To support my point that Hookup Culture doesn’t just go away even when people leave a college campus for the “real world”, I’m going to make a claim for which I have no actual evidence or support other than the fact that it makes intuitive sense to me: “ghosting”* is not a random or accidental or even super-mysterious trend—it’s the natural, entirely-predictable result of a central tenet of Hookup Culture being applied to “real-world” dating. Hookup Culture actively discourages communication, on-going interaction, acknowledgment of another person’s internal emotional world. I would argue it’s impossible to get “ghosted” in Hookup Culture, because ghosting is the absence of communication when there’s the assumption that there should be communication; within Hookup Culture, that absence of communication isn’t a bug in the software… it’s a feature.