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TRYING TO LOVE SOMEONE UNAVAILABLE
I’ve written numerous articles on love and relationships for YourTango.com, About.com (which is now DotDash.com), and Huffington Post. Of all of these, none has triggered an influx of more personal responses from readers than the one about walking away from an affair with a married man. Read more than 160,000 times in just over a year (and shared over 600 times on social media), this one seems to have struck a nerve.
This book is for any woman who is romantically involved with an emotionally unavailable man — maybe one who is married to someone else. For clarification, I use emotionally unavailable to refer to those who put up walls between themselves and other people to avoid emotional intimacy. Attempting to have, or being in, a relationship with someone who is emotionally unavailable can result in feeling rejected, unloved, neglected, and undesired. At times, an emotionally unavailable person’s behavior can rise to the level of psychological or emotional abuse. Such relationships are incredibly distressing and often volatile.
While this book is written for women in heterosexual relationships, I know that emotionally unavailable partners can also be an issue for men and in same-sex partnerships. There may be some gender-based differences, but the psychological underpinnings are the same. Therefore, although I address my advice to the female gender throughout this book, the advice is often applicable to anyone in this circumstance.
This book is not intended to shame you. It is intended to help you be self-reflective regarding the parts of yourself you may not like — the parts that are causing your problems. We all have parts like these! This book will help you take an inventory of your own behavior and the source of what is misguiding you. It will also teach you how to change your thinking and your behavior so that you move in a healthy, positive direction.
Thanks to millennials and an online dating culture, some new words have entered the vernacular of dating and relationships. We have names to describe what people experience in the dating world today — I used two in the title of this book. Being “ghosted” is when a person you are dating suddenly disappears. Being “breadcrumbed,” as the name implies, is when the person you are dating essentially throws you “breadcrumbs” to keep you hanging on but has little or no intention of maintaining a real relationship with you. Another term, “cushioned,” refers to someone keeping you as a “plan B.” This person may be a downright cheater, or he may just be keeping multiple potential partners in the loop to avoid regret should one not pan out. And another: getting “stashed” is when your partner keeps you apart from other areas of his life. This person is not ready or willing to admit you exist. You haven’t met his friends or family, and if you’re with him when he runs into any of them, you barely get introduced, and certainly not as his girlfriend. There are new slang terms coming out all the time for these dating experiences. Despite the funny or light connotations of these terms, the experiences are distressing, embarrassing, and painful...nothing to laugh about.
When someone you have been dating suddenly stops communicating and disappears without warning, it can feel hurtful and disrespectful. The more time you have spent with this person, the worse it feels when he suddenly ceases all communication. Sometimes it is done during a long relationship, which can feel traumatic. Unfortunately, the ghosting trend doesn’t seem to be going away. The hookup culture and dating apps, along with the anonymity involved, make it easier for people to behave poorly and get away without consequence. On a more serious level, the lack of empathy for others does not bode well for our society.
Ghosting is easier than rejecting someone face-to-face. The discomfort in such direct communication is so unnerving for some people that they fervently dodge it. Meeting someone online at the get-go may limit the sense of social connectedness, making bad social behavior seem less unconscionable. There might even be a desensitization to such dating behavior as it becomes more and more common.
For someone who has negative dating experiences repeatedly, the sense of rejection can take its toll. It’s confusing and makes you uncertain about how you should respond or what you should do. Our reactions come in large part from our perception of a situation, event, or cue. But how do you respond when you don’t know precisely what has happened? When you have had multiple negative dating experiences, you will start to question yourself, your judgment, and your worthiness. Even if these perceptions are inaccurate, you will still go to that place within yourself.
Men who fail to effectively communicate while dating or in a relationship do so for various reasons, a topic I take up throughout this book. There are men already committed to someone else, and there are men who are not in other relationships but who still put up barriers to intimacy. I hear daily about women who tolerate such men, hoping they will change. The women continue to suffer while relentlessly trying to “crack the code” and break down the wall.
A woman who falls in love with an emotionally unavailable or married man finds herself wasting years of her life holding on, hoping, and praying that he changes (or leaves his wife). When that never happens, she finds herself having squandered the prime years of her life. Dreams of having children are possibly dashed. Dreams of the house with the white picket fence fade away. If the situation blows up, she may find her reputation a shambles as well. The takeaway message I encourage is not one of alarm but one of extreme caution: perhaps more seriously consider dating emotionally (and physically) available men much earlier in your life.
If what you have read so far resonates with you, you may need to develop a deep understanding of why you get yourself into such circumstances in the first place. Why have you made such poor choices? What keeps you going for so long? Why do you think your “love” will cure the man you’re dating? Furthermore, can he make real changes before your life passes you by? You need answers and specific strategies to help you move forward, and I will provide them.
Regarding marriage and infidelity, the word mistress has been around for ages. Historically, men have frequently “kept” women. These women were often maintained in a certain lifestyle, most commonly by wealthier men, so that they could be readily available for sexual pleasure. This was a widespread practice among European royalty and the wealthy. Both mistress and another common term, the other woman, can stir up negative feelings, so I use affair partner whenever possible, because it is the most accurate and respectful term and is gender neutral.
I also use the terms infidelity and unfaithful in this book. Both of them describe cheating behavior and/or sex outside of marriage, and they involve a person betraying his or her spouse and the marriage vows they took. I do not get into specifics regarding what constitutes infidelity (intercourse, oral sex, cybersex, phone sex, and so on). Suffice it to say that there is a person in the triangle — the spouse — who is betrayed by the intimate involvement of a third party (you). Again, these terms are meant to create clear written communication and comprehension in this book.
Is the man entirely to blame for the predicament you are in with him? It is more important to remember that you can’t control his behavior; you can only control yours. Despite this, it is worth taking a look at such men, as well. So, what are the psychological underpinnings of men who are emotionally unavailable? In chapter 2, I profile these men so you will know what “type” you are dealing with. I divide them into multiple general categories, though a given man may fit into more than one. Some examples of these are the Sociopath,