To wonder whether people ever think about the friends they ghosted or dropped for no reason, especially when they did it badly or hurtfully?

[QuietLooseEnds]

Do those people ever look back and think, “That wasn’t fair,” or do they just move on and never care?

I had a friend do this to me and a few others. Horrible, isn’t it? He never checked in on one friend when she had cancer, and when that friend contacted him to tell him a mutual friends parent had died he gave a half arsed apology saying ‘I felt guilty about never being able to meet up (he made no effort to) and it felt easier to stop contact.’ He has cut out people he has known for 30 years. I think he felt guilty and I know he still lurks on our social media. But in that instance people will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify it. I think for some others the reason they ghosted has led to relief.

People who ghost don't feel it was for ‘no reason’. They feel it was a rational decision for them to make.

They tell themselves things like, ‘life’s too short to waste on negativity’ etc.

They feel they don’t have the resources needed for a relationship with that person.

That may mean anything from,
I want to go clubbing til 4am and she doesn’t/can’t afford to
I want to moan about my life but can’t listen while she doesn’t the same

to fairly reasonable,
I have tried several times to explain that I can’t afford to spend three hours a week listening to her and lend her more money.

But they will always feel their reason was rational.

You don't know they had no reason. A lot of narcissistic parents think that their kids cut them off 'for no reason'.

Agree. The only people I have ghosted are people I spent months or years trying to get on with before realising how toxic/narcissistic/selfish they were. If you look at it the other way round, the person who got ghosted maybe should wonder what they could have done differently.

There's always a reason.

I ghosted someone and definitely feel a bit crap about it. We'd been friends for years but over the preceding three years or so, she'd changed hugely. She met someone, he was super religious (but also massively hypocritical), got pregnant and then got married. She, in turn, became super religious, despite having not exhibited any religious tendencies in the many years we'd known each other.

Then, all she did was complain about how life was unfair, that she couldn't afford to live in an very expensive city (not our home town, somewhere else super expensive that she just happened to want to live), that she didn't earn enough etc. etc.

Every time we met up, it was just a whinge fest and I found it to be so draining. Every social media post: whinging, every interaction: whinging. I just backed away and stopped answering messages - I had my own pressures at the time and didn't have the mental wherewithal to bear someone else's too.

A (previously) very good friend ghosted me.

I have absolutely no idea why and neither apparently did mutual friends.

The fact that she ghosted me led to the demise of a friendship group of ten years standing.

However, I’m absolutely sure she had a reason, even if I can’t think for the life of me what it was.

It was very upsetting at the time and I still feel sad years later, but you can’t force someone to be friends with you.

You can’t force them to tell you what’s wrong or why they stepped away, you just have to move on.

Well i presume they have their own reason which may not have anything to do with me?

I did this to a close friend after I got married thirty one years ago and left the country, and I still feel terrible about it to this day. I was very overwhelmed by my new life, learning a new language, and after the initial thank yous after the wedding, I left it far too many months before getting in touch again. This was absolutely my fault. I then tried to get in touch but found she had left the country I had left ifyswim,

I tried to track her down on many occasions since, doing internet searches, asking around, sending letters to her old landlord, emails to old colleagues, searching in industry linked sites. All to no avail,

I think she must think that I just dropped her and I didn’t care, She brought us a really imaginative and thoughtful culinary based wedding present which we still use to this day and I often think of her and wish her well and wonder where she ended up in the world.

But there would never be ‘no reason’ otherwise they wouldn’t have dropped you.

I assume people usually ghost someone because they’ve done something to piss them off and they cba to tell them this (or think there would be no point).

Obviously the lack is closer is annoying but I don’t know if I speech along the lines of “you salt your food before tasting it it and I CANNOT overlook this”* would be any better.

*just trying to be light hearted

The person doing the ghosting will always believe they had a valid reason. That’s the point of the OP.

It definitely doesn’t mean that their reason was actually valid or fair though. 🤷🏻‍♀️

In many cases the people who do the ghosting are also flawed and twist events to suit their own narrative.

Just reading threads on here shows you how many posters have very black and white thinking based on their own experiences and understanding. Hence children growing up in the same household having polarised views of their upbringing.

I’ve also realised as an autistic person that others will condemn someone based on what they perceive is acceptable behaviour without understanding that what’s normal to us is something very different to their normal.

I look back and think why didn’t I do it sooner.

Spot on. Reframe. Have a think on what your own actions were that resulted in them not having anything more to do with you. Or maybe they are just arseholes. One of the above sentences is true and one you can do something h about, one you can’t.

I’ve ghosted someone once. Because she was frankly horrible, constantly putting others down to make herself feel better. I gave her chance after chance and then decided to remove her negativity from my life.

I did it once. We became friends at uni, I was slightly older than her. Her friendship group had dropped her and I came across her bawling her eyes out near a lecture hall. I comforted her and we subsequently struck up a friendship.

We had very different lives- I was a mature student with kids, she was average age with zilch responsibilities. I liked her though, we got on. We had fun for the most part but I also seemed to take on a role as a quasi psychiatrist at times. She had issues that seemed rather immature to me but she’d call me up crying about them and I calmed her down. I was basically always there for her if she needed me.

Then something happened in my life and she wasn’t there for me at all. I thought the favour would naturally be returned but she didn’t seem able to comfort me whatsoever. I would just get a one line response like I’m so sorry mate xx or she’d leave me hanging all together. I just realised how one-sided it had been and blocked her. Maybe the wrong thing to do but I couldn’t be arsed. Her friendship group at uni had dropped her for always making everything about her which she didn’t accept she did but I realised they were right.

I don’t really think about her much. Sometimes she’ll pass my mind but I still think I did the right thing. There’s a reason friends dropped her. I hope she’s less selfish now but who knows.

That doesn’t really matter though, does it?
Everyone has their own levels of ‘acceptable’ and if they differ with a ‘friend’s’, it doesn’t matter why. What matters is that it makes them incompatible.

I once did it because he was desperate for a relationship. It turned out he had a girlfriend. It was also other things like the chronic lateness and blaming me for the reason why his friend got sectioned

Ghosted someone recently because of how abelist she is. She seemed rather confused as to why I'd unfriended her. I then had to block her because she'd comment on everything I posted with the same dismissive comments

Nobody ghosts another person for 'no reason'. You might not know the reason but that doesn't mean there isn't one.

Friends don't owe you contact, you don't owe them contact. You haven't undergone a befriending ceremony legally obliging you to stay in touch until death do you part.

If a friend just gradually stops replying to me I would assume they just have other stuff on in their life and were drifting away.

And there would be nothing more likely to activate my slight demand avoidance than a friend asking me why I hadn't called, or reproaching me for not being in touch. It would make me walk away faster.

Someone once, she was a colleague, we were getting more friendly and she kindly sent me a birthday card. I thought it was really sweet and unexpected and carried on being friends, meeting up once in a while. I didn't know when her birthday was. But I didn't send her a card, and after whenever it was, she sent me an angry and sad message. I felt sorry for her and sad that I hadn't known how important having the reciprocal card was to her.

However I also thought - you can't make someone want to celebrate your birthday if they don't naturally do it. You have to read the room and just assume I don't see us at that level of closeness. After that, I just didn't want to be friends any more, it felt forced.

Why would people drop or ghost someone for no reason?

I am sure the reasons why they ghosted them in the first place are the same reasons why they are not looking back.

What everyone else said. There’s always a reason. It may be a perfectly reasonable reason that for some reason they weren’t able to communicate, or it may quite a hurtful reason they can’t even admit to themselves. For instance, a friend I’d considered a very close one, saw a lot of, and who was very supportive at a difficult time, dropped me completely two years ago. I realised retrospectively that I’d been a temporary emotional outlet between the end of his marriage and a new relationship, and that when the external reason we saw a lot of one another ended, he was never going to have the motivation to continue to be friends. He’d just say he’d been too busy, if someone asked. He wouldn’t consider he’d dropped me.

Nobody ends a relationship for no reason. That is just denial. The person had a good enough reason to the end the relationship on their side.

In my example of this situation from my side the person was completely overstepping boundaries and had made some shitty and deeply unfair (in my opinion) comments about my parenting and about my husband.

She feels she has been ghosted - she bumped into my husband a while back and tried to convince him of the unfairness of her being ghosted - I see it differently.

Our relationship had become increasingly unbalanced and she was a significant contributor to her own difficulties in life that she persistently vented about but lacked self awareness in. Everyone is flawed that is the nature of being human but some people are unwilling to look into their flaws and see how they contribute to their unhappiness and try to work on them.

I’ve only ever dropped people for good reason so no I don’t think it is unfair or regretful.

To really ghost someone it requires them trying to contact you and you repeatedly ignoring them. I don't think I've ever done it with no reason and I don't think about that few cases I did it.

However, I do think about people who got lost from my life - we could say that neither of us did enough to keep it up.
I'd be curious how are they doing, but it feels weird to reconnect just for once of after such a long time when I don't consider probable we would be in regular contact anyway.

This is possible but fairly unlikely. Because if it was nothing to do with you, they’d likely send a pleasant closure text. It’s when it is something to do with you that the ghosting happens because they don’t want to write the text saying why.