May 8, 2019:

It got worse each time she perceived rejection. That's understandable. It not only hurt, it made me seem unreliable, in exactly the way she'd learned to expect from the adults in her life.

She didn't internalize, I'm certain, that it was her behavior which triggered apparent rejection. Where her arbitrariness around commitments was not only destructive but also downright childish. She'd lunge at something she perceived as more shiny, so that I'd need a time-out to recover, and that became a cycle, a feedback loop, where now she perceived me as unreliable which in turn made distractions more attractive.

In the end, to be fair to her, I was very much not into it. I'd begun shining off dates myself, which truly did make me unreliable. In the final week I was bracing myself to call it quits, so that when she beat me to it I made no objection, but was actually proud of her for saying what she wanted. Or no longer wanted, being literal. I'm sure she was profoundly surprised by that.