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.
There was no explanation for the ghosting, which led to Eva endlessly speculating about why this had happened. It’s a situation that has understandably left her with trust issues. Since then, she’s struggled with how to behave in other relationships, fearing she’d find herself in the same position. “I became afraid of communicating anything [with future potential partners],” she says. “Everything I did or said felt like I was being too much. I was in a limbo of ‘not enough and too much’ for a long time after that.”
While the classic tale of “dad leaves for milk and never comes back” feels as old as time, we tend not to think this will happen to us. Not in the age of social media and read receipts and Stories updates, and not when we’re no longer expected to remain married to someone forever, and can simply break up if we’re not happy. But the disappearing boyfriend appears to be emerging as a fun new trend that straight women are having to endure. A quick peruse of TikTok reveals hundreds of videos from women who have been ghosted by boyfriends they’d been with for years, often without explanation. To make matters worse, many of these ghostings occur after things were seemingly going well. “He told me he loved me the day before and wanted to spend his life with me,” says one TikToker, who claims she was ghosted by a long-term boyfriend.
Being ghosted by a long-term partner can sometimes feel as grief-inducing and admin-intensive as someone dying. “I was left trying to sort out shared bills and bank accounts that were under both of our names, and it was incredibly difficult because companies couldn’t understand the situation,” Rianna says. Indeed, banks have no prescribed policy for “my boyfriend ghosted me”. “They literally could not comprehend that someone could just completely stop communicating and vanish without explanation.”
