The Unfinished Ending: Disengagement, Ambiguity, and Self-Worth in Young Adult Romantic and Social Ghosting

Abstract

Ghosting — the abrupt, unexplained withdrawal of communication in romantic or social relationships — has become a normalized feature of young adult relational life, yet its psychological mechanisms remain underexamined at the level of integrative conceptual synthesis. This paper addresses that gap by proposing a unified psychosocial framework, termed the ambiguity-permeability pathway, that explains how ghosting erodes young adult self-esteem through the interaction of four conditions: the structural ambiguity inherent to ghosting as a behavior that withholds explanation; a self-attributional mechanism through which individuals resolve interpretive uncertainty by generating self-blaming causal accounts, a tendency intensified among those higher in rejection sensitivity; digital mediation, which lowers the disengager's cost of withdrawal while simultaneously sustaining the target's exposure to visibility cues that prolong ambiguity rather than resolve it; and the developmental permeability of self-concept during young adulthood, a life stage in which relational and global identity are closely fused, making self-worth more contingent on romantic and peer feedback than at other developmental stages. Drawing on literature spanning ambiguous loss theory, attribution and rejection-sensitivity research, digital relational communication, and developmental identity theory, the paper argues that ghosting's psychological weight for young adults emerges specifically at the intersection of these conditions rather than from any single factor operating alone. The analysis explicitly resists overstatement, noting that ambiguous rejection is not uniformly more damaging than explicit rejection, that ghosters frequently retain other-oriented motives, and that young adults are not uniquely vulnerable to rejection relative to other life stages, but rather occupy a period of heightened relational self-relevance. The paper concludes that interventions addressing ghosting's self-esteem effects are most likely to succeed by targeting the interpretive stage of the pathway — disrupting self-blaming attribution — rather than attempting to eliminate ambiguity or alter developmental self-concept permeability. As a conceptual synthesis, the paper offers a theoretically grounded framework intended to inform future empirical and qualitative research directly testing the proposed pathway among ghosted young adults.