The Reality of Being With Emotionally Unavailable Men
We should stop holding onto potential.
Most men aren't bad people. In fact, many of them genuinely have good intentions. They want to treat you right, show up lovingly, and be everything you need. But they can't, not because of you, but because they're emotionally unavailable.
And no matter how loyal you are, how patient you are, or how deeply you love, you cannot love someone into healing when they haven’t chosen that route for themselves. Don't trick yourself into thinking you can heal someone. You can't!! It's not your job, and people have to want that for themselves first.
Sometimes, you have to give people space to grow, evolve, and heal… without you. Otherwise, you're just delaying coming across the love you actually deserve and allowing yourself to remain in a stagnant situation that leaves you feeling unseen, unloved, and emotionally depleted. All while enabling them to think their ways and the chaotic-toxic cycles of life they're stuck in are acceptable.
A man can’t think highly of you if he doesn’t have the capacity to feel highly of himself!
Often times people are silently battling things they'll never speak about. Their minds are so consumed with their pain, trauma, or internal war that they don't have the capacity to love you the way you need to be loved, even if they wanted to.
And again, it doesn't matter how "good" of a woman you are. An unhealed man cannot offer you a love that feels safe, soft, or secure.
Sometimes, they're blinded by a woman’s willingness to stay; it can lead them to convince themselves that addressing the turmoil within isn't needed. It usually takes for someone to lose the person or people who have genuinely been their rock through thick and thin for them to understand the unintentional dead weight they put onto others, and that’s often times the push that encourages them to begin addressing those issues to become a better person overall.
Self-Sabotage = Attaching Yourself to a Fantasy
Don’t fall in love with someone's potential and overlook their current reality. You have to take people for who and where they are right now, not for who you hope they'll become if they get their minds and lives together.
Anyone who is emotionally unavailable simply can't lead you because they aren't even leading themselves at the moment; they’re just surviving. Many men are weighed down by emotional baggage, pain they haven't come to terms with, and possibly self-doubt from the internal battle they're constantly fighting.
Fixing that requires more than just love from another person; it's hard to even receive, fully see, appreciate, or reciprocate love when you're emotionally unavailable. I've been there.
For me, it required deep discomfort, lots of time alone, accountability for my part in certain situations, and a willingness to face myself (the hardest part). Most people aren't ready for that, and until they start working through these things, a healthy relationship will be nonexistent. The emotional rollercoaster aspect of the relationship will always feel chaotic…because it is.
A relationship rooted in avoidance, inconsistency, or emotional numbness won't evolve, no matter how long you attempt to nurture it, how much you communicate with them, or how much you convince them that you need them to meet your needs and desires. People know when they're not emotionally available for you.
We ALL know those feelings when we have them!
Now ladies, I'm clocking us too real quick!
If an unhealed man can't build a solid foundation, a scorned woman can't nourish it even if the foundation was perfectly laid out. We're constantly growing and always recovering from something in our lives, but both partners have to show up whole enough to maintain a fun, refreshing, and healthy relationship.
You deserve a relationship that meets you where you are and inspires you to grow, just like you should be able to do for them. You’re a main part of the problem when you keep sacrificing your happiness trying to force someone to provide you with their emotional presence. Don't keep going out of your way to showcase you're deserving of things from someone who keeps showing you they're unavailable to give it to you.
A man could also simply not be as into you as you're into him, which can cause him to appear emotionally unavailable…because he is! Some men simply treat you how they feel about you; it has nothing to do with trauma or internal warfare, and you should have zero mercy on that because you're deserving of the love you yearn for and more!
A man who truly cares about you won’t selfishly want to keep you under wraps, knowing he can’t give you what you need.
The red flags are consistent and correlate across the board, regardless of which end of the unavailable spectrum he falls on.
10 Signs of an Emotionally Unavailable Man:
1. He avoids deep or vulnerable conversations. He never initiates them, and when you bring it up, he redirects the conversation, quickly brushing it off.
2. He's hot and cold—a couple of days all in, the next few days distant.
3. You feel more confused than secure after talking to or being around him.
4. He deflects, shuts down, or makes you feel like you're overreacting when you express your feelings and needs. You tell him what you need, and he never adjusts.
5. He constantly says he's not ready for a relationship or looking for one several months into seriously dealing—men know by then if they want to be exclusive or not).
6. You do most of the emotional labor: checking in on his feelings, explaining, and fixing. Even after conversations aimed at improving communication, he never follows through on those promises. Empty promise after empty promise.
7. You feel like you're "too much" for asking for consistency or clarity on where y'all stand, and you start to convince yourself maybe things are better his way
8. He literally disappears or shuts down when things get hard or uncomfortable.
9. He shows up physically but not emotionally, and we ALL know when our emotional needs aren't being met because the feeling we're left with sucks. It can even leave us questioning whether we're good enough for all that we feel we deserve.
10. You're always waiting for "the day" he becomes ready. The longer you wait, the more you enable and signal to him you'll accept whatever he gives, even if it's crumbs compared to what you really want for yourself.
What I'm conveying is…
It’s important for us women to learn how to choose ourselves. I don’t have it all figured out. I’m still learning, not just with men, but in life overall! Take small steps, and eventually, you won't feel weird or guilty for it. You'll fall in love with the feeling of prioritizing yourself over and over again.
At the end of the day, as clueless as people act to avoid being accountable for certain actions, they know EXACTLY what they're doing, how they're moving, how they're feeling, and how it leaves you feeling. They literally think about it just as you do!
Even when the intent isn't to hurt you, that's still what becomes a repeating occurrence when you're attached to an emotionally unavailable person.
When you stick around for all of the emotional turmoil, all you're doing is developing more insecurities within yourself and allowing your self-value to depreciate. You’ll literally begin to view yourself in a dimmer light.
Practice loving yourself more than you love anyone else, especially a man! Put yourself on a high pedestal so you can make more room to invite in all of the beautiful things and qualities you deserve to experience within a person <3