Emotionally Unavailable Men and Women: How to Spot It and What to Do About It

Are you or someone you love emotionally unavailable? A lack of emotional availability erects a nearly impermeable barrier between you and the one you love, or between you and the one who wants to love you. We cannot experience true romantic love when either partner is emotionally unavailable. It always creates pain for both people. Our beings were designed to love and be loved, and most fail to realize that true love has its roots, its heart, its origins in our emotions. If we cannot feel, we cannot be truly intimate and therefore we cannot truly love or be loved.

When we relate with someone emotionally unavailable, eventually and inevitably, we will experience a lack of connection with that person. Even if passion or shared interests initially bring you together, those will fade and emotional distance will strain attempts to maintain the relationship. Again, whether that is ourselves or someone else, being emotionally unavailable causes us to continuously run into barriers, roadblocks, and limitations in our hearts and in our relationships.

When one learns to shift from emotionally unavailable to emotionally available an entire world of love, pleasure, safety, and security opens up. Every human being needs these precious qualities of life. Yet, if we’re unavailable emotionally these blessings remain elusive in our lives. Unfortunately many believe that staying emotionally distant makes them safer. Yet on closer analysis, most will admit the opposite. They don’t feel genuinely secure. 

In our exploration here we’ll begin by defining emotionally unavailable. Then we’ll consider the question “Am I emotionally unavailable?“ as well as why that might happen. We’ll continue with an exploration of emotionally unavailable men and women. Finally we’ll close with how to move beyond being this painful dynamic so that you might share the deepest of connections, pleasures, intimacies and joys available to us on this human journey.

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Define emotionally unavailable

If we’re asking, “What does it mean to be emotionally unavailable,” we’ve surely had an experience where we felt as if we repeatedly couldn’t connect with someone in the way we desired. Many of us, especially as we’ve explored and entered romantic relationships, have come face-to-face with the experience of being emotionally unavailable ourselves or with a partner whom we experience that way. 

Our society tends to reward us for not feeling. Parents and friends, even well meaning strangers, have wanted us to get over and move beyond our uncomfortable or inconvenient feelings. Rarely have we been guided with instructions on how to relate consciously with our emotions. Yet every single one of us, no matter how much we might despise it, feel. We are innately emotional beings and we cannot escape that fact. Even so, many of us spend huge amounts of energy, resources, and time trying to escape.

In reality we can’t feel the good feelings – love, passion, peace, satisfaction, bliss, joy, or the like – without also allowing ourselves to also feel the less comfortable ones – sadness, grief, anger, disappointment, loneliness, frustration, or fear. Yes, in some ways that sucks, and it’s the way of the heart. 

To take this further, in order to have a romantic connection, actually any true experience of connection, we must have the ability to acknowledge and express our emotions and share them with one another. In the absence of emotional connection, a romantic date or a relationship simply becomes a business transaction of a social nature.

Realizing and recognizing the important role emotions play in love and happiness, we can more clearly understand the definition of emotionally unavailable. Being emotionally unavailable means that we lack a desire and a capacity to interact emotionally with another, especially a romantic interest. When we’re emotionally unavailable we don’t trust, respect, or appreciate our own emotions and the importance they play in our connections. This means we will develop strategies and habits to consistently shut down and avoid our feelings. This absence of emotional interaction makes sustaining romantic relationships very challenging.

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Am I emotionally unavailable?

If you’d like to understand whether you are emotionally unavailable, we invite you to begin by reflecting on how you currently relate to your emotions. Do you embrace, support, and allow them? Are you willing to share and express them? Or is it more of the opposite? 

To explore more deeply ask yourself these questions. Most of the time… 

• Do I limit my range of emotions to mad, happy, and sad?
• Do I habitually deny, ignore, or suppress what I feel?
• Do I have addictive-like patterns that keep me, or attempt to keep me, distracted from feeling?
• Have I closed my heart to protect it from hurt?
• Am I committed to keeping partners at a distance?
• Do I struggle to trust? And therefore I don’t reveal my true self, needs or desires?
• Do I get uncomfortable when another person has strong feelings? Do I try to make their feelings go away as quickly as possible?
• Do I invalidate my own or others feelings?
• Do I try to avoid vulnerable situations or conversations?
• Do I judge feelings as weak?
• Do I struggle to recognize and name what I’m feeling? 
• Do I more often express thoughts rather than actual emotions? 
• Do you have an avoidant attachment style?

If you answered ‘yes’ to more than a couple of these questions and signs of being emotionally unavailable, then you likely show up that way in relationships. If you’ve struggled to connect or sustain romantic connection, this could offer another indicator of being emotionally unavailable.

What about someone else? If you’re wondering how to know if someone else is emotionally unavailable, you could consider the questions above with regard to your experience with them. You, of course, can’t absolutely know their answers and your experience offers an indication of their availability for emotional intimacy. 

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Why am I emotionally unavailable? Why is my partner emotionally unavailable?

Asking the question “why am I emotionally unavailable,” has the power to put you on a path to healing and renewed love at levels that you may not have ever experienced. Through your own inner exploration and compassion, you and only you can uncover the real reasons you’ve become emotionally unavailable. Similarly, while you might surmise why someone you love appears emotionally unavailable, you can’t ultimately know their true causes. Only they can.  

Let’s continue with some of the reasons someone becomes emotionally unavailable. You may be emotionally unavailable if…

• You grew up in a family, where emotions were not welcome. This would have required you to shut them down and distance yourself from your feelings, making them much harder to share later in life with an intimate partner or a friend.
• You’ve experienced hurt or trauma that hasn’t been fully resolved. We will often close off our heart, the center of our emotions, so that we can protect ourselves from reexperiencing the previous pain.
• You are, on some level, afraid of losing yourself in a relationship. If we fear that relationship or connection threatens our independence or sovereignty, we often distance ourselves emotionally and sometimes physically. 
• You’ve experienced enmeshment or smothering in your family of origin or in a prior romantic relationship. If someone inappropriately made their emotions your responsibility you may now resist any emotional connection. 
• You’ve been taught that emotions are weak or pathetic.
• You fear getting lost in or consumed by your emotions.
• You have a fear of intimacy.

As you consider these questions, due to the sensitivity and vulnerability of the matter, we recommend that you explore with compassion and tenderness from the heart. An intellectual understanding may assist you in recognizing when the pattern is at play. However, the knowledge of why will not change your relationships. To become emotionally available you must go about an internal shift and healing such that feeling and connection no longer feel threatening, but safe and healthy. 

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Emotionally unavailable men and emotionally unavailable women

Ultimately emotional unavailability is emotional unavailability. Yet it often shows up and expresses differently in men and women. While not all men are predominantly masculine and not all women are predominantly feminine, the majority are. That means that feminine energy will tend to lead for women and masculine energy will tend to lead for men. Since emotions fall in the realm of the feminine, we may therefore see emotional unavailability more obviously in men. Unfortunately, many men have been told it’s not masculine to feel, and therefore they strive for a more stoic presence that makes them struggle with emotional intimacy. 

When an emotionally unavailable man steps into a relationship or marriage the woman in his life will then have a hard time feeling love, connection, and closeness. This has far more reaching impact than most men realize. The feminine is moved and inspired by how she feels. If she can’t feel the man she loves, she will tend to close her heart and have less capacity to love and be loved. From there, because women tend to access their sexuality through their hearts, emotionally unavailable men in relationships tend to have less sex over time. 

Similarly, some women also reject their own emotionality and need to recultivate it in order to sustain romantic partnership. Emotionally unavailable women will tend to feel more brittle and more serious. Often these women have learned to embody high levels of masculine energy making them more rigid, more stoic. Their masculine partners, especially as they age, will have more difficulty staying in love. Surprising to most, many men actually find women who consciously embody their full range of emotions – from joy to frustration to grief – truly beautiful and yes, sexy. 

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How to reconnect

If you or someone you love is emotionally unavailable, neither partner can make the other more emotionally available. We can’t even make ourselves more available in the moment. It’s not possible to just flip a switch from one state to the other. We must instead attend to the fears of the heart, gently and patiently. You may even need to enlist the help of a skilled therapist or relationship coach.

To become emotionally available, you must begin to cultivate a relationship with your emotions. You will need to look at all of the judgments of and resistance to emotions you may hold. Reconsidering the lessons you learned about tears and fears will matter. You might also need to review the emotional conditioning that your family and culture brought to you growing up. 

Finally, you will need to strengthen the relationship with yourself. If you believe in and trust yourself, if you know your own innate value, worth, and deservability, you will find it much easier to cultivate emotional connectedness. To be emotionally available we must be attentive to our own emotions, and as with any new “relationship,” you must first build trust. Then, as you make friends with your emotions, you can take baby steps toward realizing you will be OK if you feel. Many people quickly find themselves shocked at how safe they actually feel when they share feelings authentically with another. 

Before we close this conversation, we must make a note to the feminine. If you want your masculine partner to be emotionally available, you must develop your capacity to trust men’s emotions. If you ask a man to be emotional with you and find yourself repelled by his softening, he will shut down further, becoming colder, more distant, and disconnected from you. Your embrace of his emotions will make it safer for him to feel and share more intimately. 

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If you or your partner appear emotionally unavailable, you have good company. Many people struggle to be emotionally present and authentic. Yet, don’t allow this fact to justify your own emotional distance. You will only break your own heart.

As you develop the capacity to trust yourself and others emotionally, you will finally find the ability to love well, to partner well. While the journey may feel uncomfortable, especially in the beginning, your heart, body, and soul will find itself richly rewarded for the courage you cultivate.

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Since 2006, highly conscious men and women, with a commitment to extraordinary relationships, have chosen Ecstatic Intimacy to find and cultivate Soul Partnerships from their bedrooms to their boardrooms. Ecstatic Intimacy believes in coveted relationships, for all. 

You too, are invited…