Ghosted
Ghosted
Things are going well. Then she goes quiet. Replies slow down, plans get vaguer, the warmth drops. You try to figure out what changed. You reach out a little more. She gets cooler.
So you back off. Give it a week. She texts you first. Makes a plan. It feels close again.
Then it happens again.
The game
She has two moves: close and distant. You have two moves: pursue and back off.
When you move toward her, she moves away. When you back off, she moves toward you. The distance stays roughly constant regardless of what you do. What looks like hot and cold is a thermostat.
Her side of this doesn't require a plan. When you pursue, she has all the closeness she wants without having to do anything. When you back off, she moves toward you to get it back. She's not running a strategy. The dynamic just provides what she wants automatically.
The equilibrium
Both of your responses make sense in the moment. Pursuing when she goes cold feels right. Relaxing when she comes back feels right. The pattern only becomes visible when you zoom out.
What keeps you in it is the returns. If she stayed distant you'd eventually move on. The returns reset you. A reward that comes unpredictably produces more pull than one that's always there. The warmth after a cold stretch lands harder than warmth that never left.
Dominated strategies
Pursuing harder when she distances. This produces more distancing. The move that feels like it should close the gap is the one that widens it.
Treating each return as evidence the cycle has ended. The return is part of the cycle. When she comes back warm, her position changed, not the pattern.
The move that actually shifts things: don't return when she comes back. Backing off temporarily is still pursuing — it just looks like retreat. Backing off permanently reads differently. She stops getting the signal that pulling away works.