The vocabulary.

Anxious attachment is a relational style in which closeness feels uncertain by default, so the nervous system stays on alert for signs of withdrawal and pushes to re-secure connection at the first hint of distance.

Avoidant attachment is a relational style in which emotional closeness registers as a threat to autonomy, so the nervous system reflexively pulls away whenever a partner moves toward greater intimacy.

Benching is keeping a romantic option in reserve — enough sporadic contact to stop them leaving, never enough investment to make them a partner — so they stay available as a backup while you keep pursuing what you actually want.

Breadcrumbing is the pattern of sending intermittent, low-effort signals of interest — a like, a one-word reply, a "hey stranger" after weeks of silence — with no intention of letting the relationship actually progress.

DARVO is a four-step reversal — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — used by someone confronted with their own behavior to flip the conversation so the person raising the issue ends up apologizing for raising it.

Dry texting is a pattern of short, low-effort replies — one word, no questions back, minimal engagement — that reads as disinterest but can come from at least three very different causes.

Fawning is a trauma response in which a person defuses perceived threat by appeasing, pleasing, and merging with the other person's wants — abandoning their own needs to stay safe through agreement.

Fearful-avoidant attachment is a relational style that runs both alarms at once — the system craves closeness and codes closeness as danger, so it pursues a partner and then flees the very connection it just chased.

Future faking is the tactic of selling a vivid shared future — the trip, the move-in, the ring — to extract real commitment in the present, with no intention of building the thing being promised.

Gaslighting is a sustained pattern of denying, reframing, and rewriting events so that the target gradually stops trusting their own memory, perception, and judgment.

Ghosting is the sudden, total end of contact — no argument, no explanation, no closing message — leaving the other person to infer the ending from silence alone.

Ghostlighting is ghosting someone and then, when they resurface or confront it, denying or minimizing that any distance happened at all — fusing the disappearance of ghosting with the reality-denial of gaslighting.

Hoovering is the return move — a sudden flood of warmth, apology, or nostalgia from someone you cut off or pulled away from, engineered to vacuum you back into a dynamic you had already started to leave.

Love bombing is an early flood of intense affection, attention, and future-talk — delivered fast enough and heavy enough that the target bonds to the intensity before they have any evidence the person behind it is consistent.

Mixed signals are the pattern of warm and cold behavior arriving close enough together that neither reading of the relationship — interested or not — ever gets to be the settled one.

Monkey branching is lining up a new relationship before letting go of the current one — swinging from one partner to the next like branches, so there is never a moment of hanging without a grip.

Orbiting is when someone who has gone quiet on you in private keeps consuming you in public — watching every story, liking the old photo, reacting without ever replying — staying in your orbit without re-entering the conversation.

The silent treatment is the deliberate withholding of communication — refusing to speak, reply, or acknowledge someone — used to punish, control, or extract compliance while avoiding open conflict.

A situationship is a romantic or sexual involvement that delivers relationship behavior — time, intimacy, routine — while withholding the relationship definition, so one party gets full access at partial commitment and the other carries hope as the unpaid balance.

Stonewalling is the act of shutting down inside a conversation — going silent, going cold, refusing to engage — as a way of refusing to negotiate while still occupying the room.

The four horsemen are the four communication patterns John Gottman identified as the strongest predictors of relationship failure: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

A trauma bond is the powerful emotional attachment that forms toward someone who hurts you, built by cycles of abuse alternating with affection so that the relief becomes indistinguishable from love.