Your Ex and Their Conscience (or lack of one)

There’s a particular kind of silence that feels louder than screaming.

It’s the silence of someone who once held your face in their hands, memorised your laugh, slept with you as the stars exploded — and then one day, simply… f do disappeared. 👻

Loving a dismissive avoidant can feel like loving a locked room.

At first, they seem steady. Independent. Self-contained in a way that feels safe. They don’t need much. They don’t ask for much. They don’t overwhelm you with demands. They admire your warmth, your depth, your openness — almost like someone standing near a fire, grateful for the heat but careful not to get too close.

And when they love you, they do. In their way.

But their conscience operates differently.

When intimacy deepens — when love asks for vulnerability, accountability, emotional presence — something shifts. Not outwardly at first. Inwardly. Quietly. A survival system hums to life. Closeness begins to register as danger. Dependency feels like loss of control. Your needs start to feel like pressure, even if you’ve expressed them gently.

So they begin the slow retreat.

They answer a little later.

They share a little less.

They touch you with less softness.

They tell themselves they’re just “busy,” just “tired,” just “needing space.”

And here’s the part that breaks hearts:

Their conscience doesn’t scream at them the way yours might.

They don’t lie awake flooded with guilt. They don’t replay your tears in torment. Instead, their mind reframes the story in a way that protects them.

You became too much.

The relationship became too heavy.

They warned you they weren’t good at this.

You’ll be fine.

They convince themselves that detaching is rational. That ending it abruptly is cleaner than “dragging it out.” That emotional distance is honesty.

Meanwhile, you are unraveling.

You’re wondering how someone who once swore they cared can now look at you with calm detachment. How they can watch your heartbreak and not rush to soothe it. How they can walk away and sleep at night.

The truth is not that they feel nothing.

It’s that they feel in compartments.

Their conscience doesn’t accuse them of cruelty — it accuses them of weakness if they stay. Vulnerability feels more dangerous than loss. So they shut the door. And once it’s shut, they seal it tight. Not because you didn’t matter — but because you mattered enough to threaten their defenses.

To love you fully would have required them to confront old wounds they’ve survived by ignoring.

And survival always wins.

From the outside, it looks like indifference. Coldness. Even heartlessness.

But inside, it’s more like emotional anesthesia.

They numb before they drown.

And the tragedy is this: by protecting themselves from imagined engulfment, they create real abandonment.

You’re left holding memories that still feel alive.

They’re left with a quiet room that feels safe.

Sometimes, much later — when the pressure is gone and you are no longer reaching — they may feel the echo. A faint ache. A curiosity about what could have been. But by then, they’ve already justified the ending. Their conscience has rewritten the narrative into something survivable.

“I did what I had to do.”

And you’re left grieving a love that never got the chance to be brave.

The hardest part isn’t that they didn’t care.

It’s that they cared — but not enough to face themselves.

The ONLY thing you can do as the wounded partner is let go, choose yourself and cut the cancer out and move on.

Because no one needs a freaky outie avoidant in their lives, and once you see it for what it is - you’ll never look back.