A private dating journal

A slow fade tracker that catches the decline

Ghosting in slow motion is still ghosting. See it while it is happening.

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The slow fade is the gentler, more maddening cousin of ghosting. He does not disappear. He dims. Replies get shorter. Plans get vaguer. The good morning texts stop, then the goodnight ones. Every individual step is small enough to explain away, which is exactly why you end up months deep before you name it.

Why the fade beats your instincts

Your gut compares this week to last week, and week over week the difference is tiny. What your gut cannot do is compare this month to two months ago, because memory smooths the decline into a vague sense that things used to feel different.

A journal does not smooth anything. Entry by entry, the record holds its shape. The enthusiasm of March sits right there next to the one-word replies of May, and the contrast does the work your memory could not.

How Spilled makes the fade visible

Your consistency score is weighted toward recent behavior, so a fading connection produces a falling score even while he technically stays in touch. The trend chart shows the slope. A slow fade looks exactly like what it is: a line drifting down and to the right.

Under the hood, the tags tell the same story. Effort and quality time tags thin out. No response and excuse tags stack up. When the early warmth and the recent decline are sharp enough, the love bomb then disappear flag fires. When the silences pile up, frequent silence fires too.

What to do when you see the slope

A downward trend is information, not a verdict. Some fades are temporary (a brutal month at work looks like a fade for a few weeks). Some are the whole story. The difference shows up in the next stretch of data: temporary dips recover, real fades keep drifting.

Either way, you get to respond to what is actually happening instead of what you hope is happening. That alone changes how these things end.

See the slope before you excuse it.

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Questions, answered

How is a slow fade different from ghosting?

Ghosting is an abrupt total silence. A slow fade is a gradual decline in effort while contact technically continues. Spilled catches both, through the frequent silence flag and the falling trend line.

How much logging does it take to see a fade?

Fades are trends, so they need a few weeks of entries on both sides of the decline. If you started logging mid-fade, the falling score still shows up, just with less history behind it.

Can a slow fade recover?

Yes, and the chart will show it. A genuine recovery looks like effort tags returning and the score climbing back. A fake recovery (one good week to keep you around) shows up as a blip that resumes the slide.

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