Love Games: When Your Partner Ghosts Mid-Fight
I watched my friend Sarah stare at her phone last Tuesday, waiting for a text that would never come.
Love Games: When Your Partner Ghosts Mid-Fight
I watched my friend Sarah stare at her phone last Tuesday, waiting for a text that would never come. Three days earlier, her boyfriend had stormed out mid-argument about their summer holiday plans. Not a word since. Not even the courtesy of a proper breakup.
"He's ghostlighting me," she said, using a term I'd just learned from Forbes. It's the new portmanteau of ghosting and gaslighting — when someone disappears from your life while simultaneously making you question whether the relationship was ever real at all.
The psychology is brutal. Traditional ghosting at least offers the dignity of silence. But ghostlighting? That's when they vanish after planting seeds of doubt. "Maybe you're being too sensitive." "I never said I loved you." "You're imagining things." Then — poof. Gone.
I've been there. Melbourne, 2018. A man who told me I was "overthinking everything" before disappearing entirely. I spent weeks wondering if I'd imagined our entire three-month relationship. The gaslighting made the ghosting worse — like being abandoned by someone who convinced you they were never really there.
The cruelest part isn't the silence. It's how they rewire your memory before they leave. You start questioning every kiss, every shared laugh, every morning coffee. Did any of it matter? Were you delusional? The doubt becomes more painful than the absence.
Sarah finally blocked his number yesterday. "I refuse to let him edit our story posthumously," she said. Smart woman. Because that's what ghostlighting really is — historical revisionism with a side of cowardice.
Here's what I wish someone had told me in Melbourne: when someone makes you question your own experience of them, believe yourself instead. Trust your memory. Trust your instincts. Trust that what you felt was real, even if they're too weak to acknowledge it.
The people who truly love you don't make you doubt your sanity before they break your heart. They don't gaslight you on their way out the door.
And if they do? Good riddance. You deserve someone brave enough to stay, or at least decent enough to leave cleanly.
Some exits reveal more about the person leaving than the relationship itself.
