“She Wants To Chase Butterflies”: Man Tries To Understand Why Fiancée Left Him, Internet Doesn’t Hold Back

To paraphrase a popular saying, man plans, fate laughs. Reddit user Concordian thought he had met the one, and the two of them had it all figured out. An engagement, a house, and a shared vision of the future seemed firmly in place. But the man’s fiancée started to grow distant, pulling away without ever clearly explaining why. As the emotional gap widened, the couple reached a point where their relationship no longer made sense. And now, they’re separating, leaving him searching for answers, and asking the internet if anyone else has been through something similar—and how to move forward.

As it entered the headlines, the term “quiet quitting” generally referred to workers doing only the tasks within their job descriptions, rather than going “above and beyond.”

In the context of a relationship, quiet quitting describes people who don’t want to initiate a break-up and instead go through the motions without real motivation to keep the relationship going.

“They don’t want to do the Big Leave,” says Lia Love Avellino, a psychotherapist and the CEO of Spoke, an emotional wellness space in Brooklyn. “They want to express with their behavior what they can’t with their words.”

Avellino claims she’s seen many clients who are trying to get out of a relationship but don’t know how. “A lot of the people bringing in concern about breaking up are people pleasers,” she says. “They are going along to get along, and they are telling themselves they don’t want to hurt their partner, but really they don’t want to deal with the discomfort of being the person who calls it quits.”

Each situation might be a little different, but Avellino says there are a couple of signs that suggest a person might be quietly quitting their relationship. The first one is them stopping advocating for their needs.

This is because telling your partner what you need, whether emotional or physical, shows you care. So if your significant other seems to have no interest in communicating what they are feeling to you, they might be disengaging from the relationship.

For instance, if your partner is typically jealous but hasn’t expressed that feeling for quite some time, it might reduce conflict, but it also could indicate a lack of interest.

“When you’re feeling jealousy, there is a charge to that,” Avellino says. “There is a part of you that is hopeful and believes that the relationship is worth the work.”

The other sign — and one that we see in this particular story — is a person’s unwillingness to own their anger. Instead of having direct conversations, they might act out of character.

“They might be quitting because their partner isn’t meeting their ... needs,” she says. “They say, ‘I’m going to go out every night and make you feel like you don’t matter.’ They’re taking the aggression out on the relationship, instead of working through it.”

The things they used to enjoy doing together might stop. “Their action is meant to dismiss the other person, but really they are feeling bad about their own needs not being met,” Avellino adds.

Of course, it can be hard to know whether you’re picking up on signs in your relationship or inventing them.

“Sometimes we can’t tell the difference between paranoia and perceptiveness,” Avellino says.

Therefore, we need to focus on the facts, not judgments. So if you feel your partner is disengaging in some way, tell them what you’ve noticed and be specific.

“You want to make the implicit explicit,” Avellino explains.

For example, you can say, “Hey, I noticed you’re not initiating anything in the bedroom anymore. I want to check in with you.”

This might cause friction in the moment, but know that you didn’t create it — you just brought it up.

“Sometimes we think if we avoid the conversation and that by not naming it we are keeping the peace,” Avellino says. But “If you are naming it and there is a fight, you didn’t create the problem, you revealed the crack.”

“By saying what you’re noticing, you’re not accusing the other person, you’re inviting an honest conversation about what is happening.”