I teach a course called “Sociology of Romance” but I wasn’t familiar with the term “ghosting” until my students explained it to me. Class discussion quickly made clear that ending relationships by sudden non-communication was deplored by students; no one would speak to defend it. But for me that raised layers of problems about how sociologists explain courtship behavior.
Why do students continue to use a mechanism that makes them feel bad? A lot of easy explanations fall away when we look at this closely. For example, calling this ‘youth culture’ needs a lot of caveats because courtship changes every decade or so. It isn’t the same culture, indeed different generations find each other incomprehensible. Older people note today’s absence of dating and are suspicious of a “hookup culture” where there is no dinner and a movie Undergraduates today can’t believe older singles “dated people they didn’t know.” Each generation finds its own courtship familiar and acceptable while that of others is baffling.
Two further points on how we study this. First, the scant academic studies that do appear miss important aspects. Early discussions of the hookup dating scene missed the intense “talking to someone” by messaging and “Facebook stalking” which was going on. Young people were still getting to know each other, it was just being done though social media.
Second, the terminology sociologists use is inconsistent and doesn’t fit with broader explanations of society. Was “rating and dating” a tradition or a practice? Is today’s “hookup” best described as a culture, a script, an intimate tie, a fad, or even a social movement? Is a “group chat” something we should study as a formal organization? The difficulty of conceptualizing courtship suggests a broader problem. Perhaps sociologists aren’t much interested in romantic relationships because they aren’t prestigious in the profession. Ghosting cannot influence society; it just isn’t part of the conceptual framework. Sociologists generally dismiss private relationships because they are ephemeral, full of rapidly obsolete slang, and lack any sustained way to influence society. ‘Structural’ explanations have more prestige. So, with courtship outside sociology’s knowledge base, sociologists aren’t able to ‘know’ about dating in a serious professional and theoretical way.
But what if we can show that courtship matters? Does the way we date shape later life choices and indirectly create a cohort-wide understanding? Perhaps the speed with which courtship practices appear, along with universally understood rules, is a model of broader change in society? In this case, ghosting, and things like it, reveal a lot about society’s future.
Just being a professor and listening to undergraduates doesn’t change our profession’s concepts. Personally, we can acquire commonsense knowledge from many sources – as participants in dating, being parents and friends of young people, consuming media entertainment, and working as teachers in a classroom. But none of this theorizes ghosting or adds it to sociology’s professional knowledge. Without concepts, theories and cases that explain its importance, personal familiarity with current dating leaves the discipline of sociology without professionally “knowing” what ghosting is. Without concepts and a theoretical framework, none of us can use it in our writing, our lectures or in our critical assessments of the readings we assign. Hookups continue to be outside how we explain society.
In a recent paper I have tried to fill some conceptual gaps about courtship. I present this at ASA 2019 in New York in August. Please come. You will be most welcome and, with your help, we may all soon have courtship ghosting as part of sociology’s professional knowledge. Then we will truly be able to say that sociologists “understand” ghosting and we will all be able to write, teach and increase public understanding of it.