There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

Once feeling has drained out of a relationship, the other person’s intensity stops making sense and starts looking like a performance. Nothing about them has changed; what changed is that you no longer supply the context that made their reactions reasonable. That asymmetry is among the cruellest parts of an ending, and it is usually invisible to whoever fell out of it first.

If you are the one who left, their feelings were proportionate a year ago and you found them so. Being embarrassed by them now is evidence of nothing. Being decent about it costs you almost nothing and matters enormously to them.