Healthy Relationships Don't Drift Apart Randomly. They Decay at a Measurable, Specific Rate.
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
"We just drifted apart" is one of the most common explanations for a relationship's slow decline, and it's usually offered as though drift were formless — a diffuse, directionless loss of closeness with no real structure to it. Closely examined, drift tends to have a rate: a fairly consistent pace at which specific behaviors — check-ins, repair after conflict, shared plans — decline, trackable across the relationship's timeline.
This rate is rarely obvious in the moment because it's slow relative to daily attention, the same way a coastline erodes too slowly to see day to day but shows an unmistakable rate of change over years. What feels sudden in retrospect ("I don't know when we stopped talking like we used to") is usually the cumulative result of a steady, measurable decline that simply never got measured while it was happening.
Treating drift as random forecloses the question of whether it could have been caught earlier. Treating it as a rate reopens that question — a rate can be plotted, noticed, and, in principle, intervened on before it reaches its current point, in a way "we just drifted" never invites anyone to attempt.
Drift was never formless. It only looked that way because nobody was tracking it — which is a very different problem than a problem with no structure to track in the first place.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai