People often reach out to me to figure out why they can’t get into a relationship, or why their relationships all end in the same way. They often arrive full of blame. They blame the apps, social media, society’s superficiality, their narcissistic ex, men and women, the economy, and so on. Indeed these things are full of flaws, as are most things touched by humans.
However, in relationships the problem is almost never any of these things. Usually the problem is emotional availability: the person has been chronically withdrawn, and will have to become emotionally available before a substantive relationship can ever begin. So, what does it mean to be emotionally available?
First, let’s start with what it is not. Emotional availability is not reciting your psychosexual history to anyone who will listen. It is not ventilating past trauma in mixed company, nor is it weeping, yelling, or any other demonstrative display of emotion.
Emotional availability is engagement with three fundamental elements: attention, patience, and desire. With all three in play, emotional availability becomes possible. Remove any element, and the person reads as emotionally unavailable.
Attention
Emotional availability is attentional availability. When spending time with someone we want to connect with, we have to be actually paying attention to what the other person says and does. In a state of unavailability, we cannot pay attention. Our focus drifts to the noodles on the plate or the squirrel out the window. Our eyes glaze over. We wait to talk.
Many artistic people struggle with attention because in a creative context, unfocused daydreaming can generate a rich wellspring of ideas and directions. However, in the presence of another person generously sharing their mind, daydreaming signals stinginess and precludes connection. Attention requires energy, and paying attention is exhausting. But in order to reap the benefits of connection, this energy must be generously invested.
Patience
A relationship is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time. The tendency to rush in and spend weeks in a row with a new person is generally counterproductive, as is limiting contact to twice a month. The contact becomes either so intense that the relationship quickly takes over the two partners’ identities, or so minimal that the relationship never gains any momentum. After quickly confirming mutual desire, both people have to live patiently in a state of simmering tension between dependence and independence for a while.
This tension generates anxiety in everyone, and in order to grow a relationship, we have to tolerate the stress and live with the uncertainty for as long as it takes. Anxiety can provoke us to collapse this tension, either through overfeeding or starving the relationship, but unfortunately this subverts the slow growth that emotionally secure relationships require. Patiently enduring this state of tension and uncertainty is mandatory.
Desire
Emotional availability is knowing your desire and communicating what you want. People like desirous friends and partners because desire has a compounding effect. One person’s position of wanting enables the other to more openly want, and this mutual authorization compounds over time on both sides of the relationship.
In order to get what you want, you have to ask for things. I often speak with people who feel frustrated that life consistently lets them down and never gives them what they want. It often turns out that they don’t ask for what they want, or even know what they want. If you can’t put your desire into words, the search is over before it begins.
In a state of emotional availability, we exude confidence through simple expressions of desire. Confidence is not bravado or posturing; confidence is simply wanting things, openly and notoriously.
Strategy
For people who struggle with emotional availability, the quickest hack is eye contact. Eye contact strongly signals attention and desire, and builds generative tension between two minds by signaling focus and engagement. People avoid it for a host of reasons, but by forcing yourself to make eye contact, your specific struggles with emotional availability will come to the surface and will thereby become more available to observation and correction.
Another hack: do fewer drugs. Recreational drugs (including alcohol and off-label ADHD meds) simulate emotional connection in social contexts and therefore appeal to emotionally unavailable people. Many passionate partnerships have been theoretically hatched over shots and lines, but vanishingly few meaningful relationships have emerged. If emotional unavailability might be a theme in your life, slow down on the booze and drugs.
Conclusion
All this patient engagement with attention and desire can be exhausting. Emotional availability requires stamina, which must be built slowly. Getting to know someone is always an approach, never an arrival, and no one ever fully gets there. On the bright side, substantive relationships built through emotional availability never truly end, and they somehow live on and evolve in our minds and bodies even long after the partner is gone. Because such relationships continue to pay dividends throughout life, it is imperative to invest in emotional availability as soon as possible, to generate compounding emotional riches.