Here’s the tell. Somewhere in the same period, you stopped doing most of the small, unglamorous things that used to signal you were actually there — the unprompted text, the attention that wasn’t waiting for something back, the version of you that showed up interested before there was a reason to be. You noticed the drop in what you were getting. You didn’t notice, or didn’t want to notice, the drop in what you were giving first.

The rejection story is comfortable because it puts the entire mechanism outside your control. If it’s their withdrawal, there’s nothing to examine in yourself, no uncomfortable inventory of your own retreat to take. It also protects a specific fear: that if you looked honestly at your own contribution, you might find it’s not really about them wanting you less — it’s about a mutual absence that started somewhere, that you might have started, that would mean the fix isn’t waiting for them to come back around, it’s you going first.

What it’s costing you is the actual, available repair. A relationship where both people believe they’re the one who was left waits indefinitely for the other person to make the first move — and if you’re the one who’s actually been absent, waiting for them to notice and initiate is waiting for evidence you’ve already made harder for them to find.

The harder truth: desire rarely disappears in only one direction. If it’s gone quiet on their side, there’s a real chance it went quiet on yours first, in ways that were easier for you to justify or simply not notice than theirs are for you.

Here’s what’s available once you stop treating this as something being done to you: go first, deliberately, in the small unglamorous ways you used to before either of you started keeping score. Not as a test to see if it “works” and confirms your original story if it doesn’t — as an honest re-entry, sustained for longer than a single gesture. If the absence really was mutual, this is the only version of the story where you actually have the power to change the ending, instead of the version where you’re waiting for someone else to fix something you also helped create.