When Rianna was 26, she lived with her then-boyfriend of two years in Esher, a suburban town 14 miles out from London. His mother often complained that they should buy together rather than wasting money on rent, but she wasn’t quite ready. This reticence would prove to be a wise choice. In December 2021, her boyfriend told her he was heading out to buy Christmas gifts and would be back the next day. But he didn’t come back the next day—or ever. He left her with the dog he’d recently surprised her with.
“At first I genuinely thought something terrible must have happened,” Rianna says. It’s a conclusion we’d all jump to in the same scenario. But when she reached out to him on social media, she found herself blocked. He was alive and well, just avoiding her. “Nobody expects to be ghosted by someone they live with, especially when all of their clothes, personal belongings, family photos, passport and certificates [are] still in the house,” she says, still incredulous.
Rianna is far from the only woman to have been “ghosted”—a term we tend to associate with a casual fling, date or situationship falling off the face of the earth—by a long-term partner. One woman I spoke to, Tafori, 42, found herself knocking on the door of a boyfriend of two years who’d ceased responding. He still had many of her belongings. Even now, she has no clear explanation for the ghosting. “My ex was looking out of the window onto the courtyard. He didn’t let me in. It was raining and I stood outside this man’s door for five minutes. I got soaked and drove home.”
Eva, 33, was also ghosted by her boyfriend after a year of dating. When they first met, it was “pure sparks”, she says. “[It] felt like we’d known each other for years.” To begin with, she said, their mutual friends made a “big deal” out of their budding relationship because of his “inability to commit”. After a while, though, she noticed that communication was becoming less and less frequent. She felt as though he was “phasing” her out, slowly withdrawing, until communication ceased completely.
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