Tainted Love: Breadcrumbing actually worked until things got stale

I came across the term ‘breadcrumbing’ a month after my ex told me he was leaving me. It was just coming into the modern relationship lexicon at the time – hot on the heels of ‘love bombing’, ‘gaslighting’ and ‘ghosting’.

Breadcrumbing works on the principle of intermittent reinforcement, which involves giving rewards at irregular and random intervals to yield the greatest effort from the subject. In a relationship, this translates into morsels of attention every now and then to keep you invested.

The notion of it makes me laugh now because my ex was actually obsessed with bread. One of the rules he was adamant about was that it should never be eaten beyond two days of purchase.

During the final year of our relationship, weeks could go by where I felt little or no connection with my ex. He would say he was “going out for an hour”; I would text asking about dinner two or three hours later and he would tell me to go ahead without him.

When he was at home, I sensed he was detached. I told myself he must be worn out from all the 12-hour shifts he was doing. The daily morning peck on the mouth turned into him giving me his cheek to kiss. I tried so many times to check in and discuss how we were getting on only to be stonewalled.

Then, out of the blue, he would seem ‘switched on’ to me and the relationship. We would have dinner and a few drinks and the conversation flowed. He would make jokes that led me to think he did want to be with me long-term. One was that the number of toilet rolls a person bought was a sign of their commitment. “Did you notice I bought 24 the other day?” he’d say.

He also said we should get married in a place that meant something to both of us (which was the bottle bank at Crumlin Shopping Centre!).

During these short bursts of him being present, he often got animated talking about improvements we could make to the house. He would go into great detail sharing his ideas about possible storage solutions, insulation and a kitchen extension.

I would be on a high after such evenings, and would tell myself that we were going to be OK and all relationships go through mundane patches. I thought about my late dad saying to me, “At the end of the day it’s about putting the bins out.”

Not having lived with anyone before, I thought the situation was relatively normal even though I felt unfulfilled, and often anxious. A month before he dropped the bombshell that it was over, he had gutted and redone the bathroom downstairs. I found out later that he had also showed pictures of it to the woman he was seeing behind my back at the time.

I can see now that what I perceived as him making an effort and wanting things to work was me being led down the garden path to an awful reality. I was just like Hansel and Gretel following a trail of breadcrumbs.

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