The Ghosting Epidemic

What Neuroscience and Early Attachment Reveal About Why Men Disappear

Last year, I experienced something painfully heartbreaking, for the first time in my life. Something that I have been, quite frankly, very lucky to have not experienced prior to last year, given how prevalent it is, particularly in milennials and Gen Z populations (I will break down just HOW popular it is in the next section of this article).

The thing I am talking about is:

Ghosting.

“Ghosting is the act of ending a relationship (romantic, platonic, or professional) by cutting off all communication without warning or explanation, leaving the other person with no closure and no understanding of what happened.”

It started for me in December of 2024 when I opened a new connection with a man. I had JUST started entering the dating pool again and decided to put my brave girl hat on and enter into the mainstream dating world, by signing up for Hinge.

At first, it was just a lot of unmating to begin with. I know what I want in a man and have particularly high standards when it comes to designing out a suitable partner — I need to feel met intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, as well as feel a physical attraction to someone in order to feel a yes to exploring intimacy. I am not someone that can go off attraction alone. My heart only opens when all of these faculties feel met.

So when I matched with Jack, who satiated all of these desires, I felt genuinely excited. He was an intellect — A University lecturer and Filmmaker / Writer — but also, down to Earth, having grown up in regional Victoria on a farm. He was sweet, attractive, and the magnetism and pull between us was like nothing I have felt before (and I had WORKED explicitly in the space of Sacred Sexuality with men, for close to 6 years, and had never felt what I felt in the space between us before).

The attraction was mutual, and heartfelt, not just desire based.

And yet, when it came down to attempting to form consistency of physical connection in our lives, he struggled. He hid under the guise of “busy-ness” (which he was, but that was the front he used for something far deeper) and struggled to follow through with plans, regularly. Sometimes he would even disappear for weeks on end.

The connection continued for a whole year, and I found myself withstanding behaviours that I would never normally tolerate.

I can be great with boundaries; when someone displays red flags in a relationship, I am usually not one to attempt to make it work. And yet, in this particular connection, I kept finding myself bowing back down at the altar, with consistent attempts to keep making it work, even though it was creating so much volatility in my life.

The result of the connection, in the end, was not a relationship, it was a book.

The Shape Love Refuses to Take is my upcoming title that will be released this year, which was catalysed and written through my journey of heartbreak and love, all entangled into one.

This article does not implicilty relate to that book, but it is a deconstruction of this pattern— a pattern that I have slowly been analysing under the microscope over the past year.

Given my experience in the field of Neuroscience and in the field of Somatic Trauma Therapy, I am almost always analysing patterns under this lense, and so I will speak to what I have discovered about Ghosting, from this standpoint.

A Epidemic Hidden in Plain Sight

Finding out the statistics of just how common Ghosting is, really struck something inside of me.

Research consistently finds that between 65% and 74% of people who use dating apps have been ghosted. Broader studies of adults in relationships place the figure at somewhere between 20% and 40%, though some research puts it as high as 72% of people reporting they’ve been on the receiving end at least once. Among adults aged 18 to 35, 65% admit to having ghosted a romantic partner themselves, while 72% have been ghosted.

What makes these numbers more than just statistics is what lies beneath them. In a 2023 survey of over 1,000 Millennials and Gen Z adults, nearly 1 in 3 people said they ghost because they are struggling with their mental health. The most common reason given was conflict avoidance — a dread of the difficult conversation so consuming that disappearing feels like the only option.

And here is the detail that stopped me: 86% of ghosters reported feeling relief after going silent. Not guilt or regret…relief. The body, it seems, was making a decision the mind could not.

“86% of ghosters report feeling relief after disappearing — not guilt, not regret. The body was making a decision the mind could not.”

The ghosting epidemic is not, at its core, a story about rudeness or the dehumanising effects of dating apps (well, mostly not, although I am sure this comes into the equation at times). It is a story about nervous systems that have never learned to stay with discomfort. About men, in particular, who were shaped by their earliest experience of love into people for whom intimacy and danger became indistinguishable.

To understand why someone disappears, we have to go back much further than the last message you sent.

The Neuroscience of Emotional Shutdown

To understand why a man who seemed genuinely present can simply cease to exist in your life, we need to understand what happens inside the male nervous system when emotional intimacy intensifies. Research in affective neuroscience has consistently shown that men, on average, experience greater physiological arousal in response to interpersonal conflict and emotional confrontation than women do — and they also usually take longer to return to baseline.

A landmark series of studies by Dr. John Gottman found that men’s heart rates escalate more rapidly and remain elevated longer during emotionally charged relational exchanges. This state, called diffuse physiological arousal (DPA), impairs the prefrontal cortex’s ability to regulate emotion, access empathy, and engage in nuanced communication. In plain terms: when a man is flooded, his brain’s capacity for connection goes offline.

Ghosting, viewed through this lens, is not always a calculated cruelty. For many men, it is an unconscious act of physiological self-protection: a flight response triggered by a nervous system that has been overwhelmed and has no learned tools to stay present in the discomfort.

“Ghosting is not always a calculated cruelty. For many men, it is an unconscious flight response — a nervous system overwhelmed with no learned tools to stay present.”

The freeze-or-flee response originates in the brainstem and limbic system, which are some of the most ancient and automatic parts of the brain. When the amygdala perceives threat, it overrides the cortex. And crucially, for men who grew up in emotionally unsafe environments, the perception of threat can be triggered not by danger in the conventional sense, but by intimacy itself.

Attachment Theory and the Fear of the Feminine

Developmental psychologist John Bowlby proposed that our earliest caregiving relationships create internal working models, ie. neural templates, for how we expect all subsequent intimate relationships to unfold. When a child’s primary attachment figure is consistently attuned and responsive, the child develops what researchers call a secure attachment style. When the caregiver is unpredictable, emotionally volatile, or overwhelming, the child adapts by developing strategies to regulate the distress this creates.

For boys raised by emotionally unstable, enmeshed, or overbearing mothers, one such strategy is emotional avoidance. The child learns, often before the age of five, that emotional closeness with a woman is fundamentally unsafe — that it carries the risk of being consumed, destabilised, or controlled. This is not something that is conscious — it is somatic, written into the body and the nervous system long before language has words for it.

The Mother Wound in Men

While the term ‘mother wound’ is most commonly applied to women navigating the complex legacy of their relationship with their mothers, men carry their own version of it, and it manifests very differently.

In men, the mother wound often surfaces as an unconscious conflation of intimacy and engulfment. The feminine, represented first by the mother and later by romantic partners, becomes associated with threat rather than safety. A woman’s emotional needs, her desire for closeness or accountability, can unconsciously activate the same nervous system response the boy once felt when his mother was unpredictable or overwhelming.

This dynamic can be entirely invisible to the man himself. He may genuinely like the woman. He may feel drawn to her, even excited by the early stages of connection. But as the relationship deepens and real emotional exposure becomes necessary, something in his system sounds an alarm. The conscious mind may not register it as fear. It may register as boredom, or a vague sense that something is ‘off,’ or a sudden and inexplicable withdrawal of interest.

He doesn’t ghost because he doesn’t care. He ghosts because, somewhere beneath his awareness, caring feels catastrophic.

The Role of Shame and the Collapse of Communication

Underpinning much of this is shame — perhaps the most under-discussed variable in the psychology of male relational behavior. Brené Brown’s research on shame has demonstrated that men are particularly vulnerable to shame around emotional inadequacy: the fear of being seen as too needy, too weak, or incapable of meeting a partner’s emotional needs.

When a man senses that a relationship is approaching the edge of his emotional capacity, he may experience a shame spiral that makes direct communication feel impossible. To say ‘I’m overwhelmed and I don’t know how to be in this relationship’ would require a level of emotional vulnerability that his nervous system has flagged as dangerous. So instead, the body makes the decision that the mind cannot: it disappears.

This is not an excuse. But it is an explanation and am understanding the mechanism that is taking place — and that is often, unconscious.

What Healing Looks Like

The good news is that the neural pathways laid down in early childhood are not fixed. Neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to reorganise itself — means that men who carry insecure attachment patterns can, with the right support, develop new relational capacities.

For Men

The first step is awareness. Men who recognise themselves in these patterns are encouraged to explore their attachment history — ideally with a therapist trained in relational or somatic modalities. Approaches such as Internal Family Systems (IFS), EMDR, or Somatic Experiencing are particularly effective at reaching the pre-verbal, body-based roots of avoidant behavior.

Learning to tolerate the discomfort of emotional exposure, rather than flee from it, is not an overnight process. But it begins with a simple, radical act: noticing the urge to disappear and choosing, even once, to stay.

In the instance of my connection with Jack, he was not interested in therapy, as he felt like he was being pathologised, which was the very pattern that was instilled from him from a young age that he was avoiding. When the external world tells you (sometimes explicitly, sometimes not) that there is something “wrong” with you — which is something very familiar to the black sheep of the family — then feeling like people are rejecting us or wronging us for our behaviours, becomes something we rebel against. In this instance, that was the role he played, and so he learned to become defensive against critique. And whilst I never wronged him, and always broached the issue with so much caution and care, there was no room for introspection on his side, and so ultimately, the connection could not work.

For Those Who Have Been Ghosted

Being ghosted can be incredibly challenging to our self work, as the silence is not neutral — it activates the attachment system and can leave people caught in a loop of self-questioning and self doubt. Understanding that ghosting is overwhelmingly a reflection of the other person’s unresolved internal landscape — and not a verdict on your worth — is not just a consoling thought, it is a neurological reality.

Your value was never up for assessment. What you encountered was someone whose nervous system had not yet learned to stay.

“The nervous system that learned to disappear can also learn to stay — but only when it finally feels safe enough to try.”

A Final Word

The ghosting epidemic is, at its core, an intimacy-issue epidemic.

Whilst I have written this article about men, it is not a pattern that is isolated to men. I have just written about it from my perspective, from a heterosexual female perspective, and so I cannot comment on what it is like to be on the other side of the fence.

I also decided to write the article about men in particular, because it ties into a recent article I wrote, called “We’ve Been Reading Men’s Emotions Wrong” — I have linked the article below.

The article debunks the myth that women are more emotional than men. Instead, the research points to the fact that men are actually more naturally emotional — they just do not have the ability to language and express what they are feeling.

I also wanted to specifically touch on the Mother Wound within men, as it is something I have encountered repeatedly in relationship.

A generation of men navigating the wreckage of dysregulated early attachment, with insufficient cultural permission to name what they feel or seek help for what they carry.

Changing this requires more than dating etiquette. It requires us — as a culture — to take seriously the emotional development of boys, the long reach of childhood wounds, and the neurobiological reality that connection, for those who never knew safe love, can feel indistinguishable from danger.

The nervous system that learned to disappear can also learn to stay. But only when it finally feels safe enough to try.

This is the foundation of what I speak about in my latest book release The Motherculture Revolution, which you can purchase here.

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References available on request. This article is intended for general educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice.