The blessing and curse of digital technology development is that you can reach everyone with a device 24/7. However, some people are serial ghosters, and one thing they won’t do is continue conversations that don’t serve them. We sat down with three young Nigerians who told us why they ghosted someone they were talking to.
Shola*
I’m constantly ghosting potential lovers. I’m very intentional about the people I ghost, and most of the time, they aren’t worth the closure to me. So far, I have not regretted anyone I ghosted.
If I think you’re still very useful to me or I totally enjoy your company, I won’t ghost you. I’d rather decrease my emotional investment, but I’ll keep you around. The most recent one is a guy I’ll call Emeka.
Emeka is a tech bro who earns around ₦1m or ₦2m monthly. I was attracted to him, so I shot my shot by dm-ing him on X , and we kicked it off from there. I’m never afraid to shoot my shot because it is exciting to be the one interested at first and still ghost last last.
Emeka and I met up for the first time for lunch two weeks after we first got talking, and he was even more dashing in person. I drank a bit too much and got really tipsy, so Emeka offered to take me to his house.
Please tell me why Emeka took me to his self-contained apartment in Bariga where he doesn’t have a generator. Why are you inviting me to suffer with you?
So, I told him I wanted to eat Sharwarma, and he went to buy it. As he left, I called an Uber and went to my bestie’s house because I was too drunk to go home. He came back to an empty house and thought I had robbed him and disappeared. He then texted me and said he’d find me. Pele o, Penn Badgley.
Ayo*
I don’t like ghosting people because I don’t like to imagine them feeling rejected, but sometimes the game is the game.
Once, I trauma-bonded with a friend, and he started to get really close to me. We also had similar personalities, so you would think that becoming friends would be easy for me. But I had serious self-love issues at the time, and couldn’t just imagine why someone would like me as a friend.
Instead of talking to him about it, I started stonewalling whenever he reached out to me until he stopped talking to me. I felt bad for a bit, but I don’t regret it. I like being by myself.
Deyo*
I’m a serial ghoster and I can’t seem to stop myself. If someone tries to become a part of my life too quickly for my liking, I disappear. The most memorable instance happened back when I was twenty years old.
I got talking with my longtime crush and we got into a relationship. The relationship was mostly easygoing, but I suck at conflict resolution.
In our sixth month together, he had to go for his NYSC camp posting. Things were going okay until he sent me a group photo of his platoon in his second week there and this particular girl looking at him like she wanted to eat him. I asked about her, and he said she was just a “camp friend”, but my jealousy was eating me up inside. To make things worse, he started talking about her regularly. If he wasn’t talking about her, she was in his photos. I felt suffocated because I couldn’t talk about it.
The next Monday, he sent me a good morning photo, and she was behind him throwing up a peace sign. I stopped replying to him from then on. He texted and called for weeks after that but I never responded. He even got all our mutual friends to reach out to me and beg me. But I felt like it was too stressful a conversation to have, especially because the jealousy made me feel so embarrassed.
I’m in therapy now, and I’m a bit better at conflict resolution, but I still have to fight the urge to ghost a person or conversation every time I feel emotionally pressured.
Moses*
I have to admit, I’m a commitment-phobe, and it’s the main reason I ghost people. One time, I was on the phone with a talking stage of mine and she said “I love you” before hanging up. I found it so jarring thatI started avoiding her. Don’t get me wrong, I said it back o, but I still disappeared from her life.
Cynthia*
I ghost people because I’m really sensitive, so if you rub me the wrong way, I’ll most likely remove myself from that situation. One time, I started talking to a man on Facebook named Shola. We met in a random group chat,and our conversations were so easy and enjoyable. Even though we hadn’t met in real life, we started dating a month later. Then I started begging Shola to see me. We both live in Lagos, so I didn’t understand why he kept giving excuses and avoided me. Out of frustration, I reached out to someone else in our group chat to ask why Shola was acting up. Turns out, while Shola was a real person, none of the pictures he posted on Facebook or sent to the group were actually his. I was livid, left the group and blocked him everywhere. You won’t believe this dude emailed me to answer questions nobody asked him. I didn’t reply — just blocked him there too.
