I've been doing this for most of my life. Jobs, friendships, projects, whole cities. The second I sense someone might be cooling on me, I'm already halfway out the door. I don't wait to find out if I'm right. I go first.
So why do people leave relationships before the other person can leave them? Because if you're sure the rejection is coming, leaving first feels like control. It hurts less to be the one who walks than the one who gets walked away from. Or that's what the scared part of the brain believes. Psychologists link it to fear of abandonment, which often grows out of insecure attachment or early hurt, and in some people sits alongside traits of borderline personality disorder. Psych Central's overview of abandonment anxiety lists pulling away emotionally as one of the classic signs.
That's the textbook. Here's how it plays in my head.
What leaving first looks like from the inside
It doesn't feel like fear. That's the trick of it. It feels like being fine. Like being the guy who just isn't that into it anymore.
Someone gets close and I like it, I really do. Then something small happens. A message takes a day to come back. A tone in a meeting. A plan gets moved. My brain files it as evidence and starts building a case, quietly, the way a lawyer would if the lawyer was also the defendant and the judge.
By the time the case is "solid," I've already pulled back. I go quiet. Or I pick a fight that hands me a reason. Then I leave. First there's relief, a big exhale. A few days later I feel like garbage.
For most of my life I didn't see it as a pattern at all. It took therapy, in the past few years, to make me look at it. The same thing kept happening in Vancouver, in Indonesia and back in Québec. I was the common factor.
Where fear of abandonment comes from (my best guess)
I want to be straight about labels. I live with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and ADHD, and at 50, in the middle of a breakdown during the COVID years, I was also diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Fear of abandonment is one of the big BPD traits, and it's the big one for me. I wrote more about that tangle in BPD, autism or trauma?
CAMH's page on BPD has a line that stopped me cold. It describes behaviour that "may lead to the very abandonment and alienation that the person fears." (CAMH) That's the loop. You're terrified of being left, so you act in ways that make leaving more likely, or you leave yourself and call it a decision.
Then there's the autism piece, and this one I'm surer about. I spent 50 years not knowing why I was "weird." The tics, the obsessions, the passions nobody else shared. When you're the odd one for that long, you get very good at spotting the exact moment people decide you're too much. I learned to leave just before that moment. It felt like dignity.
You don't need a diagnosis to do any of this, by the way. Plenty of people leave first with no label at all. The deeper story is in where fear of abandonment comes from.
What it costs
Here's why it's so hard to stop. It works. Short term, it works every time. You never get dumped. You never stand there while someone tells you it's over.
The cost shows up later, and it's huge. Nobody gets to know you long enough to stay. I'm in my mid-fifties. I can run a room, and the few people really close to me are a long way off. Lots of people know me. Hardly any of them I see day to day. I wrote about that in close friends, just none close by, and it isn't a fun read.
And it doesn't switch off just because someone did stay. Sandra, my partner, lives with all of this. I still catch myself testing, watching for the day she's had enough. That's mine to work on. It isn't her job to keep proving she won't go.
What I'm trying instead
No ten-step program here. A few things I'm practising, badly some days.
Catching the evidence phase. When I notice I'm collecting reasons, that's the alarm. The case-building is the symptom. If I can say "I'm doing the thing" out loud, even just to myself, the case loses some of its weight.
Saying the scared thing instead of the cold thing. "I felt shut out when you didn't answer" is a hundred times harder to say than nothing. Nothing is how I lost most of what I've lost.
Therapy, and specifically skills. I've done therapy, and I'd do more. Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) has the strongest evidence for BPD traits, and CAMH lists it alongside options like mentalization-based therapy. The DBT skills around tolerating distress and handling relationships are useful for anyone whose emotions run the exits. There's a plain-language breakdown in CBT, DBT, ACT in plain words. In Québec, the Québec.ca mental health page explains how to get into public services, starting with 811.
Staying in the bubble a bit less. Leaving early and hiding at home are cousins. The bubble is the other half of this story.
I'd love to tell you I fixed it. I haven't. What's changed is timing. I notice the pull to bail earlier than I used to. Sometimes a day earlier, sometimes a week. A day is enough room to not do something stupid.
If the fear of being left is sliding into thoughts of not wanting to be here, the numbers for your country are on the Get help now page.