I waited over a year for my avoidant ex to maybe remember what we had. I finally reached out, and she blocked me immediately.

I’m 35M and my ex, B, is 30F. English is not my first language, so I used ChatGPT to help me write this clearly. I am from a Spanish-speaking country. I also changed names for privacy. I’ll call my ex B and the guy I later became obsessed with comparing myself to Pete. Also chongos = hookups with random guys.

I think I need to write the whole story from the beginning because I feel humiliated, confused, sad, angry, and honestly kind of traumatized by the whole thing. I know this is long, but I need to get it out.

About a year and a half ago, I met B at work. I had been emotionally shut down for around 10 years before that. My life was basically work, home, videogames, repeat. I barely dated. I barely talked to women. I had an old ex years before, but after that I more or less closed that whole part of myself.

Then B arrived.

At the time, she had a boyfriend of 6 years. That is important, because a lot of why I later got confused is that from the outside that relationship sounds “serious,” but from everything B herself told me, it sounded emotionally dead and weirdly shallow. She told me they could go months without intimacy. She told me he would go away on vacation with his father for a month or more and leave her behind, and she would feel awful and anxious. One time, according to her, she cut all her hair very short after one of those times because he left and she was so distressed. He did not really like spending time with her family. He didn’t want to go to dinners with them. He wasn’t really involved in her home/family world. She also said he didn’t give her much emotional attention. Meanwhile, she always needed someone to talk to constantly, and she later managed to talk to me basically 24/7 without him even noticing, including while they were together watching movies. That says a lot about how “deep” that 6-year relationship really was.

And there is another important thing: B had the classic pattern of keeping exes and male orbiters around. Not just one. More than one. Even now she still sees that 6-year ex sometimes and goes out to eat with him. While she was with me, she was still seeing him too.

At first, I had no intention of anything because she had a boyfriend. I was just talking to her because she was new at work, and I like asking people about their lives. I asked normal but personal questions: how she lived, who cooked, who cleaned, how her relationship worked, whether her boyfriend was jealous, what kind of life they had, stuff like that. I genuinely was not trying to steal her from anyone.

Then one day after a work meeting, I sent her a simple message apologizing for not talking much because I had been exhausted and hadn’t slept. That tiny message hit her hard. Later she told me it really affected her. After that, she started messaging me more. Soon she was asking me to stay up and keep her company during late-night work shifts, and that became our thing. We started talking for hours and hours, every day, all the time.

And very quickly it turned into something emotional, sexual, and very intense.

This is the part that still messes me up: she was still with her boyfriend, but she started sexting me. She sent me provocative photos, sexual messages, and emotionally intimate messages while her boyfriend was literally still in the picture, sometimes physically nearby. She told me personal things, fears, family stuff, future stuff. She asked me constantly if I loved her, if I would leave her, how much I loved her. She got attached to me incredibly fast.

So yes: she was emotionally and sexually unfaithful to her boyfriend with me before she officially left him. I’m not proud of that either. But it matters because later she painted herself publicly as someone I hurt, while the truth is that our whole relationship started with her already crossing boundaries.

She eventually left her boyfriend and came toward me.
From my point of view, she never really processed the end of her previous 6-year relationship before getting involved with me. We were already talking 24/7 for almost a month while she was still with him, and the moment she became officially stable at work, she left him.
She literally told me she was waiting to become officially permanent at work before leaving her 6-year boyfriend. While she was still on probation, he was helping support her financially, and once her job became stable, she left him almost immediately She emotionally transferred from him to me right away.

At first she was very attached, warm, sexual, soft, needy in a vulnerable way. But even early on, there were contradictions.The first month, things were mostly okay, but she already started making excuses around intimacy and exposure. Sometimes she would say she was scared the ex would see something. Sometimes she would say she did not know if I would “act like a boyfriend” in public. Sometimes she would want me intensely in private and then pull away in public. It was like she wanted the emotional safety and the romantic intensity, but not the real-world consequences of being with me.

Then it got even stranger.

She would try to leave me, saying she didn’t see a future with me. Then she would come right back. The only way she finally “stabilized” for a while was when I accepted something insane: basically being boyfriend and girlfriend without the label. Once I accepted that fake middle ground, she calmed down and started acting like a girlfriend again. So in reality we were a couple, but only in the parts that worked for her.

And to me it was real.

She came to my house around three times a week. We talked literally all the time. I listened to her fears at 3 a.m. I also had several more years of experience than she did at work, and I helped her a lot with how to present herself professionally. I often told her what to write in emails and reports because I knew the kind of things that would get management’s attention. Within just a few months at the company, the manager was already praising her and even invited her to an exclusive event for only four people: me, my team lead, another very capable coworker, and her. She was standing out over coworkers with much more seniority, and a big part of that was because I was quietly helping her behind the scenes. What was hard for me later was that she seemed to experience those achievements as entirely her own, without really recognizing how much support I had been giving her.

I bought food, Ubers, small gifts, movie dates, whatever she wanted. I sold savings and even crypto to help her. I helped with things related to her family. I helped her financially. I helped her emotionally. I cleaned my house every time she came. I changed sheets, prepared things, bought her favorite drinks, candy, everything.

And she gave almost nothing back in gestures.

Not because I expected 50/50 financially. I’m talking emotionally and symbolically. She rarely gave me even the smallest sign of “I thought of you.” She could go to a huge sweets event, I could beg her 30 times to bring me one specific candy and even offer to pay for it, and she would somehow “forget.” She got influencer products and never shared them with me. She could get 150k( 150 USD) worth of chocolate products and not give me even one. She could happily hint on TikTok that some random guy gave her something and “he deserves a 10,” but I spent a fortune on her and she basically acted like the things appeared out of nowhere. She never publicly named me or acknowledged my gifts.

She also hid me constantly. She would move plates in photos so it looked like she was alone when we went out to eat. She posted in singular while I was there with her. She acted single in content. In public, if I tried to hug her, she could go literally stiff. Like frozen. At home she could sleep with me, have sex with me, spend all day with me. In the street she could act like she barely knew me. She only let me go to her house once the whole relationship.

That one visit still haunts me. She begged me not to make it sexual because being in that bed made her think of the ex and feel weird. I promised I would not do anything. The second I got there, she basically jumped on me and took me to her bed anyway. Then right after sex she became cold, distant, and visibly irritated by my presence. I thought maybe I had done something wrong sexually, but later at my house we had sex a lot and it was fine, so I no longer think that was the reason. I think she just could not tolerate me inside her territory. My house became “the place where she received care.” Her house was where reality hit too hard.

That became the pattern of the whole relationship.

At my house she wanted food, movies, comfort, sex, sleep, support, routine, safety. In public she could barely tolerate being seen as my girlfriend. She did not want me to touch her in the street, but in private she wanted everything. The disconnect was insane.

There was another huge thing: cats. She insisted for around two months that we should adopt kittens together. She named them. She called them our children. She showed photos of them to her mother and talked like they were our family. In reality, the cats stayed with me, but in her mind and language they were “ours.” So when people ask me why I got so attached, it is because she was not casually dating me. She was talking like we were building a life.

Then the real deactivation started.

Sexually she changed completely. In the beginning she was intensely sexual, very responsive, always engaged. Later she became dry, reluctant, frozen. Sometimes she would let me do things to her but act weird and detached. One time she even said “what are you doing?” in a surprised way when I tried to initiate after she had been clearly inviting it. Another time, after weeks without sex, she finally agreed but said, “Okay, but I’m not doing anything.” It was awful. There were also moments where she would seem physically into it and then instantly shut down. I now think that was psychological and attachment-related, not just sexual preference.

Emotionally, she became colder and colder. She would say she did not see me in her future, and she gave me different reasons at different times: that there was no chemistry, that I deserved something better, that we were not compatible, or that she needed to focus on herself. There were several moments where she basically tried to leave me, but they never felt like clean final breakups. They felt more like emotional tests or withdrawal episodes. I would panic, promise changes, try harder, and then she would come back. The confusing part is that after those episodes, we could have strong reconnections where she would suddenly become soft and attached again, almost like the earlier version of her, asking me if I would leave her or if I would love her forever.. One time I cried in front of her, begging her not to leave, and she just froze and eventually asked to call an uber to go home She show 0 emotions, like a robot trying to scape. The only thing that made her calm down at that stage was me agreeing to continue in this fake relationship-without-label arrangement. Then she could act like a girlfriend again while still keeping one foot out the door.

Eventually she left me. But not cleanly.

After the breakup, we had about two months of being “friends” where she still leaned on me emotionally. We still talked all the time. I still took her out to eat. I still solved her work problems. I was still the person she called. The only difference was: there was no intimacy, and suddenly I was not allowed to ask for anything because I was “just a friend.”

Meanwhile, I kept noticing her doing little things with random people that she never wanted to do with me. Things like taking photos with male coworkers, acting lighter and more playful publicly with them. These were small things, but when you have spent 8 months hidden, they feel enormous. I felt crazy and humiliated.

Then I tried to go no contact. I failed within a week.

When I reached back out, she treated me like garbage. Not just distant — like I was annoying, like I was a burden, like a stranger. Except when she needed help with work. Then she would speak to me nicely for 5 minutes, get what she needed, and go back to coldness.

The day I finally exploded is still burned into me.

She messaged me sounding nervous and said she wanted to talk to me about something but felt awkward. I thought maybe she missed me or wanted to talk emotionally. She took me into Discord, and what she actually wanted was to ask me for 300,000 pesos (about 350 USD at that time). I froze. I said no.

That alone hurt, but what really destroyed me was what came right after. Because I pushed for clarity, she then admitted that in less than two months she was already involved with someone else. What hurt most was not even the new guy. It was how she had started treating me like trash while still using me, still calling me for work help, still expecting emotional availability.

That is when I exploded.

I said horrible things. I called her a whore. I said she used me. I told her I finally understood why so many exes and male “friends” ended up leaving her. I screamed all the things I had swallowed for months: how I gave and gave and gave while she hid me, gave random men things she never gave me, acted like I did not exist publicly, and kept me in a fake half-relationship while I financed, emotionally carried, and practically supported so much of her life.

I was wrong in the way I exploded. I know that. But the pain underneath it was real.

And then, after all that, I still did something insane: 2 months later I sent her a gift and apology later, trying to calm things down and take responsibility for my explosion.

She used that gift as content.

She made public content for an audience of over 600,000 people on tiktok saying I had hurt her physically and mentally, reducing the relationship to “one month,” saying I was the worst person she had ever met, and erasing everything else. That was the moment I realized she was willing to publicly rewrite reality to protect her self-image.

Another detail that matters: when she decided to leave me, she had a talk with her mother and used that as validation for the decision. That was a pattern with her. She constantly needed an external “okay” before making hard decisions. She told me about a childhood where her feelings were minimized, where pain was dismissed, where she learned to suppress, self-manage, and not trust her own inner experience. Her father was also chaotic and problematic, and she often had to be self-contained very young. So yes, there are trauma patterns here. She is not just some simple villain. But the damage is still damage.

After that public rewrite and the final blow-up, she blocked me almost everywhere: phone, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Discord, LinkedIn, Steam, Epic Games. The only place she had not blocked me was Telegram, which she barely used.

And then I spent over a year stalking her social media.

I know how bad that sounds. I know it is unhealthy. I am not asking for sympathy on that part. I just need to be honest. I watched because I could not understand how someone who once seemed so attached, so dependent, so “safe” with me could turn me into a monster and act like none of it mattered.

Because she is an influencer type, I could watch her patterns in real time.

And what I saw was exactly what made me keep hoping: rebound after rebound, guy after guy, song after song, content arc after content arc. She would post specific songs clearly directed at men. She would have a guy, then suddenly songs about lies, betrayal, men being all the same, “I gave too much,” “he blocked me,” “he took my heart,” “I’m done with men,” then a new guy would appear. Then another. Then another.

She did this with random gym guys, guys from work, old friends, the “simp” who spent a lot of money on her and got cut off, and especially Pete (changed name), who seemed to be the one that hit her hardest in the post-me period. Pete seemed to trigger a whole different level of obsession/fantasy in her. She posted songs about lies and missing someone, made a YouTube video about someone who gave her more anxiety than her breakup with the 6-year ex, talked about shared songs, being blocked, all of it. After Pete there were still more men. Literally one after another. Easily 10 or more “situations” in a year. Sometimes she did not even wait two weeks before posting romantic/couple-style TikTok trends with different men. It was crazy...

And that is where I made what might have been my biggest emotional mistake: I started reading everything through the lens of fearful avoidant attachment.

It fit way too well.

She had the deactivation.
The rewriting of history.
The initial relief after the breakup.
The compulsive rebounds.
The inability to be alone.
The sudden coldness to my voice, memes, presence.
The idealization of new people and then quick collapse.
The public performance of being fine while privately seeming chaotic.
The way she could not process loss directly and instead went chongo-to-chongo.

I read Reddit threads. I watched videos. I even asked different AIs for help understanding. For over a year, almost everything seemed to match the textbook avoidant/fearful pattern. The only difference was that most stories involve one rebound. B had a whole production line of them.

Recently, her mother got seriously ill. This matters because her mother and younger sister are basically her emotional core. Around that same time, B’s TikToks changed. She posted that she missed “a particular person” while her mother was having health problems, someone who would be there holding her in moments like this. She posted a song saying “that crazy guy took my heart.” She made content about not wanting to let go. She looked lower-energy. Less dancing, less forced excitement, more sadness under the surface. Her little distraction projects were ending. She was spending more time with her sister. She followed weird “I’m lost in my 20s,” self-improvement, and aspirational accounts. To me, it looked exactly like what the attachment content said would happen: eventually the avoidant stops being able to bury the real memory.

And I thought maybe, finally, she remembered me.

Not because I am delusional enough to think I am the only man in the world. But because in her worst moments with her mother’s health, I believed she might remember the person who:

• took her to the hospital,
• stayed on the phone at 3 a.m.,
• solved everything,
• was always there,
• cared about her family,
• called our adopted cats our children,
• and gave her a life that was much calmer, more cared for, and more structured than the chongo carousel she had after me.

So after over a year, I finally sent one message on Telegram. Calm, respectful, not begging, not threatening. I asked how her mother was and how she was. I also said that for me, what we had lived was real.

She blocked me immediately after reading it.

Then she posted content implying she had shown someone my message/block situation and got approval for the block (“blocked obviously” / “perfect”). People in her audience then started criticizing her for seeming controlled by a man, so she quickly made another Story saying it was “just a joke,” that it was “just a friend,” and then immediately pivoted into influencer mode again, talking about how she had a great day and asking if people wanted her to give away a burger.

That broke something in me.

Because whatever the truth is — whether that person was a friend, a chongo, or another orbiting guy — what mattered is that she turned my message into performance and external validation.

So this is where I am now:

I spent 8 months in what, to me, was a real relationship.
She was unfaithful to her boyfriend with me to start it.
She used me emotionally, practically, and financially.
She hid me publicly.
She called our cats our kids.
She acted like a girlfriend only when I accepted no label and no rights.
She discarded me, rewrote everything, publicly painted me as abusive, then spent over a year cycling through men while I watched.
I convinced myself her patterns meant one day she would remember.
When I finally reached out once, kindly, she blocked me and used the whole thing as part of her content performance.

What I need help understanding is this:

Was I just feeding myself false hope by applying attachment theory to someone who is simply selfish and validation-addicted?

Can a fearful avoidant really look this textbook and still not care at all?

Or is this exactly what an immature avoidant person does when faced with a real message from someone they hurt — block, externalize, perform, and keep running?

And how do I stop obsessing now that I finally hit the wall?