Do any of these situations sounds familiar to you?
- Your partner will say one thing and then do another. Actions don’t match the words.
- Your partner says he/she will “text you in one hour”, then you don’t hear from him/her for the rest of the day.
- Your partner shows strong interest one week and then seems distant the week after.
- Your partner calls you “too serious”, “too dramatic” or “too sensitive.”
- Your partner lies or leaves out important information.
If this sounds familiar to you, then it’s possible you are in a relationship with someone who is emotionally unavailable. Here are the main reasons that individuals will find themselves in these types of relationships.
- You are emotionally unavailable and afraid of getting hurt.
If you consistently find yourself in relationships with people who are emotionally unavailable, the harsh (but highly likely) truth is that you yourself are emotionally unavailable as well, and you’ve simply matched with yet another person who mirrors you in that way.
Maybe you’re still healing from a broken relationship or marriage and you secretly don’t want to get close to anyone. Maybe you’ve been repeatedly cheated on in the past and you have a baseline level of distrust of every person that you date. Maybe you still carry toxic shame about yourself because of a challenging childhood.
Whatever the reasons, if you consistently find yourself meeting and attracting emotionally unavailable partners, then it’s highly likely that you aren’t as emotionally available as you like to tell people you are.
2. You have low self-esteem and don’t think you deserve better.
People with low self-worth often struggle with anxiety, seeing the positive side of situations, and intimate relationships. I mean, if you don’t think very highly of yourself, how could you think highly of the person who thinks that you’re an amazing?
If you constantly worry you’re either too much or that you’re not enough (which are two sides of the same coin), then you will be highly prone to attracting emotionally unavailable partners into your life.
3. You benefit from trying to “save” your partner and/or “fix” him or her as a distraction tactic from working on yourself.
If there are glaring holes in your life (you eat terribly, you barely sleep, you have no real friends, your relationships are non-existent or clearly toxic, etc.) then those holes are much easier to ignore if you have another person to treat like a project.
In this instance, your significant other is merely a distraction to keep you numbed away from facing the pain in your life that you feel afraid to face.
Ultimately, these project-type relationships crumble as the fixer-upper becomes dissatisfied with the illusion of their partner (regardless of whether or not the person being ‘fixed’ changes for the better, worse, or stays much the same).
SO, how do you stop this?
Love yourself first.
If you want self-esteem, build yourself into something that you’re proud of.
Be the kind of person that you would want to ideally date, and you will start (like some kind of otherworldly magic) to meet and attract emotionally available people (even if they never seemed to have existed anywhere in your life before).