He Was Hot. Then Cold. Then Warm Again. I Spent a Year Learning the Pattern. | The Intermittent Reinforcement Trap

The Griot (0:00)

I learned to read him through his silences.

That sounds romantic. That is not what it was. The way he disappeared for three days, and then appeared again like weather warm, present. Asking about the things I had told him weeks ago, remembering details I had barely noticed I had shared. And the way I felt when he reappeared. The loosening of something I had not realized was clenched. The specific relief of it. That was not love. I know that now.

I did not know it then. What I knew then was that the relief was real. And that the relief only existed because the silence had existed first. And that I had begun organizing my days around trying to prevent the silence rather than building a life that did not need him in it. There was a lipstick in my bathroom that I never used. I had bought it on a Tuesday in October. The color a deep rose that I thought he would like. Because he had once, early on, said something about a woman in a film and the particular shade she was wearing. I did not wear it to our dinner that week.

I put it in the drawer and forgot it. But I did not forget why I had bought it. And months later, when I was finally trying to understand what had happened, I found it again, still wrapped, never opened, and I understood exactly what it was. Evidence. Not of love. Of a woman who had learned to anticipate what another person wanted with a precision that she had completely lost for what she herself needed. He was not cruel in the ways the books describe. He did not shout. He did not threaten. There was never a moment I could point to and say, This is abuse. That is the most precise way I have of describing the trap I was in. The trap had no walls I could see. It had patterns. And patterns unlike walls are invisible from inside. The pattern that ran everything was simple enough that I am embarrassed to describe it. When I was consistent, available, warm, and present, he withdrew. When I gave him space or pulled back or became unavailable, not strategically, not as a game, just because life demanded my attention elsewhere, he returned, more attentive than before, more specific about what he valued in me, more clearly the person I had fallen for in the first place. I did not identify the pattern.

I identified only the outcomes. The outcome when I was fully available was distance.

The outcome when I was preoccupied was closeness. The lesson my nervous system learned was, be less available. The next lesson it learned, this one is the one that took me longest to unlearn, was that the closeness I experienced when I pulled back was real and earned, and that my job was to manage the calibration of my availability in order to produce that closeness more consistently. I was training myself to want less of him in order to keep more of him. I was learning to suppress my own needs in order to keep a system running that was designed to work precisely because I was suppressing my needs. This is intermittent reinforcement. Psychologists identified the mechanism decades ago.

BF. Skinner demonstrated in the 1950s that when a reward is delivered on an unpredictable schedule, sometimes when you press the lever, sometimes not, with no discernible pattern, the behavior of pressing the lever becomes more persistent, more compulsive, harder to extinguish than when the reward is delivered consistently. The gambling industry built itself on this principle. So did he. He did not know he was doing it. I want to say that clearly, because the version of this story where he was consciously manipulating a schedule is a simpler and more satisfying story than the one I actually lived. The truth is more complicated. He was doing what he had always done in relationships, what had worked, in the sense that it kept women oriented toward him without requiring him to do the sustained unglamorous work of actual partnership. It worked not because he designed it, but because it fit a pattern his nervous system had learned and kept using.

Understanding that did not make it easier to leave. That is one of the things nobody tells you about intermittent reinforcement.

The absence of conscious malice in the person delivering it does not reduce its effect on the person receiving it. The mechanism is the mechanism regardless of intent. The midpoint of this story is a weekend in February, when he was warm and present and specific about a future we had talked about. A trip, a plan, something that required both of us to commit to something being real.