LOVE, APPS & ghosting
The writer/podcaster/ dating expert, Dolly Alderton spills on the spirits that haunt our love lives
It’s a tale that’ll elicit a shudder of recognition for many women. On Nina’s 32nd birthday, she decides to download a dating app for the first time. The successful food writer, who has been content as a bachelorette for the past four years, is suddenly thrown into the world of modern dating, where she is haunted by ghosts that are not merely figments of the imagination. Or are they?
It’s familiar territory. So much so that Dolly Alderton, co-host of The High Low podcast and the award- winning author of the personal-essay collection Everything I Know About Love, chose to explore the phenomenon in her first foray into fiction, Ghosts. A fitting title.
“Anyone who’s been ghosted knows there’s nothing more confusing and enigmatic. It’s like a mystery that traumatises and terrorises you,” says Alderton of the frustrating trend of disappearing on someone you’ve been dating or chatting to. “That felt like very rich ground for a story.”
Alderton was interested in what being ghosted feels like for “a certain type of woman”: one who wants to meet a man, get married and have children. “If you’re a woman who knows she wants that, there’s an uncomfortable truth about entering your thirties,” she explains. “Dating becomes a tool with which to find [everything you want] within a finite window. And therefore, is an entirely different activity [to those who date for fun], sociologically.”
More specifically, she wanted to interrogate the gender politics of ghosting. While women can obviously be the ghosts, in a heterosexual relationship, it’s more commonly the man who bails. It creates a power disparity, Alderton says, between those women for whom dating is a practical necessity and those men who are able to date “with zero responsibility and no sense of time pressures”. She believes ghosting is also a way for men to use a woman’s supposed desires against her. “It relies on this idea of women being intense and wanting commitment more than men do,” explains Alderton. “And that will be used as an excuse for ghosting.”
So, yes, Ghosts is about getting ghosted, but it’s about so much more. While Nina navigates dating, she’s also dealing with changing friendships and family illness. It’s a trojan horse of a book that serves as a study in how all our relationships transform over time and, Alderton says, poses the question: “How much of love is in our minds, and how much of it is reflective of what’s in front of us?”
“GHOSTING IS A WAY FOR MEN TO USE A WOMAN’S DESIRES AGAINST HER”
Ghosts by Dolly Alderton (Penguin, $32.99) is out now.