Being back in the dating game after getting out of a relationship can be tough. Especially if you've done a lot of self-healing and you're relatively unwounded. You look around and you find that you're mostly doing the dating dance with people's shadows personas, not the real them.
I get it. People are scared of getting hurt. They are scared of losing face and the upper hand. This is why we have fucked up dating rituals.
I don't consider myself a young person anymore but I do know all about ghosting. It's so infantile and narcissistic that I don't know how anyone manages to hook up anymore. If you don't want to talk to someone for any reason, that's easy to do nowadays.
No reason to answer politely, people can just fall off the edge of the earth back into the amniotic fluid. In modern day dating culture, god forbid someone should have any responsibility, or even sensitivity, towards the people who have decided to take a chance on them and let them enter their social circle. Ghosting can be traumatic for anyone learning to trust and open up.