“I would absolutely love to hear your proposal.”

The words feel good. You stay up late refining the deck. You research the company, think carefully about how you might help, and move another appointment to make room.

Then, when it is time to choose a date, the replies stop.

Perhaps they are busy. Perhaps you should wait. Perhaps your proposal was not good enough. In front of a silent screen, only the person who received the promise keeps searching for an explanation.

Rejection is not the most painful part. Everyone has the right to say no.

What hurts is watching the time you invested in good faith get treated as though it never existed.

That is the friction I want to examine today.

Words are free. Belief has an upfront price.

A signed agreement is challenged a month later because it now “feels too expensive.” A company hires someone without defining the role, then calls that person a disappointment. A volunteer says, “Count me in,” and disappears on the day.

Circumstances change. People get sick. Budgets move. New information can justify a new decision. This is not an argument that every promise must survive every reality.

But the two sides do not arrive at that change having paid the same price.

The person who believed the promise has reserved time, prepared, and perhaps declined other work. They may have asked others for help, rearranged family plans, or spent a little courage taking the next step.

The promise-maker can forget a sentence. The recipient may already have written it into their calendar.

In hiring, silence sends the bill to the candidate

Greenhouse’s 2024 State of Job Hunting report found that 61% of job seekers had been ghosted after an interview, up nine percentage points since April of that year. Among historically underrepresented candidates, the reported figure was 66%.

For an employer, the missing act may be one short rejection email. For the candidate, the interview meant researching the company, preparing answers, choosing what to wear, taking time off, and allowing hope to enter the room. While waiting, some people postpone other applications, relocation decisions, or plans for their families.

By avoiding a few uncomfortable lines, an organization saves a small amount of effort. The candidate inherits all the uncertainty—and the emotional work of eventually closing the door alone.

Silence is not neutral. It can transfer the cost of a decision from the person who already knows it to the person still waiting.

Qantas’s “ghost flights” turned expectation into a product

This asymmetry is not limited to personal relationships.

Australia’s competition regulator, the ACCC, took Qantas to court for offering and selling tickets for flights it had already decided to cancel, and for failing to promptly inform some existing ticket holders of those decisions. In October 2024, the Federal Court ordered Qantas to pay AUD 100 million in penalties.

Qantas also agreed to pay about AUD 20 million to more than 86,000 affected customers.

An airline customer is not buying only a seat number. They are buying the expectation that allows them to book a hotel, promise to attend a wedding, take leave from work, or arrange the care of a child.

The central harm was therefore not simply that flights were cancelled. For a period, the company held information that its customers did not have, while those customers kept organizing their lives around an expectation that was already obsolete.

The promise-maker holds the information. The believer pays first. The same structure appears in the unanswered proposal, the unresolved interview, and the ticket for a flight that will not depart.

We are wounded by promises that never appeared in a contract

Organizational research uses the term “psychological contract” for perceived mutual obligations that may never appear in a legal document: work hard and you will be treated fairly; accept this role and you will be supported; join us and you will have room to grow.

In a foundational 1997 paper, Elizabeth Morrison and Sandra Robinson described how an employee’s belief that an organization failed to fulfil its obligations can develop into psychological-contract violation—an experience marked not merely by disappointment, but by anger and betrayal.

This does not mean that people who take words seriously are weak. Human cooperation depends on our ability to infer a relationship from words and act before every contingency has been reduced to a clause. A society in which nobody moves without suspicion and paperwork would be cold, slow, and lonely.

The willingness to believe is not immaturity. It is credit that someone extends so that a relationship can begin.

Trouble begins when we treat that credit as free.

The deeper harm is taking away someone else’s options

Promises sometimes become impossible to keep. What breaks trust is often not the change itself, but the failure to communicate it—the silence that leaves the other person without enough time to choose again.

An early no lets an organizer find someone else. An honest explanation lets two parties renegotiate. A clear rejection lets a candidate turn toward the next opportunity.

The longer the silence, the fewer options remain. Communication is therefore more than courtesy. It is a way of returning the steering wheel of a life to its owner.

The OECD’s framework for trust in public institutions identifies reliability, responsiveness, integrity, openness and fairness as core drivers. The framework concerns government, but its logic reaches into everyday relationships: do what you said, respond when reality changes, and do not hide the information the other person needs.

Do not eliminate expectations. Give them stages.

The easiest way to avoid disappointment may be to expect nothing from anyone.

I do not want to live that way. I want to feel encouraged by “I’d love to.” I want to believe “I’ll help.” If repeated disappointment teaches us to close the door before anyone can enter, careless promise-makers end up pushing away the reliable people, too.

The answer is not to eliminate expectations, but to give them stages:

• Separate interest from commitment.
• Invest more deeply after the date, role and terms are confirmed.
• Name a response deadline, then move to another option if it passes.
• When circumstances change, communicate early, explain why, and offer a next step.
• Remember that your casual “absolutely” may arrive in someone else’s life as a promise.

These are not techniques for distrusting people. They protect your time—and the credit of those who reliably keep their word.

I still want to believe people

I have sometimes expected too much and hurt myself. I have also allowed a conversation to grow into a promise inside my own head when the other person never meant it that way.

The recipient has a responsibility to clarify: “Is this decided?” “When will we know?” A single question can prevent real pain.

But a more powerful party should not be allowed to end every story with “They misunderstood.” Words that create expectations can move people. When your words move someone, you acquire a responsibility to tell them what happens next.

Trust is not revealed by inspiring declarations. It is revealed by the reply, the early warning, and the explanation we offer when keeping our word becomes inconvenient.

Am I making promises I cannot keep? Am I postponing a reply while someone waits? Did I say “I’ll be in touch” and leave my name sitting alone in somebody else’s calendar?

Beyond the casual “absolutely” you said today, has someone already begun rearranging their life?

Sources and further reading

• Greenhouse, “Ghosting, ghost jobs and bots: Candidates reveal their top frustrations in Greenhouse 2024 State of Job Hunting report”, December 10, 2024 — https://www.greenhouse.com/blog/greenhouse-2024-state-of-job-hunting-report
• Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, “Federal Court orders Qantas to pay $100m in penalties for misleading consumers”, October 8, 2024 — https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/federal-court-orders-qantas-to-pay-100m-in-penalties-for-misleading-consumers
• Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, “Qantas agrees to $20m payments to customers and, subject to court approval, a $100m penalty for misleading consumers”, May 6, 2024 — https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/qantas-agrees-to-20m-payments-to-customers-and-subject-to-court-approval-a-100m-penalty-for-misleading-consumers
• Morrison, E. W. and Robinson, S. L., “When Employees Feel Betrayed: A Model of How Psychological Contract Violation Develops”, Academy of Management Review, 1997 — https://doi.org/10.5465/AMR.1997.9707180265
• OECD, “Building Trust to Reinforce Democracy”, 2022 — https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/building-trust-to-reinforce-democracy_b407f99c-en.html