How to lose friends and ghost people

In Elizabeth Day’s new book about the fragility of friendships, annoyingly but memorably entitled Friendaholic, there’s a gripping chapter on ‘ghosting’, the process of turning a friend into an ex-friend without explaining why. It culminates in the act of cutting them dead in public. I’ve always found it a haunting experience when someone does it to me, and I hope my ex-friends feel the same way when I do it to them.

It can be a difficult trick to pull off, especially at a big party. I worry that the person hasn’t noticed that he or she is dead to me, and so after my initial snub I move awkwardlyaround the room, glaring at them from multiple directions. By the end of the evening they’re sighing with relief that they’ve been dropped by a loony.

In her bestselling guide to etiquette, published in 1922, the American socialite Emily Post described cutting as ‘a direct stare of blank refusal’ that was embarrassing to witness. ‘Happily,’ she added, the cut ‘is practically unknown in polite society’. I’m sure that wasn’t true a century ago and, as Day points out, it’s certainly not true now. ‘Cutting is alive and well, partly because our society of 24-hour communications offers many more ways in which to do it,’ she writes. ‘The street is now not the only place to cut people. We can do it online by unfollowing. We can do it via text, by allowing the double WhatsApp tick to turn blue without response.’ But social events still provide the best theatre – especially, in my experience, if hosted by gay men. I’ve been to all-male gatherings where a crowded room would periodically fall silent because so many guests weren’t on speaking terms with each other.