Understanding Why You Choose Emotionally Unavailable People

I have been focusing on topics from Dr. Jack Morin's book, The Erotic Mind: Unlocking the Inner Sources of Passion and Fulfillment in my last several articles.  In today's article I'm focusing specifically on why some people choose partners who are emotionally unavailable based on concepts outlined in this book (see my article: What Are Your Core Erotic Themes?, which contains links to all the prior related articles).

Understanding Why You Choose Emotionally Unavailable People

Eroticized Longing

In Chapter 6 of his book, "When Turn-Ons Turn Against You," Dr. Morin discusses eroticized longing where people are attracted to partners who are unavailable or only partially or inconsistently available.  According to Dr. Morin, people who experience erotcized longing often discover that it is a central part of their eroticism.  

These are people who usually need the passion, excitement, storminess and uncertainty based on being involved with an unavailable (or partially available) partner.  These relationships can be passionate but, ultimately, they aren't fulfilling for people who want a long term commitment.  

These relationships often include a partner who is:

• married or in a long term relationship with someone else
• unable to make an exclusive commitment
• ambivalent
• vague about the future or eludes to a future but cannot be pinned down about the specifics
• vacillates between being open and being avoidant

And so on.

People who have a pattern of getting involved with emotionally unavailable partners often say that they are bored with people who are interested in them and willing to make a commitment.  

They don't feel the same level of excitement if they're not yearning and feeling off balance with their partner.  So, they get involved in one relationship after another that doesn't give them what they want or they get it sometimes but only intermittently. 

Even though these people say they want to be with someone who can make a commitment, they feel their only options are to either pursue a relationship that will ultimately fail because their partner can't commit to them or they have to be with someone where they don't feel the same sexual excitement. This is an awful dilemma.

Understanding the Psychological Roots of Eroticized Longing

The attraction to unavailable people is usually unconscious.  Adding to this complication, people who are emotionally unavailable often don't present themselves in that way.  

In Dr. Morin's book he gives a clinical example of a client named Maggie, who was involved in a succession of relationships with men who were emotionally unavailable. 

Prior to coming to therapy, her last relationship was with a married man who kept telling her he was unhappy emotionally and sexually in his marriage.  

Based on what he was telling her, Maggie believed he would eventually leave his wife to be with her. He seemed like he would rather be with her.  But whenever he had to choose who he would spend a holiday with, he chose his wife.  

After years of feeling hurt and emotionally abandoned, Maggie chose to leave that relationship.  But even after she left, she was still obsessed with this man.  She would call his house to hear his voice or park her car outside his home to get a glimpse of him.

The pattern with these succession of men was that they were capable of being warm and loving towards her at times, but they couldn't sustain it consistently.  Whenever they would give her what she wanted emotionally, she was happy.  But, inevitably, she was disappointed when these men became avoidant and emotionally unavailable again.

This is a typical pattern in these relationships:  The partner who is basically unavailable is available enough to provide their partner with intermittent reinforcement.  Each time the person who is yearning gets what they want, they hope their partner will finally be able to sustain the love and warmth, but they are continually disappointed.  

In other words, there is just enough of what they want to keep them hooked into the relationship, but it's never sustained over time and they are disappointed over and over again.

In Maggie's case, Dr. Morin explains that, on the surface, there seemed to be no logical explanation as to why Maggie couldn't find a man who would love her and be committed to her:  She was attractive, intelligent, kind and she had a lot to offer a committed partner.

Maggie explained to Dr. Morin that, over time, many men, who were stable and dependable, pursued her and they wanted to make a commitment to her.  But she was bored by these men.  Eventually, these men entered into other relationships with women who wanted to be with them.

Her unstable relationships had several things in common. These men were:

• adventurous in their everyday life as well as sexually
• somewhat rebellious 
• playful and spontaneous 
• unreliable in terms of showing up for dates, calling her or remembering special dates (birthdays, anniversaries, etc)
• unable to make a long term commitment 

They also had an emotional vulnerability at times that intrigued Maggie--giving her the feeling that they needed her.  

Their rebelliousness was the opposite of Maggie, who considered herself to be "a good girl" who was responsible and reliable.  Although she admired their rebelliousness, especially since it was a quality she didn't have, she was continually disappointed by these partners.  

Maggie also had difficulty focusing on herself in her therapy.  She focused on the emotionally unavailable man she was seeing at the time and attempted to analyze him, but she had difficulty looking at herself.  

At one point in her therapy, she said she believed if her current partner could just overcome his problems, they could be happy together.  She told her therapist she believed if she could just win him over, she would feel loved.

When her therapist asked Maggie what she thought it would be like if her boyfriend didn't need to be won over (if he just loved her), she admitted that she didn't think she could handle that.

As Maggie and her therapist explored her childhood home, at first, Maggie described an ideal family.  However, after a while, she admitted to her therapist that her father was often away and when he was at home, he was aloof with both her and her mother.  She also indicated that her mother was overwhelmed by responsibilities, sad and deeply unhappy with her marriage.  

Apparently, her mother suspected Maggie's father of having an extramarital affair, but she never confronted him about it.  Instead, she suffered in silence.  

So this was the relationship template that Maggie grew up with as a child.  Throughout her adolescence, she read books about delayed romantic fulfillment.  

She also realized in therapy that her relationships with unavailable men all had a persistent undercurrent of grief and loss as she was emotionally abandoned over and over again by these men.  

One of the keys to understanding these types of relationships and why Maggie and others continually get involved in them is that during the intermittent times when these men do provide Maggie with what she wants, she experienced excitement and passion.  

In Maggie's case, she was repeating her experiences with each of her parents.  Her father was emotionally cold and unavailable to her, and she also had a strong identification with her sad, long suffering mother, who suffered in silence.

Fortunately, many people, who are drawn to emotionally unavailable partners, eventually get tired of being continuously disappointed and this motivates them to change.  But others spend their lives in these hurtful relationships.  And many others just give up on relationships altogether.

Choosing Healthier Partners

In Dr. Morin's book, he outlines 7 Steps to change these patterns so that eroticized longing related to emotionally unavailable people are no longer erotic turn ons, which I summarize briefly below and add in italics my specific recommendations:

• Clarify Your Goals and Motivations: Get clear on what you want in a relationship. If you want someone who is emotionally available and able to make a commitment to you, make that your goal.  Erotic turn ons can change over time so that people who are emotionally unavailable on a consistent basis no longer seem exciting.  Instead, they seem boring, emotionally limited and immature.  

• Cultivate Self Affirmation: It's important for you to believe that you deserve to be with someone who loves and respects you and who can be there for you emotionally on a consistent basis. You need to be able to put yourself first.  While you're working on this, rather than criticizing yourself, be compassionate and recognize that these erotic patterns were formed early in your life.

• Navigate the Gray Zone:  The gray zone occurs when you're in the midst of change. You're no longer where you once were in terms of being attracted to emotionally unavailable people, but you haven't arrived to where you want to be in terms of making healthier relationship choices.  When you're in the gray zone, you might feel lost and confused.  It's a matter of tolerating the ambiguity of this stage until your path becomes clearer.  Gradually, your attractions to unavailable people can change, especially if you understand the psychological underpinnings to your longing, which is rooted in your earliest relationships as a child.  Sometimes when you're in the gray zone, you might choose to refrain from dating for a while until you get clear about what is driving these unhealthy attractions and you learn to turn away from them.  After a while, as you examine your eroticized longings for unavailable people, you will probably discover that these longings include fear, hatred, sadness and shame.  Once you experience these emotions, your experience of them can motivate you to steer clear of emotionally unavailable people because you know, on an emotional level, that these relationships are fraught with emotional pain.

• Acknowledge and Mourn Your Losses: Grieving the loss is part of the healing.  Once you see that your attraction to unavailable people is linked to traumatic memories, you can mourn these losses and, importantly, work through the early trauma.  

• Come to Your Senses: Attractions to unavailable people often involve a disconnection between your mind and your body (My Note: Reconnection is possible through experiential therapy that is rooted in the mind-body connection).  

• Risk the Unfamiliar: Insight into your problems isn't enough.  While insight is important, it's not enough to help you make a big change in the emotionally unhealthy attractions you feel.  (My Note: Change occurs when the mind and the body are in synch, which occurs in experiential therapy, see my article: Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy).

• Integrate Your Discoveries: Changing the people you are attracted to isn't easy.  Along the way, you will probably experience setbacks.  Working with a skilled psychotherapist who helps you through this transition can make a big difference in terms of successfully navigating through the changes and making them last.

Getting Help in Therapy

Although changing your sexual attraction to emotionally unavailable people can be daunting, many people have successfully navigated this change in therapy.

Rather than remaining stuck in relationships that are unfulfilling and hurtful in the long run, get help from a skilled psychotherapist who can help you to make a lasting change.

About Me

I am a New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT and Somatic Experiencing therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.