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(Absurd simplification) Oh, so she's [platonically] transgender, got [by that definition] gay married, and it just didn't work out.
She might have been running from (or in this case, devoured by) that thing.
It's very hard to describe what that thing is. People call it "anxiety", but that's just a symptom (or how it manifests) and not the actual problem. I am, related to, and know a higher-than-average number of people like this.
I legitimately think it's related to sociopathy in the sense that predicting and manipulating human outcomes is important, and a skill that we have, but whereas sociopathy typically manifests itself as "I don't care lol, just be as destructive as possible" this is "I actually care a great deal about positive outcomes (and will create them whenever possible) and have an absurdly internal locus of control (and start malfunctioning when this is disrupted for no good reason- these people tend to be political contrarians for that reason too), but the prediction software that returns answers for how other people will react to me is failing to come up with the correct answer".
In technical fields, people call this "burnout". The symptoms are the same and what causes it is... also the same- software people will recognize this as that thing that happens that makes you far more tired than usual if you make no progress on a particular problem for a long time (configuration problems and poor documentation tend to trigger this).
That thing is what happens when that burnout generalizes to human beings when you have that defect that makes you see human beings as indistinguishable from other systems more generally. Everyone else has instincts to deal with this, or doesn't deal with it as hard because the volume is turned down, but we don't.
I don't have a solution for that thing other than "find other people who are also afflicted with [or understand/have a lot of trust in people who exhibit] that thing, then stick close to them". That is likely no longer an option in this case.
I think I know what you're talking about, and I, too, have seen it more often than I'd like.
People get some deep sense of unease or a feeling of 'impending doom' that doesn't seem to be caused by any one factor in their life. They feel tired and 'stuck' and feel like IF ONLY they could figure out what the cause was they could finally break through and be happy.
And so they start to assume its because of their job, or their location, or their significant other. SOMETHING that is omnipresent in their life, just as the feelings are.
Couple it with some existential "What am I doing with my life/where am I going?" angst.
I saw something similar with me Ex. She would pick up a new hobby or distraction or obsession and, like clockwork, abandon it without hesitation at about the six month mark.
Any given thing she took up, unless external factors forced the issue, she'd eventually just stop doing it when it became too stressful or difficult and she would then zero in on a new thing to try.
And of course eventually ditched me, too.
Tend to agree that it manifests in people who have an internal locus of control, but very bad model of other people. They THINK they can enact the changes that need to happen, and they aren't really considering the impact on others when they do it.
I don't think that's quite the same, though: that just seems like normal low-commitment behavior to me (including the "what am I doing with my life?" piece every so often), cycling through hobbies once you've exhausted them. Not that this problem can't look like that, though (and it's a good first pass for normal people).
Most of the people I know (including the one you just described) like this are high-commitment for hobbies, people, etc. and actually try to make things work (scarcity/survive mindset?), so this doesn't fit. When I stop being able to consider working on something, or hanging out with people, it's not caused by that- it's something very different than "too hard, bored now", and to a point what I believe the 'depression' mechanism is supposed to protect us from (the "stop giving it your best, don't even look at that, save your energy for other opportunities"). It is probably functioning normally in this instance, but what's prompting it to occur is not.
[That first pass applied thoughtlessly is usually net-negative for us; from our standpoint, we're being clear and honest about how we work and that first pass signals you just aren't paying attention. I can see going to therapy/counseling being like this, which means it can be of limited effectiveness if you're running through the "troubleshoot a normal human being" checklist.]
We over-consider it, because we're running the "functional/aligned-in-the-AI-sense human being" program in high-level emulation rather than letting the hardware model other people for us (the normal way). It takes a lot more energy to do this.
After that, it's down to personality. Some of us are real assholes about that and make that everyone else's problem by complaining about absurd nonsense; others keep it to ourselves.
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