Emotionally Unavailable Men AND WOMEN

There is something terribly sad about the clunking cycle of looking for love men and women are now stuck in. The World today makes it much more difficult to establish emotional boundaries than it was in, say, the Macho-style 1950s. Now we have 'The Rules' and 'Mystery' and any number of other 'programmes' designed to effectively procure love from a member of the opposite sex who is resistant to giving it up. Surely all this game-playing goes against the freedom our Sixties ancestors initiated - aren't we supposed to be free to love and learn from each other with no demands, simply for the experience and the pleasure of giving.

Ah Giving. Now it seems we Women are not supposed to Give (apart from great blow jobs) anything for fear of scaring a man off. At first this seemed ridiculous. Now the number of Relationship Gurus advising restraint coupled with my experience of the DB informing me that I was trying to 'Buy' him by giving him a birthday cake, informs me that men fear giving.

Ah Fear. Keep your heart open - an ex-lover has told me on Facebook. Don't build a wall to hide behind in fear. Through projection, women have now been conditioned to be afraid of men's fear. As soon as the man you have been pressured into loving pulls away, you feel fear of rejection, of not being loved, of loss. The pressure he applies in the beginning, otherwise known as 'The Chase' or 'Seduction' is simply an expression of his fear of liking you, of you making him feel. How many men have told me they don't want to feel something. The loss of control when they fall into deep attraction makes them too vulnerable. Once they can even the score by making you feel it too, they are safe to back off.

It's a mutual collusion - the fear and a woman who can resist it will not only find herself irresistible, she will stop being manipulated by the projection of men's fears and insecurities. I am not going to start second guessing myself every time I date a man. If he thinks that a Birthday cake is somehow a metaphor for being trapped forever, that is going to be his problem, not mine.

This week, an ex-lover in Canada advised me that 'While men may be all about the chase, some women like to be chased'. For all the women complaining and blaming their heinous lovers for their inability to commit, ask yourself how much the force of the initial chase period is reinforcing your own fears. We are seduced because we want to be loved and because we are conditioned to compete with each other for a man.  All the ideals he applies that we are superior to the others appeal to our need for approval. Just think how many men say; 'I just haven't found the right one yet'.  Why do they trawl out this line? Because they know that your interior switch will be flipped to think; 'I am that one. I am better than all the rest'.

If there is reciprocity of fear - a yin-yang balancing act of it in a commitmentphobic relationship - then there is the same mutuality in Emotional Unavailabliity. It's a strange little dance we do - He chases us (out of fear) and we feel loved and special and we start to love back. He feels afraid of being smothered (more fear) and pulls back. Now we start to feel unloved (fear) and start chasing, persuading, begging, manipulating to get the love back again. We also get to cover our tracks of female emotional unavailability as we focus on his inability to commit. A man gives every sign that he's not there, even while swearing to God and Pachamama that he is - we just refuse to see it.

Comments

[Lena]

Oh my God! Leu. I thought I was alone. I am exactly in the same situation. After one THING last year I have built a perfect wall around me. I even blocked up with bricks all windows and doorway. I felt safe and protected. I was so afraid to feel pain again. But then I met this guy. It was perfect chase, as I can understand now. I started to feel... loved. And slowly I started to drag myself out, I started to open to him. And after several months to find out that he had a girlfriend... Now everything is in the mess. Sane part of my brain tells me that I have to give up and move on, trying to avoid slippery way back to my shell. But insane part... And I have the same feeling that whatever I do, will be wrong. Anyway I will regret about it. It drives me mad.

[Kragen Javier Sitaker]

I'm amused to discover that you (the author of the blog) are Suzy. So in your comment and in your post, you're describing two different pathologies that make some men emotionally distant. So clearly you know that there aren't universal principles even of assholeness, and every unhappy asshole is unhappy in his own way — why, then, does the rest of both your post and your comment reduce men and women to gender stereotypes?

[Kragen Javier Sitaker]

I've found that my intimate relationships and other friendships go a lot better when I consider them as being between two individuals rather than between two gender stereotypes. It's worked pretty well for me so far. Even if you meet a man who more or less fits the stereotypes you've written about in your post, he won't fit them well enough that you can successfully conduct a relationship with him without paying attention to the ways in which he, individually, fails to do so.

This is particularly important when the stereotypes you're talking about actually prevent a successful relationship from taking place at all — in that case, the guys who you can have a successful relationship with don't overlap with the guys you can successfully predict with stereotypes. It's kind of like how 99% of the people who send in their resumes for a programming job can't program their way out of a paper bag. If you generalize that your job applicants are terrible programmers and deal with them on that basis, you will have zero success with the other 1%, the ones you actually need to hire from. (Speaking from experience here. Part of the problem is that those 99% have to send their resumes to a lot of women, I mean employers, because they don't do that well in interviews, and they tend to have to look for work frequently.)

Men and women do have a few significant differences on average, especially in areas like physical strength and attitudes toward casual sex, but in most areas the variations between individuals are much larger than the average variations between the genders. (See Janet Shibley Hyde's meta-study entitled "The Gender Similarities Hypothesis", to which I am neglecting to include a link.)

I don't have time to argue with your entire post in detail, so at random I picked the fifth paragraph to dissect.

Every sentence in your fifth paragraph is wrong, except for one rhetorical question and one that has no meaning that I can divine. Some (most) men are not "all about the chase"; knowing that "some women like to be chased" is useless and the negation "no women like to be chased" is implausible; many women whose lovers don't want to commit to them didn't start their relationship by being "chased" at all; women are seduced for all sorts of reasons other than just wanting to be loved (although of course wanting to be loved is a factor in every human behavior, especially sexual behavior); not all women spend any significant amount of effort seeking mates, and not all see it as a competition; "all the ideals he applies that we are superior" doesn't even make sense; I have no idea how many men say, "I just haven't found the right one yet" — what, did you do a Gallup poll? But of the ones who do, only some of them are saying it to manipulate anyone into wanting to prove themselves. (I've heard it in lots of contexts where there were no plausible targets for the manipulation.)

The rest of your post generally has the same flaw, but picking it apart sentence by sentence would be boring and time-consuming, so I won't.

If you were to write about a particular relationship between particular people, it might be possible to say something meaningful about such causes and effects. Trying to make such specific statements about "men" and "women" in the abstract dooms your discourse to being nonsense — pernicious and offensive nonsense, at that.

Pulling back a bit, Suzy's comment highlights a different reason some men pursue intensely at first and then become emotionally unavailable: chamuyar. Chamuyeros don't mean what they said in the first place; they're just looking for a conquista. The love-as-warfare trope (an attempted invasion by the man of the woman's chastity — a sort of rape, with the assistance of the victim) is deeply embedded in Argentine culture.

Why do women always go for chamuyeros? They don't. Some women never do, and some women sometimes do, and they do for a lot of different reasons. Some of them know the lines are insincere and don't care; others don't know at first, but stick with it when they figure it out; others leave in disgust when they discover the lies. There are probably alternatives I don't know about, but friends of mine have done all three of those and told me the stories.

But it can be hard to find people who are actually worth dating when there are a lot of chamuyeros around wasting your time. What are you going to do? Ignore anyone who seems to like you? That's not a path to success. It's like avoiding shops that practice bait-and-switch advertising — what are you going to do, avoid any place that advertises a low price?

[Kragen Javier Sitaker]

This is a test comment; I haven't been successful in posting comments earlier.

[Suzy]

That sounds really hard Leu. Men are different though and Argentine men even more different. An Ice climber mountain man in Patagonia asked me this week why women complain about men being chamuyero but those are the ones they always go for. Men also like women who are emotionally unavailable and free - its what they understand - All his emotional stuff is like speaking alien to them. Ive realised now that having a couple of great women mates keeps the emotional stuff away from a guy so that you can have fun with them. They do become attached but it takes them a long time

[Leu]

How fitting. I drag myself away from pondering the puzzle of an affair that seems to have become a tedious game of pushing and pulling, and turn to my other passion, the tango. A passion that just gives me fulfilment and joy without the pain. And I end up here, reading your words and recognising my story.

I was lucky enough to not have experienced before what seems to be a common pattern between women and men fighting each other when all they set out to do was to enjoy each others company. So I've come unprepared and fell into it, full and proper. Stunned. I enjoyed the chase, it was beautiful. I'd never been courted like this. I opened up and gave back and have ended up being held at arms length. I feel cheated and I hurt.

I never asked for commitment, I wasn't looking for it. But I got swept away by my passion and I don't like having to pace myself. It's absurd that you can't let a man know that you want him. Because all he sees is shadows lurking of what else you might want.

Now it feels that whatever I do I loose. I can try and play hard to get, to make him show me he does want me too, after all. Because I need to know that to enjoy his company without the nagging thoughts. Which means I end up on my own when I want to be with him. Or I can tell him I want to see him, and refuse the silly game. But I can't just be happy then either, because I feel he hasn't really longed for me the same way. Damn this.

[Jean-Pierre]

I admit I am a commitment phobe. But I don't torture those that are looking for serious relationships with mind games; I'm simply not available. If a man who is interested in a serious relationship starts to chase me, i tell him to stop. I don't accept the affections of those i'm not interested in. I may have my emotional difficulties, but I still have integrity.

[joli]

You need to get yourself a minimum of 3 lovers to put in rotation, 5 would be better. Then it will just work itself out.

[Suzy]

All True N A N C Y but I think it goes deeper - That we persist in falling for these tipos because we are in reality emotionally unavailable ourselves and in fixing them we don't have to fix ourselves

[n a n c y]

Why do we women persist in falling for men who are unavailable geographically or because they are already in relationships or they have no jobs or they are unable to tell the truth? We ignore all that and then complain they are emotionally unavailable? They told us that when we first met them - we just didn't want to hear it. We thought we could fix them.