Yesterday he was warm. Today he's distant. Nothing happened, and that's exactly what makes it so disorienting.
What you're experiencing has a name: the fearful avoidant mood flip. And it's not about you.
For someone with fearful avoidant attachment, closeness and threat are wired together from early experience. When connection became real enough to matter, when vulnerability was genuinely felt, the nervous system didn't register safety. It registered exposure. And when exposure exceeds a threshold the nervous system can tolerate, distance becomes the automatic response. Not a decision. A reflex.
This is why the warmth that preceded the withdrawal is actually evidence that the connection was real. If they didn't care, the alarm wouldn't have fired. The mood flip tends to be most pronounced precisely when things feel most genuine, which is the opposite of how it reads from the outside.
The warmer the connection gets, the louder the alarm. Not because something went wrong. Because something went right, and right feels threatening when you've spent years learning that closeness eventually costs something.
He didn't change his mind about you. His nervous system changed the subject from connection to survival.
The return, when it comes, happens because the distance did its job. The nervous system regulated. The exposure dropped below the threshold. And the warmth comes back, because it was never gone; it was temporarily unmanageable.
Understanding this doesn't make the withdrawal easier to sit with. But it changes the question you're asking. Not "what did I do wrong," but "what did the closeness activate in him?" Those are different investigations, and only one leads somewhere useful.
If this pattern is something you're living inside right now, the Relationship guide goes deeper into what's actually happening and what tends to shift it.