Rose, from New Orleans, did not get a fight or a farewell when two friends decided they were done with her. What she got, she told HuffPost, was "the way they closed ranks to keep me out," and she called it "callous and cowardly." I do not think they were monsters. I think they were doing the only thing anyone had ever shown them how to do.
Romantic breakups, whatever else is wrong with them, come with a script: a vocabulary ("we broke up"), an expected conversation, an entire genre of songs built around the leaving. Friendship gets none of that. There is no word for an ex-friend, and no agreed moment when a friendship starts, so there is no agreed moment when it is allowed to end. Saba Harouni Lurie, a marriage and family therapist who runs Take Root Therapy, put it plainly to HuffPost: "Breaking up with a friend can feel more complicated than ending a romantic relationship because we don't have the same cultural scripts or language for it." With romantic partners, she said, we accept that people grow incompatible or that feelings change. With friends, there is often an unspoken expectation that the thing should simply last forever, or end only over some betrayal large enough to justify walking away.
That gap between an ending that will happen anyway and a culture with no accepted way to hold it is exactly where ghosting moves in. A 2026 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, by Gili Freedman of St. Mary's College of Maryland and Darcey N. Powell of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, surveyed just over 2,600 people across twelve countries spanning five continents, Canada to Ukraine, asking whether they knew of ghosting, approved of it, meant to use it, or already had. The finding that matters most here is not any single number: ghosting shows up as a recognized way to end both friendships and romances in every one of those places, while how acceptable it feels, and how often people actually reach for it, shifts by country. Ghosting is not a generational tic. It is what people improvise when nobody has handed them anything better.
American survey data shows how common the friendship version has become. A 2023 poll of just over a thousand Gen Z and millennial adults by the Thriving Center of Psychology found that about half had been ghosted by a close friend, and just over half admitted to having done the same, avoiding a hard conversation by simply cutting one off. Morgan Cope, a psychology professor at Centre College who studies interpersonal relationships, told HuffPost that ghosting "has increased in frequency over the past decades, likely due to the integration of social apps into everyday life and shifts in communication norms." It is easier to let a chat thread go cold than to sit across from someone and say the thing out loud.
Most friendships do not end. They fade. Emily Langan, a communication professor at Wheaton College who studies how friendships dissolve, has found through research aired on NPR's Invisibilia that friendships far more often drift into silence, a canceled dinner, an unanswered text, a slow taper, than end through any actual conversation. Part of the reason, she argues, is that conflict is coded as purely negative in this culture, something to avoid rather than move through; part of it is that friendship never had "define the relationship" talks or anniversaries the way romance does, so it has no equivalent moment to mark an ending either. We assume a friendship is supposed to last, so when it does not, it reads as a failure rather than an ordinary transition, and failure is not something most people want to narrate out loud to the person it happened to.
Langan offers a better model than vanishing, because she lived it. When she felt herself sliding down a friend's list of priorities behind his family, she did not ghost him. She told him directly: "I get it. You have a lot of family demands right now. And, based on that, I'm going to walk away here a little bit." They are still friends, just at a different tier of closeness, because she said so instead of just receding. That is a script, built from one honest sentence.
Harouni Lurie offers language just as small: "I've realized I need more space right now." "I think we've grown in different directions." Ending a friendship well, she says, is challenging but "not impossible," done with compassion and respect for both people's needs, starting from what you appreciated about the person. Neither line assigns blame. Both hand a friend something to work with instead of a silence to interpret.
None of this fixes the deeper problem, that most people are, as Harouni Lurie puts it, simply "not well-versed in having difficult and honest conversations." One borrowed sentence will not undo that on its own. But manners have never required eloquence, only a door left open rather than one quietly shut. The kindest thing you can do for a friend you are leaving is what you would want done for you: leave them a way to know, and a way in, even as you go.
