My name is Patricia Monroe. I am 34 years old. I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, moved to Chicago at 24 for a corporate job, and spent eight years in human resources before I started writing full time.

I want to tell you about Daniel.

Daniel was an architect. He lived in Wicker Park, in an apartment with too many plants and a view of the lake. We met at a wedding in Lincoln Park in November 2010. He was the friend of the groom who made everybody laugh. He asked me to dance to a song I did not like, and I danced anyway, and that is basically how the whole two years went.

For the first three months, everything was good. He called. He planned things. He introduced me to his cousin. He said things like "when you meet my mother."

Then somewhere around month four, it shifted.

Not dramatically. That is the thing about situationships. They do not announce themselves. They arrive slowly, like a slow leak.

He stopped planning. He started saying "let us see how it goes." He stopped introducing me to anyone. He still called, but at odd hours. He still texted, but in bursts, and always when it suited him.

The Thursday

I remember one night clearly. It was a Thursday.

We were in his apartment, and I asked, casually, the way you ask a question you have been rehearsing for three weeks:

I said I did. Because in that moment, saying anything else felt like it would break something I could not afford to break.

That was the rhythm of it. Every time I needed clarity, I got a question back instead of an answer. Every time I asked for more, I was made to feel like I was asking for too much.

And because I am a reasonable, educated woman with a good job and a working brain, I started to believe him.

What it cost me

Everything I tried

Six things. None of them worked. I want you to see yourself in at least one.

The turning point

Her name is Renee. She is a nurse, and she is the kind of friend who tells you the truth before she tells you anything kind.

She came to my apartment one Saturday, took one look at me, and said:

I did not understand her. She said, "Go and see someone. Not a pastor. Not me. A professional."

I resisted for three weeks. Then I went.

Dr. Ellen Marsh, a therapist in the Loop, $150 a session, which felt like a lot of money for someone to sit and nod at me.

She did not nod.

In the first twenty minutes she said a sentence that rearranged my whole understanding of my own life.

I started crying in a way I had not cried in two years. Not the dignified single tear kind. The ugly kind. The kind where you cannot breathe.

Then she said:

The build

I went home and I read.

I read Pauline Boss on ambiguous loss. I read the research on intermittent reinforcement. I read a study by two researchers named Crystal Jiang and Jeffrey Hancock, who found that long distance relationships often report more intimacy and more idealisation, not less.

They explained why. Distance gives you room to fill in the blanks.

That is what I had been doing for two years. Filling in the blanks with a man I had invented.

So I stopped reading and I started building.

A sequence. One week. Seven steps. Not because seven is magic, but because seven is short enough that a tired woman will actually finish it.

A diagnostic first, because I needed to know whether I was in a situationship or just dating someone slowly.

A decision framework next, because the stay or leave question is the one that traps people the longest.

Scripts after that, because the hardest part was always not knowing what to say.

An exit plan after that, because leaving without a plan is just a dramatic exit that becomes a comeback.

Then the part that took the longest. The 30 days after.

Because the exit is not the hard part. The exit is the easy part.

The hard part is Day 4, when the apartment is quiet and the quiet is so loud that a situationship starts to look better than an empty room.

The proof it worked

I gave the sequence to Renee first. Then to two colleagues. Then to a stranger who messaged me on Instagram after reading something I posted.

Three months later she sent me a voice note. She said:

"I am not in it anymore. I do not even miss it. I miss who I was before I met him, and I am her again."

That is when I knew I had to put this out into the world. Not as a book. As a plan. Something a tired woman can actually finish in a week.