The anti-ghosting dating app: designed to make ghosting rare

What ghosting actually is

Ghosting is when someone you have been talking to stops replying entirely and never says why. It is different from a slow fade, where replies get shorter and further apart until the conversation dies on its own, and different from simply unmatching, which at least closes the door visibly.

Research on ghosting finds that what people believe about relationships shapes how acceptable they consider it: those who see compatibility as fixed and destined are markedly more willing both to ghost and to be ghosted (Freedman et al., 2018). What makes ghosting sting is not the lost match. It is the missing information. Without an ending, people replay the conversation looking for the mistake they made — and usually there was not one. The other person got busy, matched with someone else, or never had much intention to begin with.

Why dating apps quietly reward ghosting

Three design decisions, present in almost every mainstream dating app, make disappearing the path of least resistance.

First, the feed never ends. When the next profile is always one swipe away, no single conversation feels scarce enough to be worth an awkward closing message.

Second, there are no consequences. Around half of people who have used dating apps report at least one unwanted behaviour on them, and 30% say someone kept contacting them after being told they were not interested (Pew Research Center, 2023) — behaviour that carries no lasting cost. Ghost fifty people and your account looks exactly like the account of someone who has never done it. Nothing accumulates, so nothing changes.

Third, nobody has declared anything. When two people match without stating what they are looking for, a large share of conversations are mismatched from the first message — one wants a relationship, the other wants Saturday night. Silence becomes the cheapest way out of a conversation that was never going anywhere. None of these three is an accident; each follows from how dating apps make money.

What Tekero changes

Intentions come first. On Tekero you post an announcement saying what you are actually looking for, and you are shown to people who want the same thing. Mismatched conversations — the ones most likely to end in silence — mostly never start.

Behaviour accumulates. The Trust Score is an automatic system that rewards genuine behaviour and penalises the patterns that ruin dating apps. People who consistently disappear become less visible over time. People who show up become more visible. It is not a punishment badge; it is simply a memory, which is exactly what these apps normally lack.

Conversations start honestly. Empathy Openers replace the opening "hey" with something a person can actually answer. A conversation that starts with substance is far harder to abandon without noticing you are doing it.

There is somewhere to go. Friendship Levels give conversations visible progression, and Consent Contracts make boundaries and intentions explicit before things get ambiguous. Both give a connection shape — and a connection with shape is harder to drop by accident.

What you can do about being ghosted

Say what you want early. It feels blunter than the usual script, but it filters out the conversations that were going to end in silence anyway — and it does so in week one instead of week four.

Move to a plan sooner. Most ghosting happens in the long, shapeless middle of a text conversation. Proposing something concrete converts a chat into a decision, and people are much more likely to answer a decision.

And when it happens anyway: it is information about their capacity, not your worth. The person who vanished has almost always done it before, to someone else, for reasons that had nothing to do with you.