The Hot and Cold Behaviour Log

The one rule that makes this work

Record observables only. An observable is something with a time on it: a message arrived, a call was made, a plan was proposed, a plan happened, four days passed with nothing. Not observables: distant, off with me, cooling, pulling away, being odd. Those are conclusions, and once a conclusion is in the log the log has become an account of your reading rather than a record of events.

You get exactly one interpretation box, at the end of six weeks, and it is deliberately at the end. Interpreting as you go changes what you notice. A fortnight spent believing someone is pulling away produces a log full of evidence that they are, because the entries were selected. Holding the reading back until the end is the whole method, and it is the part people find hardest.

Fill it in daily and briefly, including on days when nothing happened. A day with nothing on it still gets a line, because the blank runs are what you are measuring. A log with entries only on eventful days cannot show you a gap, and the gap is the thing this sheet exists to count.

Contact and who started it

Two marks a day, and nothing else in this column.

Was there contact, and did it start with you or with them. That is all. It takes four seconds, and it is the most informative column on the sheet, because the thing people misremember most reliably is who has been doing the reaching. Six weeks of initiation marks tends to produce a number that surprises whoever kept the log, in one direction or the other. Where an exchange was genuinely mutual, mark whoever sent the first message of the day and move on.

Days since the last contact

A running number, reset each time they get in touch.

Write the count on every blank day: one, two, three, four. Written like that, a silence stops being an atmosphere and becomes a number, and numbers can be compared with each other. Most people find the gaps are shorter than they felt and more regular than they expected, and it is the regularity that turns out to matter. A run of three, eleven, four, twelve is doing something quite different from three, four, three, four, and neither is visible while you are living inside it.

Plans proposed and plans kept

Three separate marks, because they fail at different points.

Log every plan at three stages: who proposed it, whether it was agreed, and whether it actually happened. The distance between agreed and kept is where the information sits. Someone who never proposes anything but keeps every arrangement is behaving very differently from someone who proposes constantly and cancels on the day, and both get described afterwards as hot and cold. Give cancellations a time as well, since three days notice and forty minutes notice are not the same event.

One sentence in their own words

A direct quote, or nothing at all.

This is the only place tone gets recorded, and it takes quotations only. Write the actual sentence or write nothing. Exact words resist the rewriting that memory does to them, and a fortnight later they often read very differently from your summary: warm sentences you had filed as cold turn up regularly, and so does the reverse. If you cannot remember the wording, leave the line blank. A paraphrase here lets back in the interpretation the whole log is built to keep out.

The review at week six

Measure the cycle, then interpret it once.

Add it up. Average gap, longest gap, the initiation split, plans proposed against plans kept, and whether any of it shifted over the six weeks. Then, and only then, the interpretation box: what do you think is going on. Write it knowing the log cannot confirm it. A stable cycle is consistent with someone whose tolerance for closeness runs out and refills. It is equally consistent with someone who is warm when it suits them, or who has another person, or who simply likes you moderately. The sheet measures the shape and says nothing about the cause.

What the log cannot tell you

A regular hot and cold cycle is the signature of several very different situations. It can be deactivation, where closeness accumulates until the nervous system needs distance, and warmth returns once the pressure has dropped. It can be someone keeping you as an option and being available when it suits them. It can be a person with a genuinely chaotic life. The numbers look much the same in all three cases, and this sheet will not separate them for you.

What it does do is stop the question changing every week. Once the cycle has a measured length, the decision in front of you becomes plain: this is roughly what it will be like, and you can decide whether that is something you want. Nobody else can make that call for you, and it is a much better question than the one most people are stuck on, which is what they meant by that message on Tuesday.