Are u still taking applicants?
Since Tinder’s inception in 2012, online dating has become the norm for young people who use apps for everything from hooking up or finding friends, to documenting thirsty dads and cringe softboys. But with new technology comes new ways to be a dick – enter: breadcrumbing, orbiting, and, most infamously, ghosting. Now, MTV’s new show, Ghosted: Love Gone Missing, is confronting this behaviour, reuniting people with their ghosters.
You all definitely know, but for those in the back – ghosting is when someone you’re dating suddenly cuts all contact; it’s a cowards way of breaking up, basically. Not just confined to romantic relationships, ghosting can also happen in friendships, and even families.
MTV’s new eight-part series aims to get to the bottom of this behaviour, exploring the irony between social media’s intention to make us more connected, while actually undermining real communication. The show, hosted by former The Bachelorette contestant Rachel Lindsay and actor Travis Mills, will help distraught ghostees track down and confront exes, friends, or family to find out why they suddenly disappeared.
Mirroring tropes used by popular MTV show Catfish, the trailer sees Lindsay and Mills hunt down people’s ghosts before emotionally reuniting them in a brightly-lit studio. Given their reactions, it looks like most of the contestants were probably aired by people they had a long relationship with, meaning there will likely be some gripping revelations.
The show has already received backlash online, with many calling it out as encouraging stalking, with one Twitter user writing: “I know getting ghosted hurts your feelings or whatever, but you cannot justify stalking people to get closure. This is not how life works.”
Whether you agree with the premise or not, the series is one of the first to focus on the Extremely Online phenomenon of bad dating etiquette, and will undoubtedly be an interesting insight into relationships in the social media age.
Watch the trailer for Ghosted: Love Gone Missing below.