Man, I never thought I’d be writing about this stuff, but here we are. It took me three separate blow-ups and one really weird night analyzing old texts to figure this out. I’m not saying everyone with a birthday in that sign does this, but the ones I kept running into? Yeah, they run a script, and it’s creepy how clean it is. I started calling it the Three-Step Program after my friend, let’s call her Sarah, was completely wiped out by her last guy. I tried to help her figure out what went wrong, but the guy just vanished. So I went CSI on my own past relationships with that particular energy and suddenly, the pattern just smacked me in the face.
I was in this weird state after my last big breakup—the kind where you start organizing your spice rack just to feel useful. I had kept every single message, every email, every date summary in a private journal. Not because I’m some stalker, but because I was trying to figure out why things always went from “perfect project plan” to “dumpster fire” so fast. I started highlighting words in different colors: green for approval, red for criticism, blue for future planning. It looked like a crazy person’s mood board, but that’s where I saw the cycle clear as day. This isn’t theory; this is my messy practice record.
Stage 1: The Flawless Blueprint
This is the initial blast. They come on strong, right? Like a steamroller covered in compliments. Everything you say? They’ve also thought about it. Everything you want to do? They know the perfect, most efficient way to do it. You feel seen, totally accepted, like you finally found the one person who gets your specific brand of weird.
- The Documentation: They are asking a million questions, but they aren’t just listening—they are cataloging. They’re finding out your past mistakes, your soft spots, and your dreams.
- The Delivery: High contact, high praise. Everything is “perfect,” “meant to be,” or “never felt this way.” You’re basically getting an A+ on a personality report they’ve already written.
- The Hook: You think, “Wow, this person is serious. They are planning our lives out.” They make you feel secure in a way that feels almost professional. They lay out the whole future, down to the paint color of the kitchen. And you buy it. You totally buy it.
In my notes, the green highlights—the praise—were just flying off the page. It’s a rush, and it felt like finding a perfect match, but looking back, it was too clean. It was like they were reading from a checklist to see if you fit into their pre-approved “spouse” category. I missed the fact that the intensity wasn’t admiration; it was data collection.
Stage 2: The Critical System Audit
This is where the engine starts sputtering, and man, is it confusing when it happens. Suddenly, that minor thing you mentioned on the third date—the way you chew, the typo in a text, your messy car—becomes a whole thing. The high praise stops dead in its tracks. The heat turns into a cold, clinical assessment.
The green turns to red. Fast. They are no longer overlooking your flaws; they are logging them and presenting them back to you for immediate correction. They are performing an audit of the initial blueprint you gave them, and guess what? You failed the QA check.
It’s never a big fight, either. It’s a slow chipping away. I remember once I got a text saying, “It’s efficient for us to just meet at the cafe at 7:00, not 7:02 like you suggested. Two minutes is wasted planning time.” Another time, it was an entire lecture about my slightly crooked bookshelf. They start making you feel like you are inherently faulty, and if you just try a little harder, you can be “fixed” into the perfect partner they thought they found.
- The Change: They stop investing in the future and start obsessing over the past—your past mistakes, specifically.
- The Language: It’s less “I love this about you” and more “I need you to work on this for us.” It’s veiled criticism dressed up as helpful suggestion.
- The Feeling: You feel constant anxiety, always trying to perform or meet an unspoken expectation that changes daily. You’re desperate to get back to the warmth of Stage 1. This is the trap. You start trying to fix yourself instead of seeing they’re the problem.
Stage 3: Decommissioning and Disposal
Once they’ve decided you can’t be fixed—or maybe they just found a new, cleaner blueprint—they shut it down. And I mean, shut it down. No drama, no screaming match, which is what makes it so jarring. It’s clean, precise, and utterly cold. The human connection they pretended to build? Gone.
They treat the breakup like terminating a contract or archiving a failed project. One day they are picking at your outfit, the next day they are just…gone. Silence. Blocked numbers. No response to your confused messages. If you do get a response, it’s short, to the point, and sounds like it was written by a lawyer. They will tell you, calmly, why this project is no longer a viable use of their time.
The total lack of emotional closure is what completely wrecks you. They don’t hurt or mourn; they just move on to the next task. They have already emotionally disconnected during Stage 2, using the criticism phase to prepare for the final cut.
The crazy thing is, I only saw the full mechanics of this because I had literally created a project plan for my love life. My advice? The second you feel like you are constantly being tested or audited, and the warmth is replaced by a clipboard and a stern nod, get out. Don’t wait for Stage 3. It’s not worth the clean-up afterward.
I finally learned to recognize the excessive enthusiasm in the beginning as a huge red flag. When someone is that instantly perfect, they are probably just trying to check boxes. Protect yourself by refusing to be documented. The moment they start correcting your existence, you tell them to hit the archives instead of letting them finish the whole damn cycle.
