"Suddenly" Is Never Accurate. It's Just the Point Where the Gradient Became Undeniable.
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
"It happened so suddenly" is one of the most common descriptions of a relationship's turning point — the breakup that came out of nowhere, the distance that appeared overnight. It is also, on close examination, almost never an accurate description of the underlying event. What actually happened suddenly was noticing, not the thing being noticed.
Relationship deterioration is almost always gradual — a slow accumulation of small withdrawals, tiny miscalibrations, incremental drift — precisely the kind of change human perception is worst at detecting, because it's built to catch sharp deltas, not slow gradients. The gradient runs invisibly for a long time, and then crosses some threshold of undeniability, and the crossing gets misfiled in memory as the beginning of the change rather than as the moment the change finally became visible.
This misfiling has a real cost: if "suddenly" is treated as accurate, the natural conclusion is that nothing could have been done differently, because there was no warning. If the gradient is treated as what it actually was — slow, continuous, and running for a long time before crossing the noticing-threshold — an entirely different, much earlier intervention point comes into view.
Nothing ends suddenly. Something crosses a threshold suddenly. The distinction matters, because only one of those two things can actually be caught earlier.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai