What Am I, A Ghost ?

A number of years ago Paul Simon, the song-writer and entertainer, famously sang "there must be 50 ways to leave your lover." Well we can officially add one more to this list - Ghosting someone you are in a romantic relationship with.

As it relates to dating and intimate relationships ghosting is defined in Wikipedia as "the practice of ending all communication and contact with another person without any apparent warning or justification and subsequently ignoring any attempts to reach out or communication made by said person." Figuratively and literally you become a ghost, cut off from any and all communication with and by the person you have been in a relationship with.

The term became a part of our modern lexicon in the early 2000's. Since then it has became more prevalent with the rise of dating apps and use of social media. Not only can you "swipe left" when you decide not to date someone but also you can now "swipe left" to stop dating them.

Psychologists and social scientists have recently noticed a dramatic increase in the practice of ghosting. As I discussed in a related post, a recent survey of 500 millennials showed that 57% had broken up with someone via a text message and 69% say they have been on the receiving end of such a message before. Indeed this survey also showed that once someone has been ghosted they, in turn, are more likely to employ ghosting as a means of ending a subsequent relationship.

This trend is not limited to millennials. The actress, Chalize Theron, broke off her engagement to Sean Penn, the actor, during their joint appearance at the Cannes Film Festival by ghosting him (i.e. I will take red carpet photographs with you but please don't call or text me). By doing so she earned herself the "Black Belt in Ghosting" according to New York Magazine. Matt Damon did likewise with his former girlfriend who didn't figure out that she was a "former" for several weeks. Finally, the aging songster/entertainer Phil Collins found out from his on-again-off-again wife, Orianne Collins, that they were through via a text message. What was different about this? They were both in the house together when she sent the text to him.

So, who and why do people ghost their romantic partners or acquaintances? Primarily, people ghost in a relationship as a way of avoiding that difficult and often emotionally draining conversation with your friend or lover. For sure it is a “kiss off” more cruel than the slightly less harsh letdown “it's not you, it’s me."

A recent survey from BuzzFeed indicated that 81% of people who ghosted did so because they "weren't into" the person they ghosted, 64% said the person they ghosted did something they disliked, and 25% stated they were angry with the person. Of course, the person on the receiving end of the ghosting has no idea why this happened. Instead they are left with the feeling "it must be me - it's not you."

The reality is that the practice of ghosting says more about the person who is doing the ghosting. People who are reluctant to get very close to anyone else due to trust and dependency issues often use indirect methods of ending relationships such as ghosting.

Mental health experts have also found that the more that individuals subscribe to what are called destiny beliefs (which means they think people are either meant for each other or they're not) the more they tend to think that ghosting is an acceptable way of ending a relationship. In their world "it just was not meant to be" so I don’t need to take responsibility for ending it and I don’t have to explain to the other person how destiny works.

Indeed, this was the very excuse used by a self-centered boyfriend who had received a life-saving kidney transplant from his girlfriend. Instead of being eternally grateful he cheated on her and then later dumped her over the telephone saying: "If we are meant for each other, God will bring us back together in the end." Apparently he was absent from school the day they taught the lessons on “empathy” and “gratitude."

However, the worst example of ghosting involved the case of Brie Duval, a 25 year old Australian beauty living in Canada with her partner of four years. In August of last year Brie experienced a tragic and life threatening accident when she fell headfirst from an elevated parking structure. She was rushed to the hospital by helicopter and placed on life support with a traumatic brain injury and multiple broken bones. Her doctors told her parents that she only had a 10% chance of survival. Despite the grim prognosis the parents refused to discontinue life support treatments. Brie remained in a coma for four weeks.

Miraculously, Brie emerged from her coma and showed signs of improvement. When she was strong enough to speak and her memory had returned sufficiently the doctors gave Brie her cell phone back. Her first thought was to call her boyfriend of four years who, strangely, had not been to visit her. Brie's recovery became all the more difficult and painful when she opened the phone and found a message from another woman telling her that Brie's boyfriend had moved in with her and instructing Brie not to contact him. The boyfriend had also blocked her from any telephonic contact.

Brie continued to be hospitalized for five more months and has substantially recovered from the trauma of the fall. As to the trauma of the ghosting Brie observed "“I have not heard from him since I have been in hospital, he’s completely and utterly left me in the dust. So I don’t even have closure as to why this happened." Indeed Brie suggested that the letdown of the relationship was almost as painful as the traumatic brain injury.

Some mental health professionals consider ghosting to be a passive aggressive form emotional abuse and emotional cruelty. Indeed a movement is afoot in the Philippines to make ghosting an emotional offense with penalties including mandatory community service.

Certainly attempts to criminalize such behavior in the United States would face definitional problems (what kind of relationship is protected; how long must the people be in a relationship; what about fault?) as well as other societal objections. However, it is obvious that ghosting will be under further scrutiny from psychiatrists, psychologists, other mental health professionals and, of course, the mavens of social media.

Divorce Causes - Part 4 of 5

CHILDREN OF DIVORCE - NATURE, NURTURE OR NEITHER

This five part series of posts has been devoted to an examination of the root causes of divorce. We are familiar with most of the usual suspects - infidelity, lack of commitment, money problems, addictions, lack of intimacy, domestic violence, etc.. Another significant one, explored in a prior post, is a remarriage following a prior or series of prior unsuccessful relationships. Here, the chances of divorce go up proportionally with each previously failed relationship.

However, other divorce correlations are not as well known. They remain hidden, like giant icebergs lying silently, just below the surface of the water, until they cause the marriage to break apart. In this vein we have looked at certain less well known divorce factors such as the length of the engagement and the amount of money spent on the wedding and the engagement ring.

The one thing that all these divorce factors have in common is that are within the control of the parties to the marriage. You decide how long to remain engaged. You choose to have an affair. You choose to remarry. You choose to spend $20,000 on an engagement ring or $100,000 on your wedding. But not every divorce factor is within the control of the marital partners.

In the context of many of life's circumstances, social scientist have explored the link between the shared traits and characteristics of parents and their children - e.g. intellect, personality, disease, criminal behavior, alcoholism, domestic violence, etc. But what about divorce? Is there a correlation between your parent's divorce and the likelihood that you will be following them down this same unhappy path? Are the "sins of the father (or mother) visited on the son (or daughter)?” Is divorce "generational" - passed down from grandparent to parent to child? And, if so, is it a matter of nature or nurture? In other words is divorce a matter of "genetics" or “learned behavior"?

The short answer is that researchers have been aware of the connection between a parent’s divorce and a child’s divorce for nearly a century. Social scientists such as Paul Amato and Danelle Deboer have concluded that, “parental divorce is one of the best documented risk factors for marriage dissolution.” Significantly and ironically, people with divorced parents are disproportionately more likely to marry other people with divorced parents.

So what kind of impact does parental divorce have on their children? Going back to Amato and Deboer, they indicated that if a woman’s parents divorced, her odds of divorce increased 69 percent, while if both a husband and wife’s parents divorced, the risk of divorce increased by 189 percent. Said differently, where both children have divorced parents they are twice as likely to get divorced themselves as compared to the children of parents who have remained married.

Given this established link, is this another reason for parents to stay married - for the sake of their children's future marriages? Is this link a matter of nature or nurture? What is the reason for this connection?

For many years experts concluded that divorce was a learned behavior - we modeled what we saw and experienced as children. The accepted explanation was based upon two things.

First, children of divorce did not observe their parents engage in positive relationship skills such as open communication, negotiation and compromise. The proponents of this theory opined that this lack of parental skills led directly to the lack of such skills in their children, thereby fostering divorce.

Second, the devotees of this theory also concluded that children who watched their parents’ divorce experienced a reduced commitment to the institution of marriage and lower confidence in the ability of marriages to remain intact long-term. Plainly put, "children of divorce are haunted by the ghosts of their parents’ divorce and are terrified that the same fate awaits them." Notwithstanding these fears, they jump into marriage anyway, often with disastrous partners, since they are convinced that it won't last anyway. In such cases divorce is a matter of when, not if.

However, a more recent study has concluded divorce is not a matter of fate but rather genetics. Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Lund University in Sweden tackled the question why does divorce run in families?” What they found was that the prior studies overlooked an important fact - not all children are the same. The Swedish study focused on adopted children versus biological children. When this variable was added they found that people who were adopted resembled their biological — but not adoptive — parents and siblings in their histories of divorce. Understanding this new dynamic should help people and their therapists to focus on individual personality traits rather than fate alone.

So where are we? Yes indeed the marital bliss or the dysfunction of your parents has a discernible impact on the your likelihood of divorce. However, once you are aware of this link you can mitigate its effects by introspection, therapy or by adding a new parameter to your marital search - marrying someone whose parents are happily married.

Stay tuned for the fifth and final part of this series