Society often paints men as emotionally unavailable, distant, or unresponsive, and it’s not uncommon to hear criticisms about how men just don’t open up. From relationships to friendships, men can be frequently labelled as the strugglers and stragglers in affairs of the heart who fail to connect with others on a deeper emotional level. But is this narrative entirely fair? While it’s easy to point fingers and say that men need to be more emotionally present, the reality is far more complex.
Emotional unavailability refers to a person’s difficulty in engaging with or expressing emotions, especially in close relationships. While everyone experiences moments of emotional detachment, unavailability becomes a problem when not talking about feelings has a negative and distancing effect in our important relationships.
Although some people might seem disconnected from their feelings at a surface level, deep down they may not be truly cold, so emotional unavailability isn’t necessarily about the absence of emotion. It has more to do with barriers that prevents access to expressing emotion to others.
Those barriers can include a sense of personal inadequacy, experiences of shame or even expectations of conflict if someone communicates how they really feel or what they really think. Feelings of joy, sadness or love are still felt in the emotionally unavailable soul. It’s just that those feelings can remain unspoken and walled off from other people.
Sometimes, however, guarded feelings have more to do with choice and experience rather than a character flaw or gender specific trait. For both men and women alike, it can be a learned coping mechanism shaped by early life experiences. For men in particular common causes include over-exposure in toxic masculine environments, cultural expectations and father or even mother-son relationship patterns that have their root in generational trauma.
Labelling someone who avoids deep conversations, who seems uncomfortable with vulnerability or who withdraws during conflict as unable to engage at an emotional level might keep things neat and tidy. But if we take the time to scratch the surface often patience can be rewarded with a surprise; that seemingly cold person does in fact care and feel very deeply. Their feelings are sometimes just too uncomfortable and difficult to tolerate. In such individuals emotions are experienced as highly intense and sometimes so overwhelming that talking about them and feeling them at the same time is a difficult task.
We’re still arguing about whether men who suppress feelings do so because of an intense early emotional life. On one side of the fence that argument tends towards the idea that the more an emotion is suppressed, the more force it gains when it’s finally released. On the other, it’s proposed that it’s exactly because those emotions aren’t felt in the first place that they feel so strong – because emotional tolerance has not been learned. In the middle are those who say that men feel emotions more strongly because of our biological make-up.
Even if we’re unsure if emotional unavailability is a body, habit or mind thing, what we do know today is that in some families and cultures men are still learning that there is little value in expressing their emotions and begin to suppress them very early on in life. This survival tactic becomes very useful in environments where emotions were neglected, invalidated or met with punishment. On the flip side later on in life it can limit a man’s success in new relationships and environments that call for more openness and honesty than he has been used to in his past.
The most damaging aspect of learned emotional unavailability are feelings that grow to large for someone to handle alone. Prolonged isolation, disconnection and a sense of being misunderstood are all to often experiences that are often accompanied by feelings of despair, meaninglessness and a sense of having no value, direction and worth. Short term storage of those feelings can lead to low self confidence and a loss of self respect. Mid-term for men in particular, these feelings can often trigger bouts of depression, rage and anger that are unexpected and not fully understood. If they go unexpressed or unexamined in the long term, they become harder and harder to control and can lead to more dire consequences.
The key to moving forward may lie in helping men understand where emotional barriers come from and that it’s ok to have them. When that perspective shifts, emotional unavailability starts to sound much less like a weakness or a flaw and can appear as a positive quality that worked very well in certain situations but that isn’t so useful in others. Breaking this cycle requires more emotional education spaces for men to talk so that they get the chance to express their feelings without fear of judgement or rejection. It’s in those spaces that the learning men missed out on can take place in here and now.
So maybe we can all ease up on the emotionally unavailable man. He’s doing the best he can with what he has. The good news is that now more than ever before he’s also more likely to run into other men who are charting their way one day at a time towards healthier and more open connections with themselves, others and the world around them.
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