Joint plot of EEP of destruction and the present-day orbital period. The point types and colour coding follow those in Fig. 3. The right-hand panel shows two separate histograms: one for systems destroyed before the TAMS (green), one for systems destroyed after the TAMS (pink). The overlapping region of the distributions is shown with semi-transparent shading. A clear separation between the two populations emerges at P ≈ 3.5 d.