Both men and women often complain about having an emotionally unavailable partner. But emotional availability is a two-way street. When one person is emotionally available, the other person may not be receptive. One may be full up with internal conflicts, and unable to register their partner’s need for emotional availability. The other may have a wish that that their partner would never be preoccupied with anything that would use up all the band width. Mismatches are therefore inevitable.
When one partner does have room and is emotionally available, the other may be so unsettled that their internal attachment network goes haywire misreading the signals of availability. The bad wiring leads the person to experience their partner as a non-responsive caregiver (repeating experiences of their childhood.)
So despite one partner being emotionally available for listening, and comfort, the other may not be ready or available to receive it.
Emotional Availability – The Threats Make Partners Unavailable
Meryl, a 37-year-old high school teacher complained that her husband Nadav, a 38-year-old Paralegal was rarely emotionally available when she was stressed, worried and overwhelmed. She described him as cold and uncaring, unsupportive, and not interested in her, but rather focused on himself and his work.
Meryl appeared unwilling to listen to Nadav’s feelings. He talked of Meryl telling him how he felt, and how he was supposed to feel, but never asking and accepting the feelings he actually had. He experienced Meryl as trying to ‘fix’ him to do what she thought was appropriate. Nadav reacted to her emotional unavailability by shutting down. It made him angry. He couldn’t take the risk of trying to get through when she seemed bent on controlling and molding him to her way of thinking and feeling. He had to preserve his own mind and soul and the only way safe way was to shut down and become emotionally unavailable to her.
Emotional Availability – Pretending Backfires Creating More Unavailability
Nadav wanted to act like a good husband so he tried listening to Meryll’s heightened anxieties about safety online, her anger at her family for being pig-headed and her dislike of a friend who had betrayed her. But fearing that her messy emotional state would blur the boundaries between them he listened with his head but not his heart. He could repeat back everything she said, but in a mechanical way. He got that she was upset, scared and angry but he didn’t feel it with her. So when she needed him to be emotionally available, she was faced with a robotic partner who was anything but.
Nadav and Meryl were both correct. When either one of them needed the other to be emotionally available, the threat of doing so for that person made it impossible. Neither of them felt safe, and romantic relationships can flourish with emotional safety. Periods of depression and and withdrawal afflicted them in turn. When one was on the up see-saw the other was on the down see-saw.
Emotional Availability and Unavailability – The roots of the negative experience
The threat of being emotionally available to Meryl was that Nadav would lose his personhood and become an extension of his wife. As a young boy he endured his mother’s intrusiveness, demanding that he attend to her, caring for her emotional dysregulation. She couldn’t handle that he had friends and hobbies outside of his filial duties, and didn’t want to hear about it. Nadav learned to shut down to hang onto himself, pushed into being a parent to his parent. He had no idea what it meant to have an emotionally available attachment figure, and when he married Meryl the same pattern repeated. She became the messy invader trying to destroy him by trying to tell him how and what to feel – to mush his mind with hers.
The threat to Meryl of being emotionally available to Nadav was to come to terms with her impotency in forcing a loved one to merge with her to enable her to feel secure. Meryl grew up in a home with two emotionally absent parents. Her father’s attention was on his work and his social life outside the family. When he was home he dumped his stuff on Meryl and never asked or showed an interest in her requirement for comfort and safety. Her mother brushed away any tensions in the family, pretending they didn’t exist, making them taboo. Sadly it left little Meryl overwhelmed with anxiety with no safe space to validate her fears and her anger at being left to figure things out for herself. When she married Nadav, she too repeated the cycle of experiencing a cold, cut-off parent and one who couldn’t handle her big feelings.
This is the most common paradigm for romantic couples in relation to emotional availability – unavailability. It is a see-saw that keeps going up and down with partners unconsciously being attracted to the same type of caregiver from childhood in an effort to rewrite, undo and redress the misattunement.
So let’s look at what being what emotional available involves and how it differs from being emotionally unavailable.
Emotional Availability Features of a Romantic Partner
1. Desire and willingness to take in and taste the intensity, tone, and impact of your partner’s immediate experience – be it rage, shock, despair, hopelessness, helplessness, fear, destructiveness to themselves or others, sadness, grief, and or excitement and bliss.
2. Active listening that involves allowing the flavor and temperature of your partner to filter into your immediate experience, getting a real time sense and feel for what your partner is going through.
3. Identifying with your partner’s experience so that you understand and empathize in a meaningful way. That means finding some resonance inside you that brings to mind times when you felt scared, blissful, despair, rage and so on. It’s about finding that common emotional experience (not the situation) that enables you to be available.
4. Acknowledging and validating your partner’s experience in a genuine way rather than going through the motions with a set of apparently comforting words that only serves as an armored plated shield, coming across robotically.
Now let’s look at the flip side. What are the signs of emotional unavailability in a romantic partner and why?
Portrait of a husband asking forgiveness from his wife
Emotional Unavailability in a Romantic Partner
1. Attending to something else when your partner needs you to be emotionally available and seeks you out.
Why? It’s likely that you have no room to allow your partner’s big emotions to impact you because you are full up with the enormous turbulent unprocessed emotions of your own.
2. Saying you do not have time, or it’s the wrong time.
Why? Because you anticipate your partner’s need for your availability as invasive and intrusive – a threat that you are in danger of being swallowed up, making you put up the wall and come across as emotionally unavailable.
3. Making out as if you are listening but you aren’t taking anything in. You appease the part of you that knows you should listen but you don’t want to deal with it.
Why? Because your partner’s emotions seem messy, overly dramatic and really not your problem to manage. In fact it makes you angry that you are expected in effect to parent your partner. Pretending to go through the motions makes it seem you are playing your part but your partner experiences you as cruel and insensitive.
4. Talking over your partner so you can’t hear them and/or saying that you’ve heard it all before and have no truck with it – dismissing it before it penetrates you.
Why? Because you don’t want to feel you have been the cause of your partner’s unease. You anticipate criticism or judgement and have to avoid it at all costs, so you condemn it right away to defend yourself. But you come across as superior and demeaning.
Couple at home
Emotional Availability – Building up Safety for Intimacy
Couples who recognize themselves in this portrait should consider individual therapy that includes family of origin counseling. Each partner needs to have an experience of what they missed out on as children, and then attempt couples therapy where the therapist can cue them on when they are reverting to default and not attending to the real person they are interacting with. Individual relationship therapy must be the first step to rewire the attachment framework so that a new one has a chance to be more receptive and participate in mutual nurturing of the romantic relationship.
Copyright, Jeanette Raymond, Ph.D. 2023
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