Getting ghosted hurts, but it happens to everybody.

One Plenty of Fish survey found that up to 80 percent of millennials have been ghosted by a former partner, suggesting that while it totally sucks, it’s also kind of par for the course these days, especially because online dating (or fucking) platforms make people less socially accountable to each other.

So, since it seems like we’re stuck with it — (lol, we’re being haunted by ghosting) — I’d like to propose an alternate view of the topic; one that rejects the idea that getting ghosted is bad.

Ready? Being ghosted is a good thing. The abrupt disappearance of person A from your life is actually an invaluable gift from the departed that very clearly and definitively marks the end of a relationship, thereby offering the all closure you need to move on.

Hear me out — while ghosting is a far cry from the verbal, “official” closure you might like, it’s still closure in the form of absence. If someone doesn’t respond to your texts and calls, and doesn’t ask to see you for more than a few days, what more closure do you need? Their evaporation is as good as them taking your precious little hand and saying, “I don’t want to see you anymore. Thanks for the good times!”

Whether they tell you that to your face or tell you that by disappearing, the message is the same. You don't need someone to explain why they did that for you for you to both know whatever you had is over. It would be "nice" if they did, and definitely more respectful, but it's not necessary. In most cases that aren't marriages or long-term relationships, you aren't really entitled to an explanation of why someone sublimated into a shitty human ether.

Thinking you are just gives you a reason to hang on to that person — or the absence of them — and stay connected to their ghost, which is really just a delusional form of who you wish they were. Hanging on in that way allows them to call the shots — it’s not over until they “tell you” it’s over — and wasting time feeling confused and forlorn until they resurface robs yourself of the power to end it yourself. By contrast getting ghosted actually puts the power in your hands to decide when it’s over (No call for one week? Cool. We’re officially done.) It just takes an uncomfortable reality check and a willingness to accept responsibility in your own happiness to see it that way.

Also! Also. When someone ghosts you, they just did you a favor. Their disappearance did all the work of breaking up for you. Them up and leaving for no apparent reason is actually a thousand times more time-efficient than you figuring out they’re a piece of dung during the course of a shitty relationship, which, given their proclivity to ghosting, would probably be real shitty. All that freedom from having to acknowledge the relationship just spared you 1,700+ hours of inane “college memories” retold and from having to meet their stupid fucking dads who aren’t even that good at grilling beef tenderloins anyway.

Even if they do still want to see you after a period of non-communication and they reappear back into your life like nothing ever happened (which is called zombie-ing), you have to ask yourself if that’s the type of person you really want to give a shit about. Is someone who disappears without warning for days, weeks or months at a time, making you feel like you did something wrong, really someone who’s worth your time and energy?

NoOoOoOoOope. 

They’re not. And you know it.

I’m not saying ghosting doesn’t suck. It does. I’ve been ghosted. It was not the rollicking good time the movie “Ghost” promised it would be. I didn’t enjoy it, and it did make me question if something was wrong with me, but it also told me that if that person was capable of making me feel such low-lows, then two things were at play.

The first is that I was choosing to let them make me feel like that … which I realized was optional. I could be fine with it, if I wanted to be.

The second is that their capacity to make me feel shitty did not bode well for a happy relationship in the future. Their vanishing act didn’t exactly scream “I’m a healthy and loving partner who will support and respect you!” And so, instead of wallowing in confusion and loss, I taught myself to thank that person for being such a douchebag. They outed themselves as categorically mismatched for me, and I’m uninterested in being with someone that terrible at communication. Hopefully, you can learn to feel the same.

All that said, honesty is always the right choice. It never hurts to be straightforward and to break things off directly. It’s respectful and mature. However, it helps to see getting ghosted — a much more common occurrence than honesty these days — as pretty god-dang cool.