Ghosting
Ending contact abruptly, with no explanation, rather than saying the conversation — or the relationship — is over.
Ghosting describes a specific way of ending something: not a fight, not a stated goodbye, just replies that stop coming with no warning and no explanation offered afterward either. In a chat export, it shows up as exactly what it sounds like — a chat’s longest silence, positioned at the very end of the window, that a message from the other side never breaks. That combination (a silence, at the end, one-sided, unresolved) is what separates ghosting from an ordinary busy week: an ordinary gap eventually gets a message on either side; a ghosted chat just stops.
Example
A chat with regular daily messages that simply stops, with the last message from one side going unanswered for the rest of the export’s timeframe, is the textbook shape ghosting leaves in the data.
Frequently asked questions
How is ghosting different from a chat silence that later resumes?+
By whether it resumes. A silence anywhere in the middle of an export that a later message breaks is just a gap; the same silence sitting unbroken at the very end of the export’s timeframe is what fits the pattern of ghosting.
Can an export alone prove someone was ghosted?+
It can show the shape consistent with it — an unresolved silence at the end — but not the intent behind it, which a chat log alone can never fully capture.