MILLENNIAL DATING STATISTICS: WHAT IS GHOSTING SOMEONE?

Definition: What does ghosting someone mean in dating?

Essentially, ghosting is a phrase used in the dating community when someone, without any prior warning, cuts off all communication. You may be in a conversation, or have gone on a date or two with someone, then you find yourself sitting around waiting for next reply. The person will dodge all of your calls and not get back to you at all, dismissively pulling the plug on the whole situation without warning.

The survey has highlighted that even though many think ghosting is cruel and a form of emotional abuse, it turns out that most people are likely to be the ghost themselves no matter the gender. Out of the millennial’s surveyed, 82% of women and 71% of men acknowledged that in this digital era ghosting is an everyday phenomenon, with 11% more men having the slight edge on never experiencing it.

The standout figure here is that people aged 18-35 quite simply want to use ghosting as an avoidance mechanism, rather than facing their fears, being honest, or at least using a cliché to let someone down gently. Women indexed higher in two areas, with 50% ghosting to avoid confrontation and one slightly more genuine reason of there being no real chemistry match, which caused 1 in 10 women to ghost their match. For men, one popular reason for ghosting was due to them feeling their dating partners profile pictures was a misinterpretation of their looks in real life. The third most popular justification for men ghosting is connected to their feelings around the person they’re dating is too needy/clingy.

In this current dating environment, people can hide behind their phones making it very easy to dismissively ghost, block someone and move onto the next match. The app-based dating scene is also an ecosystem where first impressions mean everything, a bad profile or misplaced message can sadly result in you spending more nights alone.

The result of this pressure is an anxiety-filled desire to stand out from the crowd, profiles and messages are comprised of fabricated content, doctored images and inboxes filled with bent truths.

Men are more likely to bend the truth in all aspects of queries surveyed other that profile photos. Over half regularly lie about their number of previous partners, sharing interests and telling trivial lies in order to impress a match, with a meager 16% believing they are generally honest. On the reverse side, 71% of women are greatly over-indexing on the use of filters from apps to improve their physical image representation as well as old snaps in order to catch more fish!

In correlation to the ghosting, the unhealthy avoidance of confrontation tops the next set of respondents answers, with over one-third of men and women agreeing to see someone again when they have no intention of following up on the statement. 1 in 4 men admitted to lying about their job and earnings to impress their match, ranking it the second most common deceit. 1 in 3 of the women surveyed believe they have remained honest around the more significant fraudulent statements. Shockingly, an average of 1 in 10 millennials have used a dating app in some form while being in a relationship.

According to the responses, men are more likely to stick to their date plans with 39% not making excuses, however, when they do, they’re using work (28%) and fake plans (26%) as the most common excuse. Virtually 1 in 3 women used the fabrication of diary conflicts as the most popular lie told in our survey. Other common excuses for women are work-related conflicts and having an exhausting day, both collecting 19% of responses.

The go-to lie for slow replies were quite different for men and women. Out of all the responses, 44% of women chose the phone being on silent and not seeing notifications as their most popular yarn to spin. Again, men utilized work as their primary response, with 35% using it as a scapegoat for their lack of effort in keeping up the conversation on dating apps.