Long distance turned me into a phone watcher
Background because I always look for it first: my ex, I’ll call him M, was my boyfriend for a little over a year. The last 7 months were long distance after he moved two states away for work. I’m not diagnosing him, but he described himself as “bad with pressure,” and the pattern felt DA-ish. In person he was warm, easy, affectionate. Apart, he got fuzzy.
I hate typing this out because it makes me sound ridiculous, but I became a phone gremlin. Before him, I used to leave my phone on the kitchen counter until I went to bed. By month 3 of distance I was checking the active dot, doing gross little math in my head, comparing “goodnight :)” with “goodnight.” I’d be brushing my teeth at 11:40 thinking, okay, he was online 18 minutes ago and still didn’t answer. Then I’d hate myself for caring.
The “needs” I had were embarrassingly normal. One planned call a week. Some rough idea like “maybe the second weekend in March” for the next visit. Not a wedding date. Just something so I wasn’t dating a weather app. If I wanted a call, I’d send “no pressure, only if you’re free,” while literally sitting on my bedroom floor crying next to a laundry pile. Cute.
If I said I missed him, I made it smaller first. If I said I felt disconnected, he heard it as me saying he was failing. Then he’d need a few days because he was overwhelmed, and I’d go quiet because I was scared one more feeling would make him disappear for real.
The switch is what keeps looping. Last time I visited, we had breakfast at the diner near his apartment. He held my hand under the table, kissed my forehead in the grocery aisle while we were buying coffee, and mentioned a spring trip like it was obvious we’d still be us. Two weeks later I asked if Thursday nights could be our regular call night. He got quiet and said, “I just can’t keep doing this,” then the focus-on-himself part. Maybe 12 minutes total. I was sitting on my bed with my coat still on because I’d been about to take the trash out. I just stayed there.
I’m 16 days No Contact. Chat archived, social stuff muted, roommate warned not to give me updates. I’m in therapy. My anxious side got loud, yes. I own that, and I’m not making him a villain. But I keep thinking about how I trained myself to need less and less, and he still left.
But how do you stop reading silence like evidence? How do you grieve the warm in-person version without using that version to excuse the unreachable one?