h2>Dating : Emotional Unavailability? Yes Please.
At the expense of losing my mind…
I started speaking to this man a couple of months ago, it started off really intense, 2 seconds between each reply and a very strong sense of curiosity and vulnerability on both sides. He would message me first each time, safe to say I was super excited!
Being the very strange girl that I am, I already planned our wedding, wondered what our kids would look like, and even made us dinner every night in my head before going to sleep.
And yes! I know what you must be thinking…. This isn’t normal behaviour, you sound like a Psycho! But like most women with these obsessive qualities, I took great care in making sure not to divulge any of my feelings towards him, acting as “normal” as I possibly could, trying to be somewhat distant, even though I was incredibly attracted to his intellect, and of course his looks.
“Breathe, just breathe! You don’t want to appear as if you’d show up on his doorsteps in the middle of the night or plant a camera in his bathroom”
Be a psycho, but a closeted one.
The back and forth continued for about a month. Until the replies stopped. It started with a few hours between the replies, to a day, to 48 hours and sometimes a week. He would come up with many excuses, he’s busy with his coursework, his ex-fiancé had sent him a cruel message about how she’s moved on, he thinks I’m still stuck on my ex, he mistakenly shaved off his eyebrows.
All of these excuses, I convinced myself were reasonable. Over the weeks, I found myself waiting for his text messages, getting so excited whenever I hear a notification, only to be disappointed that it wasn’t him, feeling scared that this connection I wasn’t going to find anywhere else, was slipping away.
I mean who else can I discuss the consistency of bread, or the colour of aliens with?
I started to notice a change in my behaviour, this strong urge to communicate with him that wasn’t there before, the obsession was growing, the obsession was growing with his distance.
Now you might be wondering, how so? Since we’re talking less and less, and relationships are like plants, the less you water them, the more likely they’d eventually die, so surely I should get put off by his inconsistency and aloofness…
no, no, no, no…
Instead, I found myself getting even more attracted to this man, with every message he ignored and every time he told me he had just been “busy”. Attention from others became as useless as the “P” in “Psychopath”. I kept reading between the lines of his very ambiguous messages and trying to infer what he thinks about me, going over our last conversations to figure out if I had said something inappropriate, or if I had farted unknowingly during one of our calls.
He would text back days later like everything was fine. It’s important to note that I never double-texted him, I’d always wait for him to reply no matter how long it took, but I was truly losing my mind, and trying to numb my pain with chocolate cake.
Until one day, in the thick of my brewing anger and insecurities, I sat myself down and re-evaluated the situation. These were some of the fears that came up;
I was no longer worthy of his attention – When someone is intense at first and suddenly pull away, perhaps they found out something embarrassing about me or I became so boring, that I wasn’t worthy of their time anymore. Perhaps they got tired of talking about bread and aliens? What if they found that weird photo of me on Facebook from 10 years ago?
The Lack of conversation around exclusivity – Millenials would call this a “situationship”, where there has been a talk surrounding dating but no solid conversation concerning exclusivity. So when he’s not speaking to me, he must be speaking to someone else since we’re still in the “talking stage”.
My childhood traumas whacking me right in the face – Psychology says the traits you look for in your partners, is linked to your parental upbringing. If one of them was emotionally unavailable in some way, you might be attracted to that kind of behaviour. In my case, my dad had moved to a different country when I was about 2. Thanks a lot dad.
As likely as those reasons were, what resonated the most was the fact that I was clinging on to the very little attention he showed me, and the weird “high” I got from when he finally replied.
When I’m in constant communication with someone, somehow they become “normal” and I seek the next thrill, the next adrenaline rush and crave “being kept on my toes”. I begin to treat them as some sort of a goal, something I must win over in other to convince myself I am good enough. And so I stay put, bound to the outcome because if I’m not able to regain his attention, I have lost and something must be wrong with me.
As humans, we’re conditioned to chase after things that are unavailable to us, be it money or people. And as toxic as emotional unavailability can be to our mental health, it can become addictive and thrilling.
Once I diagnosed all the reasons why I was attracted to someone who doesn’t respect my feelings, and wasn’t capable of reciprocating them, I decided to cut all contact, and so when he finally replied my messages later that evening, I never replied, and it was as satisfying as a bowl of hot soup on a cold winter night.
