The air in a failing relationship does not turn cold all at once, it thins out, suffocating you so gradually that you learn to live on the vapor of what used to be love. There is a modern, clinical term circulating through the digital echo chambers for how women, in particular, are choosing to survive this slow death of intimacy. They call it “dating them till you hate them.” It is framed as a tactical hack, a form of emotional quiet-quitting where a woman stays in a dead-end relationship, deliberately watching a partner underdeliver, ignore her boundaries, or weaponize his incompetence until every drop of her affection is systematically replaced by disgust. By the time she finally packs her bags, she experiences zero heartbreak. She did the mourning while still sharing his bed. She manufactured resentment as a form of anesthesia, ensuring that the final break would be entirely painless.
It is a brilliant, terrifying strategy of self-preservation. But it rests on a fundamental psychological illusion. We comfort ourselves with the myth of the clean slate. We delete the photographs, we block the numbers, and we burn the bridges, believing that with enough distance and enough manufactured indifference, an ex can be entirely scrubbed from our software. We treat a breakup like a demolition,clear the site, remove the rubble, and prepare the ground for a brand-new foundation.
But the architecture of the human heart does not work that way. The truth about the people we have loved and left is far more stubborn.Some exes never truly leave. They do not stay in the romantic sense, they stay in the structural sense. They stop being people and instead become variables embedded in our nervous system. You can reach a point of absolute apathy where you never wish to see his face again, yet he remains the silent author of your daily reflexes.
He is the reason you instinctively hyper-explain yourself when you are ten minutes late, reacting to an old interrogation from three years ago. He is the reason your posture stiffens when a new, gentler partner lowers his voice in a disagreement, your body mistaking a calm tone for the quiet before an emotional storm. He is the shadow behind the fortress you have built around your financial independence, your personal space, or your choices.
“Dating them till you hate them” is like watching a house burn down while standing in the center of the living room, waiting for the fire to make the structure cold enough to leave. But even after the flames are gone and you walk away into the fresh air, you carry the ash in your lungs. The next house you build is inherently shaped by the wreckage of the last. You build thicker walls. You install sturdier locks. You design the rooms differently because you are terrified of the old smoke. To pretend we are blank slates after a heartbreak is a vanity. We are composites of everyone who has ever broken us, held us, or watched us walk away. The ex who never leaves isn’t a sign of weakness or a failure to heal; he is simply the price of admission for having been alive and vulnerable in a world that requires risk. We do not get to rewrite the foundation every time we change the tenant. True maturity is not achieving the numbness of an empty plot of land. It is the ability to look at the scars in the concrete, acknowledge the ghost in the corner, and decide that the building is still entirely yours to run.
Yet, this haunting is not merely psychological, it has a distinct, understated physical pathology in the contemporary Nigerian landscape. In a culture deeply rooted in community, high-context communication, and an inherent aversion to absolute silence, we rarely just part ways, wish each other well, and evaporate into the ether. Instead, the internal architecture of lingering resentment manifests outwardly as a quiet, tactical game of logistical chess. We leave behind tiny, deliberate monuments of our presence, turning the process of uncoupling into a prolonged bureaucratic exercise. Every breakup leaves behind a unique collection of artifacts.
These are rarely grand romantic keepsakes or expensive gifts, they are mundane, low-value hostages left behind in enemy territory, waiting to be ransomed for one final, chaotic conversation. If one were to curate a museum of these modern relics, the exhibition would stand as a testament to the sheer absurdity of human attachment and the lengths to which we go to avoid being forgotten.
The opening display of this physical gallery would invariably feature a single, generic phone charger,usually one where the wire must be twisted at a precise forty-five-degree angle to function. It is never the international passport, the workplace identity card, or the original vehicle papers that mysteriously go missing during the final packing session. It is always an item of such negligible financial value that the transport fare required to retrieve it from Lekki to the mainland hubs of Yaba, or across the expansive layout of Abuja, far outweighs the asset itself. When an ex-partner reaches out after four months of radio silence to inquire if that specific, broken wire is still available, they are rarely suffering from a sudden deficit of electricity.
In Naija where power is a constant negotiation, the charger becomes a metaphor.
They are running a diagnostic test on your personal boundaries, using a ten-hundred-naira accessory as a passport back into your domestic orbit.
Further into the collection sits the oversized corporate jersey or the custom hoodie from an old university event. During the active tenure of the relationship, this garment was merely utility lounge wear, left forgotten at the bottom of a wardrobe. Yet, forty-eight hours after the final “we need to talk” conversation, this piece of cotton undergoes a miraculous metaphysical transformation, suddenly registering in the owner’s mind as a priceless family heirloom. To retain it is interpreted by the wider social circle as an act of spiritual warfare; to relegate it to the estate security guard at the gate is a cold declaration of absolute closure. The sudden, urgent demand for its safe return is a masterclass in rewriting history, manufacturing a logistical crisis purely to secure a final, face-to-face glimpse of a familiar life.
The physical doorstep, however, is no longer the sole theater for these post-breakup skirmishes. As our lives have migrated online, the digital leftover has become far more insidious, represented perfectly by the shared streaming account. This manifests as the former partner who remains quietly logged into a Netflix, Spotify, or YouTube Premium subscription long after the emotional connection has dissolved, tracking playlists and viewing histories under a hastily created pseudonym. The true psychological warfare occurs when the primary account holder finally revokes access and changes the security credentials. The immediate, dramatic WhatsApp message that follows,“Wow, so it has reached this stage? God bless you”,reveals the underlying truth of the arrangement. The digital squatter was not seeking entertainment; they were maintaining a pulse check on your life, treating a monthly subscription fee as a proxy for your emotional availability.
Finally, the museum must dedicate space to the artifact of calculated permanence.The half-empty container of a specific hair product or a designer perfume bottle left deliberately on a bedroom dresser. Positioned prominently, it is designed to survive the initial emotional purge when clothes are bagged and keys are returned. It sits as a fragrant reminder of a past presence, waiting quietly for the inevitable day a new individual enters that private space.
It is a monument that forces an uncomfortable explanation,a tiny, scented flag planted in private territory, declaring to the next occupant that someone else held the ground first.
The tragedy of these modern leftovers is that we all recognize the game, yet we collectively continue to play it. We leave these items behind because the alternative,a clean, absolute evaporation from someone’s life is too quiet for the Nigerian psyche to bear. In a society where everything is loud, expressive, and deeply interconnected, fading away into a statistic feels like a second rejection. We leave a charger, a hoodie, or a password because as long as the artifact remains in the room, the narrative hasn’t completely closed. The ex who never leaves is both the ash in our lungs and the broken cable on the table,a stubborn declaration that before the house burned down, we were entirely there.
The post Why some exes never truly leave, by Stephanie Shaakaa appeared first on Vanguard News.
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