Take a moment to think about how many times you have been heartbroken due to the uncertainty in your relationship? How many times has your best friend told you that your partner is not emotionally available? About the time when you were involved with someone who threw you into an emotional winger? Well it would make it quite easy for you to love a person and emotionally invest in them if you knew about their emotional availability right from the start. Where you cannot straight up go and ask your partner if they are emotionally available or not, some signs and their behaviour can surely help you to detect this issue. Where emotions have a crucial role to play in our overall health along with the emotional well being, people often tend to turn towards their partners in order to find emotional support but end up in a turmoil due to their emotional unavailability. Read along to know all about emotional unavailability and 5 signs that will help you to know if your partner is emotionally available or not.
What is Emotional Unavailability?
Making a commitment can be easy but sticking to it can be quite difficult and especially when your romantic partner is emotionally unavailable. Where feelings are really overwhelming and can make you go gala, it can feel like a task to an emotionally unavailable person. When you have been dating for long and have that great sexual chemistry but still something feels a bit off. A person who is emotionally unavailable tends to shrink away from those vulnerable moments, might shy away from conversations about emotional experiences and even distance themselves from creating real connections. A person who is emotionally unavailable has a hard time receiving any kinds of deep emotions including love from others. For these people it is difficult to understand the other person’s feelings as they are unable to understand their own. Not just this but it is also hard for them to understand the ways in which their intimacy affects the other person.
Reasons Behind a person’s Emotional Unavailability
There are various reasons that make a person emotionally unavailable out of which one is a really big red flag as they might not be that into you. Other than this emotional unavailability can be caused if a person is going through a dramatic phase of transition in their life such as a recent break up, loss of a loved one or even change in professional life or career path. Apart from all this some unaddressed childhood wounds and trauma can also be held responsible for a person’s emotional unavailability. There is no doubt in this that some scars from a person’s childhood can bleed in and affect their relationship with their partners as adults.
Signs that your partner is emotionally unavailable
Well by now we know all about what emotional unavailability is and what are the various reasons that can cause a person to block their emotions. Let us take a step ahead and learn about 10 signs that you can look for in order to know if your partner is emotionally available or not.
#1. They are unavailable (quite literally)
Well when the first thing in the morning you do is pick your phone up and text them good morning in hope for a sweet response but what you get is a reply late in the evening. It can be really hard to get in contact with a person who is emotionally unavailable. Not just this but these people also tend to put a physical distance between the two of you in order to mask the emotional distance that they have. They will always keep on making some or the other excuse to maintain a distance so that they do not have to share too much.
#2. They don’t talk about the real issues
If your partner is emotionally unavailable then they might not take up the conversations about the emotional issues as they themselves do not know how to respond and give some good advice in these situations. When you are in a desperate need of an ear to hear about the crisis going on in your family or either in professional life, they would not seem to be very engaged during these chats.
#3. They are defensive
People who are emotionally unavailable can never in a lifetime be honest about their feelings and the way they feel about you. In cases where they overshare something due to the slip of the tongue, they get quite defensive as they feel that they have been exposed. They might get rude or blame others in such situations instead of confronting their own emotional fallout. In some cases these people also tend to create space between the two of you just to avoid the situation.
#4. Do not put same amount of efforts
Where love is supposed to flow like air and should be effortless, putting in some from time to time to make your partner feel special is equally important. Where putting in some effort is an important part of any relationship, with an emotionally unavailable person you might observe that you are the only one doing so. People who are emotionally unavailable seem to not understand the meaning and importance of equal partnership. They tend not to put as much effort into the relationship as you do and with time the spark eventually fades away.
#5. Aren’t consistently affectionate
While love, trust and affection are the basis of any relationship, an emotionally unavailable person would try hard to avoid all these emotions. Apart from this you will also find them running away from intimate actions such as complementing, touching and sex. All these things make the relationship feel like friendship or may be similar to living with a roommate as the spark goes off. Its not just sex but an emotionally unavailable person also tries to escape from little things such as complements, hugs and even remembering the important events.
