Someone stops replying. The person waiting sees no explanation, only an unfinished conversation. It is tempting to read that silence as indifference. Research suggests that this reading can miss something: people who leave messages unanswered sometimes feel worse about it than the recipients expect.
That finding comes from 2026 research on the emotional consequences of ghosting by Sophia Li, Coral Zheng and Juliana Schroeder. The evidence was mixed, particularly when the researchers moved from remembered conversations to a live exchange.
Their first study involved 195 adults recalling a time they had either stopped responding to an acquaintance or received no reply themselves. They rated their feelings and estimated the other person’s. People remembering their own silence reported feeling worse than recipients predicted: 2.27 versus 1.56 on a scale from 1 to 5.
Don’t miss the next big psychology finding
Every morning, PsyPost sends a short briefing on the most interesting new peer-reviewed research in psychology and neuroscience.
The gap was larger when the failure to reply had been unintentional. Forgetting a message could feel bad to the sender without that being apparent to the person waiting.
A second study asked 601 adults to imagine an exchange with a friend. A short reply saying they could not talk narrowed the gap between the two sides’ expected feelings. It also made recipients less likely to think they had been annoying.
These were imagined situations. The live experiment was less tidy.
Among 175 pairs in which someone skipped another conversation, recipients did not underestimate the other person’s bad feelings overall. The expected gap appeared in an unplanned analysis of people who clearly saw the interruption as ghosting. Even the definition was a sticking point: the two sides did not always agree about what had happened.
Coral Zheng, a doctoral researcher in organizational behavior at Cambridge Judge Business School, offered a practical suggestion in her comments to PsyPost about ghosting: “If you’re the one who hasn’t responded, maybe consider sending a short reply before going silent.”
That leaves plenty unanswered about established relationships. A brief chat between strangers cannot tell us what happens when a partner disappears after months together.
In New York City’s 2023 Neighborhood Wellness Survey, 40% of adults said they had felt socially isolated somewhat or a lot during the previous four weeks, according to NYC Health’s report The State of Mental Health of New Yorkers. Among those aged 18–24, the figure was 50%. The question described feeling cut off or distant from other people.
London’s figures ask something different. The UK Department of Health and Social Care’s Fingertips report recorded frequent loneliness among 7.1% of adults aged 16 and older during the pooled 2022/23–2023/24 period. They reported feeling lonely often or always.
Putting those percentages side by side does not tell us which city is lonelier. New York measured a broader feeling of distance; London measured frequent loneliness. The periods and age groups differ too. What both figures make hard to dismiss is the idea that living near other people guarantees feeling close to them.
Living alone is another question. Someone can be happy with a small circle and plenty of time to themselves. Someone else can have a partner, colleagues and a crowded calendar and still feel lonely. NYC Health makes that distinction in its guidance: being surrounded by others does not rule out loneliness, and being socially isolated does not necessarily mean someone feels chronically lonely.
Counting messages cannot settle that question either. The unanswered text is visible; the relationship around it takes longer to understand. A survey needs to ask about the experience, rather than assume it from a person’s address or relationship status.
There are practical obstacles as well. NYC Health identifies work stress, caregiving, money worries and communication barriers as circumstances that can leave people vulnerable to loneliness. Someone may want more contact and have little time, energy or opportunity to arrange it. Better wording in a text message will not pay for transport or find cover for a caring shift.
Dating adds another difficulty: several kinds of uncertainty can arrive together. Someone might search for dating com scam while trying to understand a confusing exchange, an unexpected charge or doubts about a profile. Each concern needs its own evidence. A billing question calls for purchase details and terms. A claim about a company needs evidence about that company. Waiting for a reply tells us little about either. None of the communication studies discussed here assessed a named dating service.
It is also possible to misread someone who has been quite clear. Gurit Birnbaum and colleagues’ research, discussed by PsyPost in July 2026, tested how people judged dating profiles with different amounts of personal information. Across three experiments, disclosure shaped the relationship intentions readers attributed to the profile owner.
When personal disclosure was the main clue, a moderate amount was especially effective in attracting interest. More detailed profiles could also make someone who stated casual intentions seem more open to commitment. Readers’ impressions could drift away from the preference written in front of them. That is not proof of concealed intentions.
Loneliness itself may be linked to how feelings change through the day. In a 2025 study in Cognition and Emotion, Jee eun Kang and colleagues followed 252 adults aged 25–65 from Co-Op City in the Bronx. Participants answered a loneliness questionnaire, then reported their emotions through smartphone prompts five times daily for two weeks.
Lonelier participants had less stable positive emotions. That link remained after the researchers accounted for depression, average mood and objective social isolation. The link with unstable negative emotions no longer reached statistical significance once depressive symptoms were included.
Feeling lonely was associated with more than simply having a lower average mood. But loneliness was measured only at the start, and the study could not show which came first. Nor did it test whether unanswered dating messages explained the emotional changes. The sample came from a particular neighborhood, not the whole city.
Even receiving a reply does not mean someone feels listened to. Tuğba Türk Kurtça’s research, reported by PsyPost in May 2026, examined 704 unmarried heterosexual couples aged 18–35 in Türkiye. Both partners answered questions about phone distraction, mindfulness within their relationship and relationship quality.
People who felt ignored in favor of a phone reported less mindfulness in the relationship, which went along with poorer relationship ratings. Having both partners take part gave the researcher a view of each side. It was still a survey taken at one time. It could not establish that phone use caused the relationship to worsen.
What remains missing is research that follows these exchanges through everyday life: the delayed reply, the explanation, the next conversation. The live ghosting experiment began with something much shorter. Two strangers spent eight minutes talking online. Then one could skip the next exchange, leaving the other in the chatroom.
