Every move has a name.
The patterns the canon already catalogued — defined cold, so you spot them the instant they run.
Anxious attachment
A nervous system that reads distance as danger. Quick to reach, quick to protest, quick to over-give. The tell: the reply that gets longer the colder she goes.
Avoidant attachment
Closeness reads as threat, so the exit stays open. Warm until it's real, then gone. The tell: the vanish that arrives precisely when things deepen.
Fearful-avoidant
Both alarms at once — craving the closeness and fleeing it. The hot-and-cold isn't a game; it's a war inside her. The tell: intensity followed by retreat, on a loop.
Breadcrumbing
Just enough signal to keep you on the hook — a like, a reply, a "we should hang" that never lands a date. The tell: attention without progression.
Benching
Kept warm on the roster while she explores better options. Not chosen, not cut — held. The tell: steady low-effort contact, zero escalation.
Orbiting
Gone from your messages, present in your views. Watches every story, answers nothing. The tell: the silent viewer who never speaks.
Love bombing
Overwhelming warmth, fast — to manufacture a bond before you've vetted it. Intensity as a down payment on control. The tell: too much, too soon.
Future faking
Vivid promises of a tomorrow that keeps not arriving. The trip, the label, the "someday." The tell: the future is detailed; the present never moves.
Hoovering
The pull back in just as you're leaving — the sudden warmth, the apology, the "I miss you." Named for the vacuum. The tell: warmth timed to your exit.
Gaslighting
Rewriting your memory until you doubt your own read. "That never happened. You're too sensitive." The tell: you leave each talk less sure of what you saw.
DARVO
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Caught out, she flips the frame so you're the one apologizing. The tell: your complaint becomes your crime.
Stonewalling
The shutdown — silence as a wall. Not a pause, a withdrawal of the field itself. The tell: the conversation doesn't end, it's abandoned.
The four horsemen
Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling — Gottman's predictors of collapse. The tell: contempt, the eye-roll, the surest of the four.
Situationship
The deliberate non-definition. All the labor of a relationship, none of the commitment, by design. The tell: every status question dissolves into a joke.
Once a move has a name, it loses its spell. That is the whole game.