Had I gone out later that day I would have got straight on the bus and never met him, and this new feeling of certainty would be no more than an unheard whisper of missed opportunities and bad timing.” In this very line, Sarah encapsulates the sheer fragility of human experiences, and how drastically they may alter our existence the dire anguish and immense love that life catapults our way are brought about by split-second actions or decisions.įollowing a week of a profound and extraordinary romance, Eddie seemingly evaporates into thin air. Sarah recounts, “I laughed, and he kissed my nose, and I wondered how it was that you could spend weeks, months – years, even – just chugging on, nothing really changing, and then, in the space of a few hours, the script of your life could be completely rewritten. Instead, they find this encounter to be merely coincidental. Eddie and Sarah, the two principal characters, fall quickly in love shortly after meeting alongside a road that held painful memories for them both alike, whilst this very commonality between the two had yet to be revealed. Upon departing from Boston to Charlotte on my weekly business trip, I proceeded to delve into the first chapter, and found myself instantly lost in this novel.

It read, “We can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite who we have fallen in love with.” This excerpt from Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love, resonated quite heavily with most of my romantic experiences, so, naturally, I purchased the book.

My real challenge, moving forward, would be to think up a reason for Eddie’s disappearance that Sarah, and my readers, could understand, maybe even forgive – but never guess.”Īs I peeled open the front page of this ostensibly short book, the introductory quote certainly captured my attention.

I knew I wasn’t the only person who’d reacted this way, but I realized that I didn’t know anyone who’d been ghosted for an acceptable reason. I went home thinking about the number of times this had happened to me, and how dismaying my loss of emotional control had been each time. As she hypothesized the likely reasons for his disappearance (serious illness, a broken phone, death, even) I knew this was it. Then, one evening, I had dinner with a friend who’d just been ghosted. When asked what had inspired her to embark on this topic of twenty-first century “ghosting,” Rosie Walsh attests, “I wanted to write about a universal dilemma – an experience that almost all of us have had, but few of us have been able to navigate successfully.

Ghosted by Rosie Walsh