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.
Relationships take some awareness and take some skill to get right. The truth is that many of us were not brought up with models of great relationships. We weren't taught, consciously or unconsciously, helpful pragmatic tools and skills about how to be in a relationship successfully. So we bumble our way along trying to figure it out as we go.
There are a few reasons why relationships can be so difficult. Here are two of them.
In Part Un I wrote about shifting attention to oneself when considering the challenges in your relationship.
My own relationship was asking me to share my work-in-progress thoughts. Y’know instead of waiting for that day when I’ve thought everything through and figured it all out and can present what I want, or what’s bothering me, in a perfect package. Or get to a point of such discomfort I can no longer keep quiet.
I get it. I’ve spent time in past relationships hoping it would change, or my partner would change, or I would somehow wake up one day feeling different and not be bothered by THAT thing anymore. Or if this One Little Thing would just change already to make everything different.
When I found out about this it hit me hard. Sometimes we start fights because we're actually missing feeling the presence of the other person.
I know it sounds fucked up, and it is an ingeniously perverse strategy - when we're missing feeling connected to our partner we do what we know gets us attention and into connection. Even that’s starting a fight.
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.
A lot of relationship advice (including mine!) can be focused on what to do when your relationship is in a crisis, on how to fix specific problems, and what to do when things are feeling really uncomfortable.
So here's something that you can do when you're not in crisis, when you're not in struggle, because the focus is more on creating a strong foundation. And it’s also something you can do if you are struggling as it will help create some intimacy and calm.
