Mr. Emotionally Unavailable. He’s everywhere. He’s that guy you’ve romanticised since you were 18, the fuckboy you Netflix and Chilled with a couple of times, that guy who swept you off your feet before the relationship went tumbling down a flight of stairs, and maybe even that guy you’re meeting for nachos on Saturday. And when us gals chase the emotionally unavailable, we all seem to have a mutual reaction… we declare ourselves unloveable.
On some subconscious level, I always seem to chase these men. I don’t know why, but more importantly, I don’t know why this problem is so common. Why do I now enter relationships presuming he will leg it in a few weeks/months? What is it about our generation that has built a wall between him and I? Why can so many of you relate to the problems I have experienced in all of my maybe relationships?
Women are always labelled as the fixers, apparently desperate to tame a free-spirit. The thing is, maybe it’s time that emotionally unavailable men stop diving into situations that they plan to set alight, and then we won’t need to fix anything. On reflection, maybe women aren’t really fixers at all, I think we just long for the person he pretended to be at the start. Not a fixers, just a reminiscer.
Something has caught on in our generation – The taboo around emotions. God forbid if you tell him you like him or open yourself up to falling for him when he’s obviously not in it for the long haul. Or is he? That’s the thing, we don’t know what he is and what he isn’t, because anytime we ask, we’re obsessive, we’re clingy, we’re foolish, we’re overthinking, we’re moving too fast, we’re psycho.
Some guys I have dated could read this and feel personally attacked, and that’s the problem. Some of them are so focused on feeling attacked by the emotions of strong women that they miss the point completely. They miss the tears until 4am, they miss the overwhelming shit feeling when you go home in last night’s outfit and wait for the text you know isn’t coming, they miss the over-analysing that happens when he leaves without answers, and often, an air of unnecessary ignorance. They are missing the point that there is an entire generation of women thinking they’re flawed because some men are so quick to up and leave without explaining anything or offering any closure. We get angry because we care about these people, our heart is in it. He is everything, and then he’s a stranger who acts like we meant nothing to him. And it hurts.
Until we as women all fight against the psycho narrative and own that strut over to tell him his behaviour is wrong, nothing will change. Send the first text, be honest about your feelings, call out the toxic behaviour of your friend’s boyfriend. It’s an uprising hun, there’s no time to say “Ah, leave him off!” I want you to be the girl he says “Oh here we go!” about, because even if you’d go to the ends of the earth for him, you’re not a doormat for no man.
