RACHEL DANFORD Staff Writer

At one point or another you have more than likely been ghosted, and if you haven’t, then hooray. How do you know if you’ve been ghosted if you have no idea what that even is? Well, being ghosted is essentially when a person you were/are dating just disappears from your life. Your relationship is fine one day and when you wake up the next morning, boom! You’re single and confused.

Ghosting can come in many ways- they can just fade from the relationship without even telling you it’s over or they can pretend that you don’t exist after it’s ended. I personally have been ghosted and when you go to a small school like Piedmont, being ghosted makes a break up harder and a lot more awkward.

You hear stories of ghosting quite frequently, especially on college campuses. Being ghosted is not a fun thing to experience because it leaves you wondering what happened and whether or not it was your fault. This method of breaking up is raising the question as to if this is morally acceptable or not.

I personally don’t see this as ethically right, but rather a cowardly way out of a relationship. It seems that ghosting is becoming the norm rather than having an old school sit down and break up talk. Most people associate this urban term with men, when in actuality, women are worse about doing it than men are. Being intrigued by this “ghosting” term that I had never heard of but experienced, I started reading articles on it and managed to find one article where the writer conducted a poll on this phenomenon. She found that 17% of the men that she polled ended up being the ghoster, while 23% of women have done the ghosting.

But what is the cause of this issue? Could it be that the rising use of online dating apps such as Tinder, Grindr, Hinge and Tastebuds (yes there is a dating app called Tastebuds) have caused us, as a society, to become pickier in choosing a partner and more prone to just disappearing if we don’t like that person? It’s fairly simple to get a new partner online, all you have to do is swipe right.