Ghosting, pulling a Casper, suddenly cutting off all communication without providing any explanation - call it what you want but I'll call it what it is: Rude!

It seems everyone has experienced the agony of the date and ditch - I know I've been there.

I recently asked my Instagram followers whether they'd ever been ghosted and polled them. The result was almost comical. Dear reader, an overwhelming 76 percent admitted to being ghosted.

My DMs rapidly filled with some wild stories. Some admitted they had been the ghoster themselves (boo hiss to you!) but most had been on the receiving end.

My shout out was prompted by a story that recently went viral. A woman shared how she went on a date with a man she'd spent weeks talking to.

She'd flown across two states after visiting her terminally ill mother, driven two hours from the airport, squeezed in a blow-dry before dinner and arrived at her date excited to finally meet this man. Halfway through the evening, he got up to use the bathroom and never came back.

He later texted that he had a 'panic attack' because she told him she had got a blow-dry for their date and that type of effort 'stressed' him out.

A man triggered by a good hair day? Shameful, indeed. Then again, after spending more than a decade navigating the strange wilderness that is modern dating, I'm not shocked. I've heard so many horror stories - and experienced some trainwrecks myself.

Years ago, I went out with a dating app match who seemed so nervous from the moment he arrived. He was dripping in sweat the whole time and I wondered whether he'd accidentally shown up for a job interview instead of a date.

He announced he was stepping outside for a cigarette - his third in an hour - and he never came back.

When I messaged him on the dating app, he gave me a ridiculous excuse for ghosting: He left because he'd seen me chatting to the men sitting next to us and assumed I was more interested in them. What he failed to realize was that I only started talking to them after he disappeared multiple times.

I was alone on that date, but I'm far from alone as a victim of ghosting - and my followers' stories made him look almost courteous.

One woman told me she was ghosted after spending Christmas Day with a man's family. She'd met his parents, played backyard cricket with his nieces and nephews, helped clear the lunch dishes and posed for family photos.

Three days later, he stopped replying to her messages and she never heard from him again. Somewhere in Ohio, there is a framed family Christmas photo featuring a woman nobody has seen since.

Another follower was ghosted after helping a man move apartments. She spent an entire Saturday carrying boxes and assembling furniture with him. They ate pizza on the floor while they talked excitedly about the future. The following week, he disappeared.

Then there was the woman who thought she was heading towards something serious after a man invited her to a friend's wedding. She spent a small fortune on a new dress and glam and was so excited to meet his friends. She said she spent the weekend-long wedding being introduced as his date.

On Monday morning, he vanished. No fight. No explanation. Just silence.

By comparison, the man who escaped my date at least had the decency to leave before feelings came into play.

But the pain rarely comes from losing the person. It comes from being left with a giant question mark where an explanation should have been.

All of these stories could have had a reasonable ending if men simply said: 'I'm sorry, I don't think we're a match.' Most of us are grown-ups. We can survive someone saying: 'Lovely to meet you, but I'm not feeling it.' What sends people spiraling is having absolutely no idea what happened.

For the next 24 hours, you go over and over the date a million times, asking yourself whether you missed some important clue. So many women told me the same thing - 'I was going crazy trying to figure it out!'

And that's the worst part: the ghosted person feels like they were the problem, not the coward who couldn't speak up.

Of course, some people genuinely struggle with anxiety and difficult conversations, but there is a difference between feeling uncomfortable and treating another person as though they don't deserve basic courtesy. Rejection is never easy, but many of us seem to have convinced ourselves that silence is kinder than honesty.

Judging by the hundreds of responses flooding my inbox, it isn't. Most people would rather hear a simple, uncomfortable truth than spend weeks trying to decode a disappearance.

Rip it off like a Band-Aid, people, because we are tired of your Casper antics.

If you're struggling to find the words, here are two messages you can copy and paste into a text:

Option 1: Hey, I've enjoyed getting to know you, but I don't think we're the right match. I wanted to be honest rather than disappear. Wishing you all the best.

Option 2: Hey, you're lovely, but I'm not feeling the romantic connection I'm looking for. Rather than ghosting you and ending up in a Daily Mail article, I thought I'd be honest. Wishing you all the best.

OK, maybe the second one was personal.