He's 17. On Friday I dropped him off at university for his first year.
We spent most of the week prepping - creating lists, packing, shopping, packing, checking lists. It was stressful at times.
He's not the most organized person, I'm better than I was.
He's prone to procrastination and forgetting, and my dance was to maintain a gentle forward pressure without losing my temper. I shared my impatience and worry with him that he wouldn't be ready in time, in the way I know how that minimizes the other person experiencing blame.
The term ‘emotionally unavailable’ seems to have risen in visibility in the over the last 2-3 years. It certainly wasn’t familiar to me when I was in my mid-30s back in the mid-’00s.
What was familiar was a numbness that I experienced as a not-knowing, a fog, an absence of connection to myself.
I remember a friend asking me about my relationship, posing the question ‘what do you want?’ I couldn’t answer. I felt numb and confused, confronted by that simple question.
I wasn't actively taught to be emotionally unavailable.
My dad has a big laugh. He would unleash it watching something funny on TV. I remember lying in bed as a kid when my parents would have guests over, hearing it burst out in response to a joke or a quip (often one of his own).
I hear a lot about emotional unavailability on the socials and the blogs.
It's most often the term used to describe men in relationship.
My understanding is that it describes a man who is not emotionally expressive. Detached from his emotions. A man with a limited emotional vocabulary. A man with a lack of emotional literacy.
This post is a direct follow-up to my previous blog about how showing appreciations can help build a stronger foundation to our relationships.
My post was about appreciations in general, and included some differences in the way men and women feel appreciated (and I’m making broad generalisations here). I received some feedback from my partner that the examples given would work great for a man, and there is a way of showing appreciation that lands more deeply for a woman.
