People Rewrite the Story of a Relationship's Ending So It Makes Sense. The Pattern That Actually Ended It Rarely Needed a Story At All.
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
After a relationship ends, people tend to construct a coherent narrative for why — a turning point, a specific betrayal, a moment things changed. These stories are often genuinely felt and genuinely coherent, and they frequently retrofit a clean causal arc onto an ending that was actually produced by something much less narratively satisfying: a pattern that had been running, quietly, for a long time before the story's designated turning point ever occurred.
Stories are good at explaining endings because that's what stories are for — they organize events into cause and effect after the fact, in whatever shape makes the ending feel intelligible. A pattern doesn't need this kind of organization to have been the actual mechanism. It was operating the entire time, producing outcomes, regardless of whether anyone ever wrapped it in a narrative.
This is why the "turning point" a person identifies in hindsight so often turns out, on closer inspection, to be simply the moment the pattern's cumulative effect finally became undeniable — not the moment anything actually changed, but the moment the story needed a scene to point to.
The pattern was doing the actual work long before the story arrived to explain it. The story makes the ending make sense in retrospect. The pattern is what made the ending happen in the first place — and it was never waiting for a narrative to do so.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai