Emotionally Unavailable Men: WHEN To Walk Away

If you're trying to make it work with a guy who seems emotionally unavailable, he keeps pulling away, he's hot and then he's cold, it's a really confusing landscape for you. When exactly should you walk away? When is enough enough? When should you draw that line? Today, I'm going to give you two simple equations to help you come to this decision. Stick around to the end because I'm going to unpack what is going to make it so hard to walk away and what to do about it. Welcome. If you're new here, my name is Amy and I help women who keep falling for unavailable men to break the cycle of toxic romantic relationships by healing their core wound and embodying their true authentic self so they can be happy alone until they find a healthy relationship. If you'd like more content on this topic, please hit the subscribe button and click the bell notification so you get notified when I post new lessons every week. Before I begin, Heal Your Heart School is open for enrollment. If you'd like to know more about how to work with me, make sure you stick around to the end. Now, let's firstly actually acknowledge you can't actually lose an emotionally unavailable guy because they were never yours to begin with. They're emotionally unavailable. He's already walked away. He's already made those decisions to be unavailable in some way. He's giving you just enough to keep you invested. He's keeping you on that hook to keep up the illusion that there's something going on, but there's actually nothing concrete in this. I liken it to an Easter egg. It's really sweet and yummy on the outside, but it's hollow on the inside. The truth is that he can't actually do anything more than spark a fantasy in you. That is the kind of game that's being played between the two of you, and he knows that. He's doing what he can to keep that fantasy and that illusion in play. He shows up just enough for you to believe in his potential, for you to believe in the bond and the match, but he doesn't show up to actually follow through his words with his actions to actually make a concrete relationship out of it. So understanding that there's this fantasy at play is really important in a bond with an emotionally unavailable person. Firstly, and this is the question I get asked a lot on my channel, what is emotional unavailability? The very definition itself tells us they are unavailable to the deeper emotions that allow them to connect intimately to you and also to themselves. So there's an amount of self-unawareness going on. There's a disconnect within them as well, which can be maddening for you if they tell you one thing and then they do another, and then they don't acknowledge that. That disconnect that's within them is really apparent. And because of this disconnect and this inability to connect to their own deeper emotions, they will only be able to form superficial bonds. So the bond they have with you, as I mentioned previously, is a type of a fantasy bond based on an illusion, and it is superficial. It's that Easter egg that's delicious and sweet on the outside, but it's actually empty and hollow on the inside. Now they might come across as really charming, really convincing, because their exterior is so well developed, right? They have an amazing mask that they put front to the world because that's where they put all their energy. There isn't a deeper connection with themselves. There isn't that deeper inner security going on. So they're very focused on how they outwardly appear to the world and how they outwardly appear to you. So their actual level of self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-emotional availability is incredibly limited. And that's why you'll start to see through the cracks of the shell after a few months, because someone can only put up a mask and a shell like that and kind of keep it convincing for a couple of months, right? The cracks are going to start to show eventually. Now, some general outward signs of emotional unavailability is that they have a history of short relationships. And when I say short relationships, I'm not just referring to two or three months. I'm actually referring to two or three years, because you can have a relationship with someone and keep it at quite a superficial level for a couple of years. I used to be emotionally unavailable and I used to do this. And then when more is needed from them in the relationship, which can generally happen sometimes in the rather one or two mark around questions of commitment, things are going to fall through because they're just not able to commit to you. So those short-ish relationships, they're going to be kind of riding the wave of putting in the minimum effort. Their actions and words are going to be kind of like not always aligned, so it's difficult to form trust and respect with them. They're hot and cold, so it's really confusing for you. And there can be really intense intimacy here, right? Sexual bond is often the core connection between someone who's emotionally unavailable with another, because when you're not in touch with your emotions, one way to actually feel strong emotions is to have sexual relationships with someone. And that kind of physical chemistry can actually be mistaken for deeper feelings of connection and emotional intimacy. But of course, it's actually just the physical emotions that come with the act of sex, and they can be felt with anyone that you have sex with. And this fear of intimacy, this way of loving in this superficial way has formed for them probably since childhood, maybe in a series of relationships if they had some really difficult ones where they had to disconnect from their emotions. And getting close to someone new scares them. They may not have the emotional skills to do so, or they used to when there's some trauma there. There are many different ways emotional unavailability is caused, and it's important for us to unpack the two types of emotional unavailability, because not everyone's born this way. Type one is that they have situational emotional unavailability, and this is they're simply at a place in their lives where they're not able to open and connect with you, right? They've just come out of a long-term committed marriage or a long relationship, or they've gone through some kind of trauma like a death in the family, a significant life crisis in some way, and all of their internal resources are being used to deal with that immediate crisis, and they don't have the internal resources available to connect with you. So intimacy just isn't possible because they're healing, they're focusing on themselves, the timing just isn't right, and the signs of someone who has situational emotional unavailability is that they're actually telling you that they've just come from something really significant, and they might be saying they're not sure what they're looking for, they're saying they're not ready for anything serious, and they might actually keep talking about their ex or keep talking about their previous relationship, and it's just clear to you that most of their time is kind of focused on dealing with something that happened in their past, and they're not available to connect with you openly in an intimate, healthy, natural, organic way. The second type of emotional unavailability, and this is probably the one to really, really, really look out for, because it can be hard to see, is chronic emotional unavailability, and this is where this person has a pattern of their entire lives of showing up in relationship in this superficial way, because they just simply lack the skills to connect to their emotions on a deeper level, and as such, they're unable to connect with you on a deeper level, and they learned this. This is love to them, so again, they're going to be leapfrogging from one relationship to another, allowing themselves to stay to connect in the way that works for them, but as soon as anything more is or deeper is asked of them, they're just not able to offer that, so it's naturally time for them to move on, and again, the exterior shell here is really convincing, really charming, but underneath, it's hollow, right? Their actions just don't match their words. They don't show up in a way that looks committed. Their priorities are not for connection, for you, for the relationship. They have all these other priorities that get in the way, and there's this feeling that they might just kind of leave at any time, and they might even be threatening. You know, they might have that one foot out the door and be trying to like control the situation so they can get what they want and have the kind of emotionally unavailable relationship they need to have, and that kind of forces you to stay because they are threatening to leave, and because they don't have that internal self-feedback mechanism and they're not able to hold a space for those uncomfortable emotions, they get easily defensive, okay? They don't take responsibility for things, so you can't have healthy conflict with them. They're not able to really recognize and hear what you're saying and to self-reflect and self-adjust based on feedback, which is essential for a healthy relationship. So instantly there's that defense mechanism coming out. There's probably a lot of redirection to you blaming you or blaming other people that everyone else is the problem and not me, and it can be absolutely maddening, right? Because it's a form of gaslighting in a way when you're being told something that just isn't the case because they're not willing to look at themselves. So there's a lot of hot-cold behavior as well. You might feel like you're being constantly kept at arm's length, but when you actually try and leave, they kind of need to keep you back there. So you're being kept, being held there, but you're not able to get any closer to them, right? And they lack the emotional literacy to offer you the healthy support that you deserve as a partner, so they're not able to offer compassion and support for you because they can't offer that for themselves. They don't allow themselves to feel that when things get tough or when things get uncomfortable, they shut down. And again, I'm speaking from personal experience. I remember doing this and feeling this way. It was like something in my body just completely disconnected when anything uncomfortable came up, and I wasn't able to feel self-compassion and self-support and work through a difficult time. I would just run away from it or disconnect from it. And there's a lot of engaging and numbing behavior as a result, right? Because that's the go-to coping mechanism is to literally not cope. So they might be drinking a lot. They might have some addictions like alcohol or drugs or sex or some milder addictions, and perhaps even just watching too much television or be hyper-focused on doing the same thing every day for hours and hours. And there's this overall general fear of commitment coming from them, right? Because as you're trying to get closer to them, you're trying to ask for more and more, which are natural healthy needs when you're trying to form a close bond with someone and they're always pulling away. There's always a reason why they can't, and you're just kind of feeling like they're getting cold feet all of the time. Now, if you want a complete list of the signs of emotional unavailability, I have a video on that right here. Now to the actual topic, when do we leave someone like this? Because firstly, we need to identify, okay, is this person emotionally unavailable? So I've given you kind of a general idea of what to look for, and it can be really tempting if someone's situationally, emotionally unavailable, that's a mouthful, to wait for their situation to change, right? It can be really tempting to do this because they might be telling you how, you know, their previous relationship was amazing, and they're giving you all these kind of anecdotes, and you're really wanting that with this person. But in waiting for them for an unknown period of time, because they can't give you any guarantees at all, nor should they be able to, in doing that, you're cutting off all other possibilities and all other potential healthy matches that are out there. In choosing to wait for someone who's emotionally unavailable because of their situation, you are choosing a state of limbo that is going to be incredibly painful for you, and it's not going to get better. It's going to get worse and worse over time. I know this because I've been there, and if you have anxious attachment or any kind of anxiety, this is fuel for the fire. This is the perfect storm when you're waiting for someone to change or waiting for them to realize how great you are. If you can just kind of pin it to the fact that you've got to wait for them to grieve a relationship or a marriage, it seems like there's some kind of an ending, but actually what the healthier thing to do is to walk away and to say to them, when you are ready, feel free to reach out to me, and I may or may not be available. That's the healthiest thing to do. Now I'm going to give you the two equations later on so you can figure out exactly the moving parts, but I just need you to know that. Now if someone is chronically emotionally unavailable, the best time to leave is yesterday. This person, you are not going to be able to change them. They're not going to change. They're going to continue to live the way they've always lived. This is the way they know love to be, and whether they choose to go into therapy, whether they choose to do all the things that particularly I did to get myself from unavailable to available is their choice, and having someone like you kind of waiting on the sidelines and encouraging them and guiding them or whatever it looks like to you is again going to put you in a state of limbo that's going to be far more painful than just a situation where someone's grieving a marriage, because this person's actually changing lifelong patterns, and guess what? It takes a long, long time, and what I've often seen with people that I've dated who've turned out to be emotionally unavailable is that you cannot make the choice for them to take responsibility for their internal world and for their patterns to heal. That is their choice to make, and I'll tell you now, 99.9% of people choose to not do this because it is an uncomfortable process to go through to address what's going on inside of you, and you might be waiting on the sidelines and looking at them and thinking, oh, look at all the changes they're making, and your bar is lowering when that's happening because you're choosing limbo, you're choosing their potential, you're choosing this future scenario, you're sacrificing so much of your own internal peace and health and happiness in the process. That's why I wanted to give you these two black and white equations so you can write it down on a piece of paper and get really clear on when it's time to leave, because I understand often when you are connected with someone deeply in a way, there's a feeling that they're the only one for you. It might be the soulmate or twin flame stuff that goes around, and honestly, that's just a spiritual explanation for what is a very chemical-based attachment system that's going on, right? It's a familiarity of this person. They trigger deeper feelings and dynamics within you that were placed within you when you were young. So here's the first equation, and what we've got here is we've got two boxes. We've got an A and a B, and I'm going to explain this in a minute, but if you have a piece of paper, you can follow along. Just take a piece of paper and draw a line right down the middle so you've got two columns. The first question you need to ask yourself, what needs am I not getting met, and is it worth what needs I am getting met? So column A is what needs that are not being met. You need to write all those down, and then on the right-hand side, you write down what needs are being met, okay? So be honest with what needs you're not getting met here. If you are questioning whether this person's emotionally unavailable or not, there's a high chance you're doing that because there's a whole bunch of needs that aren't being met, and probably a whole bunch of them that you don't think you deserve to have met, but you actually do. So emotionally unavailable people lack consistency, which means trust can't be formed and a secure bond just isn't there, right? You're always left feeling unsure, uncertain, and feeling triggered and anxious, so internal needs around health and safety and feeling secure aren't being met in a situation like this. Emotionally unavailable people are often subversively controlling or outwardly controlling, and that's going to significantly undermine your own self-worth and your own self-autonomy if you've been trying to make it work with this person for a long time. And that great intimacy, that great sexual chemistry in bed, it has a ceiling, right? Okay, when they're hot, it's on, but when it's cold, their intimacy, they've hit a ceiling they can't follow through, they can't be consistent with that intimacy, and you're probably left feeling really unloved and kind of there's this coldness to them. And because there's hardly any commitment, it feels like there's nothing to stand on, there's no foundation in the relationship, so there's going to be a whole lot of things that you're going to write into column A that are specific to your situation. Now, column B, what needs might you be getting met in a relationship with someone who's emotionally unavailable? These are all the really, really fun, exciting things. You're going to get lots of dopamine from how, you know, exciting your time together with them is, because it's a bit like that slot machine, it's inconsistent and you don't know when it's going to come. So when it does come, it's even more amazing than someone who's consistent with their intimacy and their attention to you. So you'll have this excitement, you'll have these feelings of love, this soulmate, this amazing connection, you know, you might be kind of a bit onto that, that might be a bit overboard, but write down all of your needs that you feel are being met. And just to make this even better for you, I actually wrote down a list of my equation from the last time I dated an emotionally unavailable guy, only lasted four weeks. Luckily, I called it off when I realized what was going on. But on the left-hand side, for me, the needs not being met was there was no consistent physical affection. I didn't feel I was getting to know who he actually was. I felt like there was some kind of keeping his cards close to his chest. I didn't feel accepted as I was, and there was no stability in our connection, no certainty of planning dates, or how the relationship is progressing. There was no certainty of how he felt about me or feelings developing. He was using this really circular language and not really kind of pinning down specific communication around how he was feeling. And I didn't feel wholly understood. And that kind of intermittent contact and that intermittent like attention gave me huge anxiety and huge overwhelm. And I'm now a secure person, but this is not an environment that I was going to feel secure in. So the needs I was having met was the sex was great, the companionship when he was around, which, you know, wasn't that often. And I had this feeling that I'd found a great person. Like I had this kind of narrative that was going on that I very quickly saw through the cracks of, but it was just kind of like familiar, familiar feeling to me. So as you can see from just looking at this list, obviously one list is longer than the other. But the question you're really going to ask yourself is, is grieving A, which is like grieving the fact that you're never going to get consistent physical affection. You're never going to feel like you actually know him, or you're never going to feel accepted as you are. That whole list is grieving that worth what you're getting in list B. And obviously when you look at an equation like this, there's no way list B is worth list A, just looking at the number of things I've written there. But the things in list A that are so, so important for healthy, committed relationship, there is no way you can put up with a relationship where you're not having those needs met. Now, the second equation, if the first one wasn't enough for you to get really clear on whether you should stay or leave, the second equation is probably a bit more specific. On the left hand side, we have a list of the harms that we're going to have towards ourselves of staying. By staying with this person, what harm do I choose for myself? And B is going to be the harm of leaving. So by leaving, what harm will I choose for myself in leaving? We're just considering ourselves right now. I have clients that always tell me about how they consider so much for this other person and it would hurt them so much leaving them and all this kind of thing. But we're not caretakers here, right? We're looking at a relationship where someone can show up for us. So we're just considering and looking at our own internal climate. It sounds selfish, but it isn't selfish, obviously, right? We're just socialized as women to think about other people more than ourselves. So get used to just considering about your own internal environment here and we're just going to focus on that. So we're going to look at which is less painful, column A or column B, okay? So again, I've written out a list of the things that were harmful for me staying and leaving from my last experience. And for me on list A, the harm of staying was I was going to feel physically rejected. This is being with him, always being unsure or suspicious of what was going on or who he's seeing because he was keeping cards close to his chest. The rejection was lowering my self-esteem and my self-worth. I could feel it going down and down and down, just being chipped away at even over those four weeks. And there was that uncertainty about what are we? And that question kind of came up naturally at the four-week mark. I wasn't jumping in too soon, but I knew that moving forward I was going to be in limbo about that. And I was going to be constantly waiting around for the relationship to actually get momentum because it didn't ever feel like it kind of was going to get off the ground with where we were at at the four-week mark. And I was going to be in limbo about how he feels because his communication again was circular. He wasn't direct about how he was feeling. And this makes sense for someone who's emotionally unavailable because they don't have the connection within themselves to identify their emotions, right? It's just a very superficial internal contact that they have. I wasn't going to feel seen or heard by this person, right? And that's a pattern of mine from throughout all my relationships. And it's part of the reason that it felt comfortable to be in a relationship where I wasn't seen or heard. But this is something that is so incredibly important to me. So that was going to be an issue. And I was going to be more anxious, overwhelmed, and uncertain. And it was really significantly starting to affect my life at the four-week mark. And I could see that it was only going to get worse and worse and worse. So that's the harm of staying. Now, the harm of leaving, I don't want to discount that because, right, it is hard to leave a relationship. So I was going to have to grieve our connection and our bond because we had a great connection. We had a great bond. We had great sex. We had great conversations when he was around. And I would have to start again from scratch, right? I thought, oh, I've met someone, you know, done that whole thing. Like, oh, I don't have to let that all go. And I was going to have to be alone or lonely for a while. And I didn't know how long that was going to be. That was an uncertainty. So there are significant points that, you know, we choose harm for ourselves when we leave something. But again, you look at the columns, column A, column B. Column B is significantly lighter than column A, which is less painful. And it's just a no-brainer. Column B was the way to go in a situation like this. Now, you might be looking at these columns and my work and the explanation and thinking, well, it seems really black and white and seems really clear and easy when you put it out there. But actually doing it is a lot harder than saying it, writing it down and looking at it. And I completely agree because I've walked the walk. I've been through it. I know how hard it is to leave a relationship where you feel really truly bonded with someone, even though they're emotionally unavailable. And I'm going to explain to you the two significant aspects that make it hard to leave and what to do about it. And the first aspect is that you are in scarcity. Now, I've alluded to that narrative of he's the one, you know, or the Twin Flames soulmate narrative. When you're in scarcity, there's a belief that that person is the only person that will be able to love you in the way that they have. You get into this kind of black and white mindset that you'll only get love from him. Right. And that you have to deal with it and put up with that love because no more love for you. Right. Like no one else can do this. And this doesn't make a whole lot of cognitive sense. But when you actually look at the origin of these false self-beliefs, it makes complete sense, right? If we have a core belief that we are not worthy of love or that we're unlovable in some way, we are going to hone in on one person as our love supply because of the historical fact that they have given us a certain amount of love over a certain period of time. Now, we ignore the fact that we've had all these other relationships where we've received love in the past. And that historically, if we were to look at that data, we will continue to go out and meet people because that is what naturally has happened in the past. No. When we're in our wounded state, we go into scarcity and we believe that this person is the only one that's going to be able to show up for us in this way. So we have to accept them warts and all, including all of their emotional unavailability traits. And this comes down to our attachment blueprint, our attachment origins. If you've watched anything on my channel, you know that if we get used to love being painful when we're young, like if we had emotionally unavailable caregivers who were not able to fully see and hear us, we just kind of get used to love showing up in that way. So that's why we accept an emotionally unavailable partner in adulthood. We're actually kind of wired to think that it's familiar and safe. But what actually happened from childhood or wherever this pattern started is the first time or the first couple of times that, you know, our emotionally unavailable caregivers or partner really let us down, something called an abandonment wound was formed in our body energetically and a whole lot of core beliefs came from that. Now, we don't need to be significantly abandoned by someone to feel an abandonment where you might have had a father or parent leave or a divorce happened, some significant capital T trauma, but just simply being raised by regular, healthy, loving parents that are also emotionally unavailable was enough for me to form a significant abandonment wound because of my genetics as well and how sensitive and empathic I am. So know that when I say the word abandonment, we're talking about complex little T trauma instances that come with time over time being not seen or not heard by our caregivers. And because we're used to this kind of a dynamic, we justify that the relationship we're currently in is good enough, that that abandonment wound is running our pattern. It's causing us to pull the wool over our eyes and think that everything's okay and that we can accept him the way he is. So if you're in a situation like this and you really, really struggled to leave and that this kind of black and white, these equations haven't really helped, I want you to go and watch this video next because it's going to unpack more about what the abandonment wound is and how you can actually start to work through it and heal it so you stop attracting people who can't meet your needs healthily in a relationship. And if you're interested in knowing more about how to heal these deeper patterns, I have a complete three-step process to self-love that I teach in my free webinar. You can join in the link below. I also have a Facebook group. I would love to see you in there. I'm in there every week, often doing lives. And if you'd like to know more about how to work one-on-one with me, you can click the calendar link below and apply for a discovery call with me for Heal Your Heart School. Please let me know in the comments how you found this video today. If it was helpful, let me know what your equations look like, if you've made any decisions based on that, and click the like button because it really does help my channel in this video out in the algorithm. We're still growing here. And here are some follow-on videos to help you move one step closer to having an incredible relationship with yourself, breaking the cycle of toxic romantic relationships, and embodying your true authentic self. And for now, I will see you in the next video.