‘I seem to spend a lot of time exchanging apologies with friends these days'
Do you have time then?
' I write. The
'typing' notification flashes on the screen of my phone. 'Agh no I'm sorry!', they message back. 'We're taking the kids to Kerry that week and we have to paint the whole downstairs when we get home.'
There's another brief typing interlude and then they ask – 'What about the second Saturday in August?' I groan audibly at the misfortune of timing. 'I'm not around that day', I say, glancing through the calendar in my phone to see a work commitment I can't move and feeling disappointed. 'I'm really sorry.'
I seem to spend a lot of time exchanging apologies with friends these days. This bizarre dance of calendars appears to be the language of modern friendship, at least for people over 35. You don't necessarily live in the same communities, cities, counties or even countries. You try to find snatches of time to look directly into one another's eyeballs in an attempt to retain a bond that was originally forged in the two of you doing actual things together, such as watching films or going to gigs or lying in the park on summer weekends talking about college assignments or useless boys who don't text back.
Now you see one another far less than you'd ideally like. I'm talking about the friends you love here rather than the slightly awkward acquaintances from another lifetime who you don't quite know how to kill it dead with. I'm referring to the friends you mourn a former closeness with and truly want in your life. The ones who would have helped you bury a body, or brought you Skittles and flat 7-Up when you were in the hospital, or supported your brief if ill-considered attempt to write a godawful screenplay. The friends who came before spouses or houses or babies or ageing parents or thermal socks.
READ MORE
[
Dublin and London changed me in different ways. Australia has shown me things I considered impossible, are possible
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]
In this bizarre, digitised era, so much of human connection is conducted through technological proxies that we are often duped into thinking we're keeping meaningful relationships topped up through utterly superficial contact, and then wonder why we're lonely. The modern adult friendship seems to consist largely of seeing people one to three times a year for a meetup which takes four thousand messages back and forth to pin down. If no one cancels, when you finally do see one another, it's been so long that the whole thing can feel a bit alienating.
Physical changes indicate the uncomfortable breadth of time passed since you last sat down together. Someone has lost or gained 30lb, or suddenly has more grey hair than not-grey, or has cut in a fringe that renders them suddenly unrecognisable, or they've retrained as an accountant.
The meeting turns into an exchange of facts. Information uploaded and downloaded. Here's where I've been. Here's how work is going.
How's your mother getting on? And that boss who was giving you trouble?
How long have you had the fringe? It suits you!
Meetings feel as though you're running breathlessly after one another, trying not to lose touch but hauntingly aware that you're failing quite spectacularly. The relationship becomes something that makes you feel sad and disconnected and inadequate rather than the restorative, connected sense of meaningfulness that friendship should bring.
[
Laura Kennedy: The Irish immigrant makes two grim discoveries on their first winter in Australia
Opens in new window
]
Add emigration into the mix and see if that makes it simpler to maintain these crucial connections to long-term friends (it doesn't). When I visited home last October for the first time since moving to Australia, I stayed for 10 days or so with my old housemates from college. They've long since married one another and made their home in Dublin while I went gallivanting to London and now Australia.
It's the sort of old friendship where you can invite yourself to stay for a rudely long time and it isn't weird (or only a little), but when I arrived at their door I could see by my oldest friend that we shared a mutually unexpressed worry. We had lived together before, but not in a long time.
It had been years since we'd spent a protracted amount of time together. Here she now was, granting me access to her home – the place where we ideally go to avoid awkward conversations with people we don't like as much as we thought we did. There it was in the big eyes I'd always admired for their expressiveness and enviably long lashes, trepidation – 'will it feel the way it used to? Do we still have the friendship we used to have?'
Neither of us shared that worry with the other until the end of the trip. Throughout the visit, we finally had time to spend together. Not just exchanging life information, but eating chocolate on the sofa while watching shockingly bad reality TV. Going out for dinner and not sharing one dessert – because desserts should be strictly one per person and we understand that. Walking around Dublin and getting reacquainted with the city and with the grown-up versions of ourselves. There in my friends' home, I found myself getting to know them all over again.
All of the features I'd loved about them – the curiosity and gentleness, the silly sense of humour and the tendency to wander into deep conversation – was still there. We were all much changed, but still it felt like it used to. It just took more than a rushed catch-up in a cafe to reconnect in the way that a 19-year friendship deserved.
We can't all drop everything and run into the sunset together with our friends, but despite the distance of time and emigration, I was deeply reassured by that visit. By the realisation that if you are finally able to spend time with your friends (after however much messaging and calendar consultation and if the demands of caring roles and workplaces allow), the anxieties will often sort themselves out.
The relationship might be there, just as it ever was, if we can find a way to spend some time together.
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Irish Times
5 days ago
- Irish Times
‘I seem to spend a lot of time exchanging apologies with friends these days'
'What about the 15th? Do you have time then? ' I write. The WhatsApp 'typing' notification flashes on the screen of my phone. 'Agh no I'm sorry!', they message back. 'We're taking the kids to Kerry that week and we have to paint the whole downstairs when we get home.' There's another brief typing interlude and then they ask – 'What about the second Saturday in August?' I groan audibly at the misfortune of timing. 'I'm not around that day', I say, glancing through the calendar in my phone to see a work commitment I can't move and feeling disappointed. 'I'm really sorry.' I seem to spend a lot of time exchanging apologies with friends these days. This bizarre dance of calendars appears to be the language of modern friendship, at least for people over 35. You don't necessarily live in the same communities, cities, counties or even countries. You try to find snatches of time to look directly into one another's eyeballs in an attempt to retain a bond that was originally forged in the two of you doing actual things together, such as watching films or going to gigs or lying in the park on summer weekends talking about college assignments or useless boys who don't text back. Now you see one another far less than you'd ideally like. I'm talking about the friends you love here rather than the slightly awkward acquaintances from another lifetime who you don't quite know how to kill it dead with. I'm referring to the friends you mourn a former closeness with and truly want in your life. The ones who would have helped you bury a body, or brought you Skittles and flat 7-Up when you were in the hospital, or supported your brief if ill-considered attempt to write a godawful screenplay. The friends who came before spouses or houses or babies or ageing parents or thermal socks. READ MORE [ Dublin and London changed me in different ways. Australia has shown me things I considered impossible, are possible Opens in new window ] In this bizarre, digitised era, so much of human connection is conducted through technological proxies that we are often duped into thinking we're keeping meaningful relationships topped up through utterly superficial contact, and then wonder why we're lonely. The modern adult friendship seems to consist largely of seeing people one to three times a year for a meetup which takes four thousand messages back and forth to pin down. If no one cancels, when you finally do see one another, it's been so long that the whole thing can feel a bit alienating. Physical changes indicate the uncomfortable breadth of time passed since you last sat down together. Someone has lost or gained 30lb, or suddenly has more grey hair than not-grey, or has cut in a fringe that renders them suddenly unrecognisable, or they've retrained as an accountant. The meeting turns into an exchange of facts. Information uploaded and downloaded. Here's where I've been. Here's how work is going. How's your mother getting on? And that boss who was giving you trouble? How long have you had the fringe? It suits you! Meetings feel as though you're running breathlessly after one another, trying not to lose touch but hauntingly aware that you're failing quite spectacularly. The relationship becomes something that makes you feel sad and disconnected and inadequate rather than the restorative, connected sense of meaningfulness that friendship should bring. [ Laura Kennedy: The Irish immigrant makes two grim discoveries on their first winter in Australia Opens in new window ] Add emigration into the mix and see if that makes it simpler to maintain these crucial connections to long-term friends (it doesn't). When I visited home last October for the first time since moving to Australia, I stayed for 10 days or so with my old housemates from college. They've long since married one another and made their home in Dublin while I went gallivanting to London and now Australia. It's the sort of old friendship where you can invite yourself to stay for a rudely long time and it isn't weird (or only a little), but when I arrived at their door I could see by my oldest friend that we shared a mutually unexpressed worry. We had lived together before, but not in a long time. It had been years since we'd spent a protracted amount of time together. Here she now was, granting me access to her home – the place where we ideally go to avoid awkward conversations with people we don't like as much as we thought we did. There it was in the big eyes I'd always admired for their expressiveness and enviably long lashes, trepidation – 'will it feel the way it used to? Do we still have the friendship we used to have?' Neither of us shared that worry with the other until the end of the trip. Throughout the visit, we finally had time to spend together. Not just exchanging life information, but eating chocolate on the sofa while watching shockingly bad reality TV. Going out for dinner and not sharing one dessert – because desserts should be strictly one per person and we understand that. Walking around Dublin and getting reacquainted with the city and with the grown-up versions of ourselves. There in my friends' home, I found myself getting to know them all over again. All of the features I'd loved about them – the curiosity and gentleness, the silly sense of humour and the tendency to wander into deep conversation – was still there. We were all much changed, but still it felt like it used to. It just took more than a rushed catch-up in a cafe to reconnect in the way that a 19-year friendship deserved. We can't all drop everything and run into the sunset together with our friends, but despite the distance of time and emigration, I was deeply reassured by that visit. By the realisation that if you are finally able to spend time with your friends (after however much messaging and calendar consultation and if the demands of caring roles and workplaces allow), the anxieties will often sort themselves out. The relationship might be there, just as it ever was, if we can find a way to spend some time together. Sign up to The Irish Times Abroad newsletter for Irish-connected people around the world. Here you'll find readers' stories of their lives overseas, plus news, business, sports, opinion, culture and lifestyle journalism relevant to Irish people around the world If you live overseas and would like to share your experience with Irish Times Abroad, you can use the form below, or email abroad@ with a little information about you and what you do. Thank you
Irish Examiner
12-07-2025
- Irish Examiner
Vanishing act: The realities and impacts of ghosting on those left behind
We associate ghosting with modern dating, but vanishing lovers are as old as time — the only difference is that these days, they can disappear digitally as well as physically. And while we think of ghosting as a particularly brutal aspect of romantic relationships, it happens within all realms of human connection — familial and platonic, professional and social, as well as intimate relationships. Being ghosted by a friend is probably worse than being ghosted by a lover, and we've all been ghosted by builders. Thanks to our infinite capacity for digital connectivity, the more easily we connect, the easier it is to discard. Unfollow. Delete. Block. These are contemporary ghosting verbs. ('Caspering' — letting someone down gently before vanishing — is slightly less jarring.) Dominic Pettman is Professor of Media & Humanities at the New School in New York. His latest book, Ghosting: On Disappearance, takes a philosophical look at people vanishing, and how ghosting each other has replaced traditional ghosts, in whom we tend to no longer believe. 'Abandonment is as old as people,' he says. 'There's something about the term 'ghosting' that captures the moment, the specific zeitgeist of our time. So it's an age-old problem, but because of new media, we have a different relationship to abandonment — the way we anticipate it, deploy it, rationalise it, experience it, what it ultimately means.' As a child in 1980s Australia, Pettman's family was ghosted by his dad's younger brother Gordon, who, in his 20s, changed his name to Gabriel, moved to Europe, and vanished. Never to be heard from again. When Pettman lived in London in the 1990s, he'd find himself looking at strangers on the tube, wondering if he were unknowingly sitting opposite his 'quasi-mythical' uncle. 'That was my early introduction to radical ghosting, where someone close deliberately removes themselves completely,' he says. 'It was a big violent jolt. Ghosting creates this thing that theorists call 'structuring absence' — a subtraction that creates a chalk outline that people tiptoe around for the rest of their lives.' Think Dickens' Miss Havisham, the rest of her life structured around the sudden absence of her fiancé. 'People think of ghosting as mostly to do with dating, romantic love, but friends and family set the tone,' he says. He reminds us of Freud's idea of our first sensations of abandonment: 'Just the mother leaving the room is to the infant a form of ghosting. If the mother is not directly present, that's an early lesson in ghosting.' What makes ghosting between grown-ups something Pettman terms 'an act of violence' is not the actual leaving — people leave each other all the time, compelled to seek out new situations, or move away from situations that no longer work for them – but the lack of communication that precedes the leaving. Dominic Pettman: 'We have these WhatsApp groups all over the world, so we have a simulation of community, but it's very different to seeing people face to face every day. We send emojis rather than help.' DISCONCERTING Whether it's after a third date or an established relationship, someone vanishing into thin air — digitally or IRL — is disconcerting, creating a sense of mourning for a living person who has made themselves dead to you. As Miranda says in an early episode of Sex & The City, 'It's like those guys you have the great second date with, and then never hear from them again. I pretend they died.' Being let go without being told you're being let go can be painful if you've formed an attachment, resulting in outpourings of tormented creativity — all the great love songs are not about dull contentment, but anguished loss. 'There can be a dark pleasure in wallowing in the melancholy,' says Pettman. 'Ghosting can, paradoxically, create a continuity with the self. 'We can all relate to being ghosted,' he continues — except supermodel Bella Hadid, of course, who recently admitted she has never experienced the phenomenon — 'which is a form of solidarity'. 'Maybe this explains the popularity of Taylor Swift — so many of her songs are about abandonment.' From the discourtesy of not bothering to text a polite thanks-but-no-thanks to someone casual to the emotional devastation of a lover who dematerialises like the Cheshire Cat, ghosting is nowadays a commonplace practice, despite dating apps like Bumble attempting to eradicate it. I was once ghosted after a two-year relationship; it felt like death without a body, and took longer to get over than if there'd been an it's-not-you-it's-me conversation. My ghosting happened when both parties were well into adulthood — there wasn't even the excuse of callow youth. Why do people ghost? Is it cowardice? Laziness? Fear? Contempt? Apathy? Sociopathy? All of the above? Perhaps a mix — but the main driver of the increasing normalisation of ghosting, says Pettman, is the fraying of our social fabric. A digital continuation of the Thatcherite idea that there is no such thing as society — only the individual. 'Ghosting is what happens when we are stuck in the limbo zone after the evaporation of traditional community,' he writes. 'After the social contract has been fed into industrial-size shredders, somewhere in the loveless, generic spaces of Wall Street, Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley. 'So many relationships tend to be transactional,' he says. 'There's lots of talk about boundaries even with friends, where friendships start to be associated with emotional labour, where they can become too much to bear. It becomes uni-directional — we want to have friends but we don't want to do what it takes to be a friend. 'We have these WhatsApp groups all over the world, so we have a simulation of community, but it's very different to seeing people face to face every day. We send emojis rather than help.' And while time-poverty plays a part in individuals turning inward, focusing on their immediate families, Pettman wonders if we need to work a bit harder at our friendships. 'Even with the best intentions, we do live in a time famine — we just don't have the bandwidth, because we have to work so hard and hustle so much that we don't have the luxury of the time it takes to cultivate friendships or respond properly to the needs of others,' he says. However, he adds that 'the dial has gone too far – self-care can go too far.' Friendships, in order to thrive, need tending. They need input. BEING THE GHOSTEE Ghosting is the central scandal in The Banshees of Inisherin. Picture: Jonathan Hession Generally, ghosting tends to be a more urban or digital phenomenon; it's harder to ghost someone in a small community. Especially if they are a friend, rather than a lover. This is the central scandal of Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin — that a friend would unfriend a friend, publicly, in the broad daylight of real life, in a place where everyone knows everyone. And while being ghosted by lovers or potential lovers is almost expected in these days of dating whiplash induced by swipe culture, being ghosted by a friend creates a far deeper anguish of what-did-I-do-wrong — especially if there has been no obvious rupture. 'We can't say why someone ghosts us, especially online,' he says. 'The second guessing is part of the stress of being the ghostee.' Pettman includes a heartfelt, poignant letter, written in 1939, from Samuel Beckett to his friend and fellow writer, Thomas MacGreevy: 'I am sorry that we seem to have lost touch with one another and ceased to correspond... I do not think there is any reason for an estrangement, certainly I do not know of any… I may have done something to alienate you… if I have, I ask your forgiveness.' We've all been there, Sam. Pettman tries to keep his own online friendships as near as possible to anthropologist Robin Dunbar's 'magic number' of 150; this is the amount of connections Dunbar has calculated we can handle without blowing a fuse. It's considerably less than the 5,000 we can accumulate on platforms like Facebook, which could explain an overall devaluing of friendship, and something called 'passive ghosting'; keeping contact to a bare minimum, rather than breaking it off entirely, yet never reaching out, while responding only briefly and belatedly. Reducing the relationship to emojis. 'The real dystopia would be if ghosting never bothered us at all,' concludes Pettman. 'If we just drifted in and out of each other's lives as easily as a Tinder swipe — that's when it's game over for humans. We start to feel like ghosts ourselves, drifting through the landscape without getting any traction.' He imagines a future where we are ghosted by the friendship-simulating tech we have created. (This tech already exists — Replika, the best known 'friendship' AI, has 10 million users.) 'We are living in a loneliness epidemic so Silicon Valley, which helped create that epidemic, is trying to find us the solution,' he says. 'A little app which is good at responding in real time in a convincing way — which people admit to becoming emotionally reliant on for advice, information, feedback. It's friendship without a friend — another dystopian possibility. There's a whole subgenre of science fiction of human men — it's very gendered — being abandoned by AI women. What if we just turn out to be very dull to our AI companions and even they ghost us? They're supposed to be our replacement proxy for the friends who are too busy for us — what if they stop responding?' He laughs. 'We'd deserve it.' Ghosting: On Disappearance by Dominic Pettman, Polity
Dublin Live
11-07-2025
- Dublin Live
Air fryer recall issued as 60,000 in Ireland told to stop using product immediately
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info A recall has been issued for a staggering 60,000 air fryers in Ireland after it was discovered that there is a manufacturing defect associated with the product that could result in a fire risk. The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) issued a warning this morning for any consumers who own certain models of Tower air fryers to stop using them immediately. Almost 60,000 affected models were sold in retailers across the Republic of Ireland. The problem with the product is that there is a manufacturing defect that could cause the air fryer to overheat, possibly resulting in fires and risking injury or death. Thankfully, no such incidents have been reported in Ireland yet but there have been reports of the same products catching fire in the United Kingdom. The five affected models of air fryers are as follows: T17023 Tower 2.2Ltr Manual Air Fryer T17061BLK Tower 4Ltr Manual Air Fryer T17067 Tower 4Ltr Digital Air Fryer T17087 Tower 2Ltr Compact Manual Air Fryer T17129L Vortx 8L Dual Basket Air Fryer To find the model number of your air fryer, unplug the product and check the appliance rating label which can be found at the bottom of the appliance. This number will begin with the letter T. If you have one of the above models in your kitchen, unplug it and stop using it immediately. Affected consumers are advised to contact Tower Housewares, which can be done on the website or by emailing towerproduct@ The implicated air fryers were manufactured between 2020 and 2024 and were sold in various retailers including Argos, Tesco Ireland, DID, Dealz, Lidl, Amazon, as well as the Tower Housewares website. Other retailers may also be included. Grainne Griffin, director of communications at the CCPC said: "This recall covers five Tower air fryer models with a dangerous manufacturing defect that could cause the models to overheat. "Almost 60,000 affected units have been sold in Ireland so it's vital that consumers who have a Tower air fryer check their model. If their model is affected, it is not safe to use." Additional information about product recalls can be found on the CCPC website. Join our Dublin Live breaking news service on WhatsApp. Click this link to receive your daily dose of Dublin Live content. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. For all the latest news from Dublin and surrounding areas visit our homepage.
