New Delhi, July 22 -- For three months, K. Gupta was building a relationship with someone. Dates would turn into weekends, plans would spill into the following month. She had, as she puts it, "calendarised her life" around this person. "Then, one day, he disappeared," she says. "No fight. No warning or explanation. Overnight, he went from 100 to zero," Gupta recalls.

The 33-year-old Mumbai-based financial services professional wasn't new to the vocabulary of modern dating. She knew what this was. She looked up its psychological effects online, read about dysregulation, about the specific cruelty of disappearance in a world where reaching someone takes seconds. She knew the word was "ghosting". She just couldn't bring herself to use it. "...