Dinner ran three hours. She laughed at everything. You walked her to her car thinking this one's locked in.
Then: nothing. Two texts. No reply. What happened?
You did what most men do on a great date. You filled every silence, answered every question, and left her with nothing to wonder about. No mystery. Nothing to sit with when she got home.
Rule 3 of the "22 Rules" changes the ending: tell her a little, hold back the rest, and let her imagination do the chasing. The ghosting stops too.
Three seconds. That's how long it took. Your shoes. Your posture. The way you held your drink. Whether you looked at the floor or looked at her.
She already filed you away. Interesting. Boring. Safe. Bold. Before you even opened your mouth.
Everything you say after that is just her confirming what she already decided.
So stop rehearsing lines. Fix the first three seconds. Stand tall. Look up. Smile like you mean it. Walk like you belong wherever you're standing.
The words come later. The impression comes first.
She calls you when her car breaks down. When she needs help moving. When some guy she's actually dating treats her badly.
You're the listener. The reliable one. The guy who would treat her so much better, if she'd just open her eyes.
She won't. You trained her to see you as the low-effort option — the friend who requires zero risk and zero investment. Every favor dug the hole deeper.
The "22 Rules" break the pattern. You'll stop auditioning for a role she already cast and become the man she chases instead. It starts with Rule 1.
Yes I strongly concur with the symptomatology. Abandonment by the father is a common initiator of the abuse/neglect cycle. However, that's clearly the abusive personality disorder. Which is why I say that BPD is a shabby substitute for thorough diagnosis. IMO, what we call BPD is actually Common Three plus any number of other disorders at various degrees of severity.Bible_Belt said:The best predictor of BPD is daddy running away or dying at a young age. But for fear of feminists, a mainstream article is not allowed to say that.
The very first criteria the article lists, 1) Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, is completely wrong as well. BPDs do the opposite; they create situations where abandonment is certain to occur. They can't live without abandonment.
That is definately true. I've encountered 5-10 girls who I'm 100% sure are BPDs and they all had one thing in common: abandoned by their father who either left them or died - or had an abusive father who harassed them sexually or physically.The best predictor of BPD is daddy running away or dying at a young age. But for fear of feminists, a mainstream article is not allowed to say that.