“A slow-cooled relationship that ended by attrition, not conflict.”

The give-and-take is meaningfully skewed toward you. In months 1–3 the exchange was near-symmetrical — both sides opened threads, asked follow-up questions, and matched effort. From month 4 onward, your bids started returning smaller replies or none at all, while your own investment held steady or grew.

The pattern isn't hostile — it's asymmetric maintenance: you keep the thread alive; they respond just enough to prevent an explicit rupture. That's the classic signature of a relationship cooling toward dormancy rather than ending in conflict.

You send roughly 2.1× the words they do across the full corpus, and the gap widens month over month. Their share of the wordcount drops from ~47% in month 1 to ~19% by month 8.

Volume asymmetry alone isn't a red flag — some people are just shorter texters. What matters here is that the drop tracks the drop in initiations and questions, which suggests reduced engagement rather than a style difference.

In February and March you and they opened new threads at almost identical rates (52% / 48%). By June, 71% of the first-message-after-6h-silence exchanges were coming from you. In July and August your share climbed to 84%; there are entire weeks in that window where every single new thread starts with a message from you.

The messages you're using to reopen the channel have also gotten softer and more self-deprecating over time — "hey stranger — you alive over there?", "no pressure but…", the sighed emojis. That drift in your own opener style is itself evidence you're feeling the imbalance and trying to hide it.

Your median reply is ~12 minutes; theirs is ~3h20m, with a long tail of 24h+ silences on emotionally charged threads. Response time is bimodal on their side: quick and warm on logistics, delayed and terse on anything relational.

That pattern — fast on low-stakes, slow on high-stakes — is a mild avoidant signature. It's not necessarily deliberate, but it consistently starves the vulnerable threads of momentum.

After month 4, their callbacks to things you'd told them nearly stopped. The family situation you shared in early April, the interview process you walked them through across three messages in mid-April, the sick friend you mentioned in May — none of these ever resurfaced from their side, not as a question, not as a check-in, not even as a passing reference.

Meanwhile you kept threading their details back into your own messages: their sister's move, the deadline they'd been dreading, the restaurant they said they wanted to try. That asymmetry — you holding both sides of the shared context — is what pulls this score below the benchmark. It's not that they're absent in the moment; it's that between messages, the relationship stops occupying space on their end.