Produced by the island at WBUR Boston.

The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart sick.

Sugar is here, the both of us, speaking straight into your ears.

I'm Cheryl Strayed.

I'm Steve Almond. This is Dear Sugar Radio.

Oh dear song, won't you please?

Yeah, some better sweet days with me.

I check my bedbugs every day.

Oh, and this sugar, you see in my way.

Hi Cheryl. Hi Steve.

Well today we're going to talk about ghosting.

You see, that was a little moment where I ghosted you.

Did you catch it? I didn't feel ghosted.

But you know, it's interesting. This is a new word to many of us.

Yes, it is. I don't know. I didn't look it up in the thing of my jig.

But I would say I started hearing it maybe only about three or four years ago.

Right, we're old. So probably it's been around since like the dawn of the new millennium.

But for us it was like, what is all this talk of ghosting?

I teach undergraduates and they use this term now with the casualness that to me again,

with the old school heart, I'm like, really?

You can just completely without any explanation abandoned somebody who you've been to one extent or another intimate with.

Yeah, but you know, I want to kind of complicate this idea of ghosting a little bit.

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