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{Author’s Note: I have spent more than 20 years studying how relationships come apart. I still needed somebody else’s vocabulary to see what I was doing every night at 11 p.m.}
It was almost midnight, and I was watching a story posted by someone I had not spoken to in seven months.
Not reading a message. Not writing one. Just watching—a 15-second clip of a kitchen I used to know, a hand I recognized reaching for a kettle. Then I closed the app, put the phone face down, and told myself I was going to sleep.
I had been doing this most nights since spring. Long enough that it had stopped feeling like a decision and started feeling like weather.
Here is the part that stings. I have spent more than two decades researching how relationships form and why they fail. I read the literature. I know the vocabulary. And I still needed to stumble across a word before I could see the shape of what I had been doing.
The word is orbiting. It describes someone who has stopped talking to us but keeps watching and interacting with our social media, staying close enough to be noticed without ever making contact. Visible, but never arriving.
I had always assumed orbiting was something done to me. It had not occurred to me that I was the satellite.
Orbiting is seductive because it appears to cost us nothing.
There is no message to compose, no vulnerability to survive, no risk of being left on read. There is no moment where we have to admit out loud that we still care. We simply watch, and the watching feels passive, almost accidental—a thumb moving across a screen the way a thumb does.
The arithmetic is not honest, though. Something is being spent. It is just spent slowly enough that we never notice the withdrawal.
I know what I was buying with it. As long as I could still see them, nothing had finished. The story was ongoing, and I was, in some technical sense, still in it.
There is a Buddhist idea I have circled for years without living it particularly well: that suffering comes from clinging, and that clinging often disguises itself as devotion.
Orbiting is clinging with excellent manners.
It demands nothing. It disturbs no one. It simply refuses to close a door, and then calls that refusal respect.
What it does in practice is keep a wound aerated. Every story I watched delivered a small, precise dose of the person—enough to keep the nervous system interested, never enough to satisfy it. I was not healing. I was maintaining.
The cost surfaced somewhere else entirely. I was less present with the people who were actually in the room with me, because part of my attention was permanently parked in somebody else’s evening.
I would love to report a clean decision to stop. There was not one.
What there was, eventually, was a night when I watched the story and felt nothing except tired. Not peace. Tiredness. I muted the account the following morning, which felt embarrassingly small for something I had carried for the better part of a year.
The first two weeks were harder than I expected. The watching had been doing a job, it turns out, and once I took it away I had to sit with the thing it had been covering.
Then it went quiet. Then it got better.
A small practice, if any of this lands.
I am wary of turning a personal mess into a method, so this is not a program. It is one question.
Before we open the app tonight, we can ask what we are hoping to see. Not in a self-flagellating way. Just honestly.
Sometimes the answer is ordinary curiosity, and that is fine. Sometimes the answer is that we are checking whether we still matter to somebody who decided we did not. That second answer is worth knowing, because it is the one that keeps us in orbit.
If we find that we are circling, we can try the smallest available move. Not a dramatic unfollow, not a speech, not a final message at 2 a.m. Mute. One tap. Nobody is notified, nothing is announced, and the loop breaks anyway.
Letting go rarely arrives as a moment of clarity. Mostly it arrives as the slow, unglamorous work of closing one small access point at a time, and then finding out who we are without it.
We are allowed to stop watching. We were never really in the room.
~
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