Your Ex: Their Curated Life isn't Love!

You cannot curate love.

You can curate a life that looks impressive—busy calendars, impressive titles, financial milestones, a constant hum of productivity and movement—but love doesn’t live there.

Love doesn’t survive in performance. It doesn’t grow in avoidance. And it certainly can’t be outsourced to money, status, or “success.”

Dismissive avoidants are masters of the curated life.

From the outside, they look like they have it all together. They’re often the busiest, most accomplished, most “successful” people in the room.

They stay in motion, always building, achieving, planning the next thing. And money—whether earning it, spending it, or talking about it—becomes the ultimate emotional deflection. A socially acceptable way to avoid feeling anything at all.

For a long time, I admired people like that. I thought that was strength. I thought emotional distance meant self-control, independence, maturity. I didn’t see the emptiness underneath—I couldn’t, because I hadn’t healed yet.

Now? I see straight through it.

There was a phase, during my healing, where I felt sorry for them. I could see the wound, the fear of closeness, the freaking out, the running away, the terror of being truly known. I understood how they learned to survive by staying self-contained and unreachable.

But now… I feel nothing at all.

That’s the part that surprises me the most.

It’s astonishing how dismissive avoidants genuinely cannot see that anything is wrong with them!

They keep hitting milestones that look impressive on paper—another promotion, another property, another trip, another loveless relationship, perhaps a baby, another goal ticked off the life list—and then sit quietly with that familiar, nagging sense that something’s missing.

Yes. Something is missing!!

Real love is missing.

Real connection.

The kind that can’t be scheduled, purchased, optimised, or controlled. The kind they almost had - with you! The kind they ran from. The kind they lost because intimacy felt more dangerous than loneliness.

And instead of turning inward, they just… keep going. More doing. More achieving. More noise. As if the next milestone will finally fill the gap.

But it never does.

What’s funny—almost darkly hilarious—is how tedious it all looks from the other side of healing!

Once you’re no longer entangled emotionally, the pattern becomes painfully obvious. Predictable. Dull.

All that motion, all that effort, and such a profound avoidance of the one thing that actually matters.

The emotional ties on my end are gone. Completely.

There’s no anger. No longing. No sadness. Just clarity.

I see through it now—and I don’t feel a thing.

And honestly? That might be the clearest sign of healing there is.

TR