Ghosting is the new normal in the dating world, but it's nothing new. The art of cutting off communication without explanation has been done with great skill long before texting, smartphones or email.

Yet dating apps like Tinder have certainly made it more commonplace.

The reason why people choose to ghost someone rather than flat out let them know they don't want to be around them anymore is simply that ghosting is easier.

And everyone can take a hint, right?

I once had a guy apologize for ghosting me two years later, and his excuse was that he "just wanted to be single."

A totally legitimate reason. So why couldn't he just say so in the first place?

I might have been spared the constant analysis in my head of what went wrong, but explaining opens an uncomfortable conversation, and nobody wants that.

Even more anxiety-ridden is the art of "breadcrumbing," where somebody doles out tiny bits of communication here and there to lure you in and keep you interested while doing minimal effort to do so.

"These ambiguous digital crumbs are enough to remind you that the person is alive, and may even hint at a future meet-up," says Refinery 29, "but never get to the nitty gritty of whether they actually want a relationship."

Even worse than breadcrumbing is cushioning, when you are dating someone, but you have someone else on the side just in case it doesn't work out.

Cushioning and breadcrumbing seem to go together. You can breadcrumb several people here and there to cushion yourself in case your main relationship falls through.

It's already tough out there, and how is cushioning any different than cheating?

There are times when it actually works out better when someone ghosts you because the feeling is mutual, and there just wasn't that much there to begin with.

A conversation about what went wrong isn't always necessary, but every relationship is different.

Ghosting isn't limited to romantic relationships, it can happen in platonic ones too.

And even between married people.

A wife in Taiwan was recently granted a divorce from her husband, using unanswered text messages as key evidence that he was purposefully ignoring her.

For six months, she messaged him using Line, an app that uses tick notifications to confirm your message has been received and read.

The wife rarely, if ever, got a reply, but the messages were marked read.

At one point, she sent a message saying she was in the emergency room, demanding why he wasn't answering her messages.

It seems as though there were multiple issues in the relationship, but the ignored messages were apparently the last straw and the judge concluded she had enough grounds for a divorce, stating that the couple's marriage was beyond repair.

Dating and relationships are hard work, but they get easier when people are better to one another.

Bottom line is if you're ghosting, breadcrumbing or cushioning you're really just being a jerk and it'll likely come back on you one day.

Angela Gosnell is a video producer for knoxnews.com. She can be reached at 865-342-6351 or angela.gosnell@knoxnews.com.