Why I Don’t Recommend Dating Emotionally Unavailable People
By: Patricia Vilchez
Tags: Dating Tips, Situationships, Dating Advice, Relationships, Life Lessons

Why I Don’t Recommend Dating Emotionally Unavailable People

My experience with one and three very important lessons I learned along the way. Patricia Vilchez Apr 25·6 min read

Photo by Yaopey Yong on Unsplash

I’ve read somewhere the following: emotionally unavailable boys will ruin you. And I could not agree more with this. I thought I could handle it but the next thing I knew is that it was causing me endless pain.

So what does it mean to be emotionally unavailable and what does it imply in a relationship?

In a nutshell, an emotionally unavailable individual is typically someone who is unable or unwilling to emotionally commit to an intimate relationship.

These types of people will often want to keep things casual and undefined in order to avoid dealing with the emotional commitments that characterize a regular serious relationship.

The preceding paragraphs describe my personal involvement and also a few lessons I've learned and mastered. So without further ado, this is why it didn't work out for me.

To start with, evidently, I wasn't aware of it on the first date. It took me about two months and a half (months in which I continuously tried to make things work) to realize that I couldn't make any progress with him. And for the next two weeks, I was thinking about ending things. Here’s what I wish I knew at the time. Lesson one:

1. You will never be good enough for someone that doesn't know what he wants.

You can be the most amazing partner and still it won't make any difference in how they treat you. You can’t make a tree bloom, no matter how hard you try. For the sake of your mental health, you need to accept that we can't change people, we can't fix them or heal them. That's something they need to do on their own. If they are not willing to do so, you can not make the self-growth or self-improvement for them.

This incessantly trying had left me incredibly frustrated and mentally exhausted. I was astonishingly supportive and understanding; exceptionally patient as well. He always had some sort of “emotional wall” between us. He bottled his emotions up. He was never truly vulnerable and intimate with me.

I kept my expectations low. Thinking eventually he would open up, be able to express emotions, and simply be himself. I didn't want to leave him. I believed I could keep him if I played the cool role rather than just admitting that I wanted him to be my one and only. Which brings me to lesson two:

2. Accept your feelings as valid.

We have to learn to say, these are my boundaries, you are not fitting into that, you are not meeting my needs, this is what I want and what I don't want. You are entitled to communicate how you feel. If you’re unhappy with the current situation don’t assume your lover is aware of your feelings. It’s okay to say this is not going to work. It wasn’t gonna work out from the beginning.

Most of the time what ends a relationship was there at the start. We just didn’t pay attention to the red flags. Even before we met he did say he didn’t want a relationship. I thought I wouldn’t want one either. But after a few encounters, I was hooked.

It’s alright if at the beginning you didn’t want a relationship and then, later on, you realize you do want one. This brings me to lesson three:

3. Know that you’re allowed to change your mind.

This obviously started as a no-strings-attached arrangement. I saw it as a non-threatening thing, super carefree, with no expectations whatsoever.

Even if such an arrangement works for you now, it might not work for you in the following weeks or months. And I didn’t change my mind overnight. It was a process. It’s okay to want something more defined, settled, and secured.

I reached the point where I no longer could stand the lack of clarity, the inconsistency, the constant uncertainty. Wondering every day what the hell was going on. At times it felt like things were falling into place or transforming for the better, but shortly after, they turn bad again.

The truth is that relationships aren’t supposed to be that difficult. They should add value to our lives, not the opposite. I hated the idea of not having him in my life, I had invested so much, it made it extremely difficult to let go.