Chapter 12: The Quiet Pattern / The Cost of Not Naming It

I didn’t lose people because of one explosive argument or a dramatic rupture. I lost them slowly, in rooms where certain truths were never spoken and where my discomfort was treated as something to be managed rather than understood. These were relationships built on intermittent closeness, periods of warmth followed by long stretches of emotional absence. I stayed far longer than I should have, trying to figure out what I had done wrong instead of asking what was actually happening.

The cost wasn’t only the loss of the relationships themselves. It was the gradual erosion of my voice, my instincts, and my ability to trust what my body was telling me.

What Michelle and Ryan shared wasn’t cruelty, but control of proximity. They decided when intimacy was available and when it was withdrawn. I responded by shrinking my needs instead of naming them. That was the real contract she kept signing.

Michelle was one of the first people to teach me this pattern.

I met her at the end of high school, when I was stepping into what passed for adulthood, working full time, not going to college, and handing over half my paycheck to help my mother pay the bills. Michelle seemed harmless at first. She made me laugh, which was always the quickest way into my inner circle. Humor was the glue in most of my long-term relationships. She also seemed real, or at least theatrical in a way that felt alive.

People joked that Michelle was living inside her favorite soap opera, Days of Our Lives, and that she fancied herself Marlena. She romanticized relationships as epic love stories unfolding in real time -- not in her actual life, but in an imagined one she constructed to make the world feel beautiful and meaningful. In hindsight, that fantasy may have been how she survived.

She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but she was drawn to beautiful people. I was the “it” girl for a while, dating the “it” guy since eleventh grade. Michelle entered my life through my sister, who met her at a party and liked her immediately. Anyone my sister befriended eventually came into my orbit. I watched first. I assessed. I decided who felt interesting enough to let close.

Michelle knew how to pique my interest. Maybe it was fixing me up with her brother, a free spirit, outdoorsy, elusive, not traditionally handsome, but was attracted to which confused me. Or maybe it was her fascination with people like Ryan, whose family had a name in town and whose cousin would go on to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Looking back, Michelle was a social climber in a fishbowl town that only mattered to those deeply embedded in it.

At the time, I didn’t see the danger. What I saw were two people, Michelle and Ryan, who appeared deep, intelligent, and emotionally attuned. They remembered details. I could talk to each one of them for hours. Michelle drifted in and out of fantasy; Ryan drifted in and out of sincerity. The joke about Michelle was that no one could tell whether she was brilliant or completely foolish.

Ryan, on the other hand, seemed authentic -- until he didn’t. He could be profoundly moved by things that didn’t require intimacy from him. A movie would leave him speechless, almost in tears. But when it came to the emotional reality between us, he shut down completely. Anything that required emotional reciprocity, vulnerability, or sustained presence was intolerable to him.

This dynamic repeated itself.

Michelle and Ryan both had the same talent: they could make you feel extraordinary when their attention was on you, and utterly disposable when it wasn’t. The withdrawal wasn’t overt. It wasn’t cruel in a way you could point to. It was just absence. Cold. Confusing. Devastating.

I’m a prideful person. When they pulled away, I pulled back harder. I told myself I didn’t care. I acted unavailable. I refused to name how much it hurt. I couldn’t admit, least of all to myself, that my heart was breaking. Not because someone left me for someone else, but because they kept coming and going at their own pace, deciding when I was worthy of presence.

And when they came back, I took them back.  I mistook persistence for love. Longevity for truth. Familiarity for safety.

For years, the pattern was the same: wash, rinse, repeat. We reentered relationships out of convenience, history, and shared language. I told myself that if we could just have a rational conversation, something would finally resolve. Those conversations always began with good intentions and ended in jokes and dismissal. If I tried to steer us back to the real question: Do you love me? And if not, please let me go – it never landed. The conversation with Ryan would abruptly end with “Whatever,” and the door would close or with Kristen it was just blantant ghosting.

I was left standing there, invisible and foolish, wondering if I was overthinking everything.

The unspoken rule became clear: don’t talk about emotional intimacy. Play your role. Be agreeable. Pretend we’re fine. If I violated that rule, I was degraded, labeled dramatic, manic, bipolar. Those labels weren’t diagnoses; they were defenses against having to listen. (And I would later learn my kids would followed the same play book.)

Nothing was ever resolved. The subject was always redirected to something else, usually how lucky I was, how good I had it, how grateful I should be. And when relationships finally ended, it was never because of the real issue. It was always some minor, off-topic grievance that felt absurdly insufficient to justify the loss.

This fed directly into my blueprint: joke, fight, minimize, move on.

What I wasn’t taught was how to pause, and to locate pain in my body which was always my stomach. To understand that discomfort is information. To recognize that other people’s behavior is not a referendum on your worth.

Ignoring that truth came at a cost. When I tried to pretend everything was fine, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. The misalignment became physical. Intolerable.

I never felt like I chose to leave. It felt like something underneath the relationship gave out, a structural failure that couldn’t be repaired. I withdrew emotionally long before I left, and I think they sensed it. There was relief in my disengagement.

What I didn’t realize then was that I was gravitating toward the same dynamic over and over, just with different faces and tactics. The outcome never changed.

The shift came when I finally saw the game and realized I no longer wanted to play. The clarity was brutal. I wasn’t just being played; I was participating. I confused endurance with love. Drama with meaning.

I had to accept that not all relationships are meant to last forever. Most people are simply surviving the only way they know how. That doesn’t mean I have to endure it.

In my mid-fifties, I took the mask off. I stopped chasing the programmed happy ending. I stopped assigning other people the job of completing me -- a job they could never do. That changed everything.

I began saying no to invitations, to dynamics, to roles that required my silence. I found creativity, not approval, as my refuge. A blank canvas became my salvation. I could create something whole without needing anyone else to validate it.

That was enough.

I finally understood that no one was ever going to care about me in the way I thought they should. And that was not a tragedy -- it was a release. The people I lost no longer needed a reason. The pattern was clear: if you won’t play my game, you don’t get to stay.

I see the pattern clearly now.
I no longer mistake silence for safety.
I am no longer available to be told who to be.