Falling in love with an emotionally unavailable man
I was watching a movie the other day and one of the central characters made a statement that caught my attention. She said “A person can’t help who they fall in love with.” I paused for a moment and asked myself, “how many people will go astray by believing that load of nonsense.” The statement sounds very sincere and romantic, but it’s a notion that will keep you from experiencing the kind of love you deserve if you’re not careful.
A few days before I saw this movie, I received a letter from a woman and had been thinking deeply about how I would respond to her. She was involved with a man who she thought was a good match, but he had been through a traumatic relationship experience in the past, she said, and was emotionally unavailable. He was hot one day and cold the next, and she could never measure her true feelings for her. The only thing she felt she knew for sure was that she was in love with him. I suspect this woman’s letter is the reason my ears pricked up when I heard the actor make this misleading statement.
Emotionally unavailable men are distant, unattainable, so to speak. This man will give a woman enough of a clue as to who she could be if she had no problems. He enjoys the chase, he can be charming and attractive, and is apparently sympathetic to the fact that he is cheating on you, but he completely lacks the desire to commit to a relationship with you. Some women flock to this type of man because deep down the woman is afraid. She is also insecure and afraid of real commitment or else she would not please this type of man.
Proverbs 4:23 (NIV) says “Above all, take care of your heart, because life springs from it.” If you and I did not have the ability to guard and protect our hearts from foolishness, then God would not have told us to do so, but we definitely have this ability and we should use it. As children of God, we sometimes have a bad habit of picking and choosing which scriptures we will listen to. Well, it can’t get much clearer than Proverbs 4:23, and it would be a serious error of judgment to ignore it, especially when it comes to a couple. God is telling us to watch what goes in and what comes out of our hearts because what goes in and what goes out affects our quality of life.
When it comes to protecting your heart, sisters, you need to put on your superwoman cape. Not only do you have to be able to recognize an emotionally unavailable man a mile away, but you have to understand from the vertigo that it is not a beneficial move to reverse your emotions. The woman who wrote to me fell in love with such a man because she allowed it. To tell the truth, the man did not give her enough to build a quality relationship. He gave her leftovers and she accepted them. She accepted them because she thought that it was God who put the man in her life in the first place; therefore, she considered that God must have intended her to be with man. This is how we think sometimes. We think with our emotions rather than with our spiritual and mental intellect.
Every man who is interested in you is not sent by God. And every man you care about is not sent by God. We cannot be so gullible, so needy of a man’s attention that we allow ourselves to invest in someone who will not give a generous return.
1 John 4:1 KJV says “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but test the spirits whether they are of God:” This is extremely wise advice when looking for a marriage partner. God is telling us frankly not to believe in every spirit, because that is our tendency. We want to believe that just because the brother looks good, smells good and talks good, we can give him our hearts. Well, take a look at Ephesians 6:12 too. He reminds us that the physical is just a shell and that we would do well to look much deeper. He tells us that we are not fighting with flesh and blood. In other words, our battles are not with the physical being of a person. We are fighting against the spiritual evil that may have usurped the mind and heart of man.
He understands that we delude ourselves into thinking that emotionally unavailable men will love us because we haven’t dealt with what’s going on in our own souls. And if you haven’t wrestled with your own stuff, how the hell can you wrestle with theirs? It is incredibly important to develop a solid and strong relationship with Jesus Christ before we get married, because the couple these days demands that we are secure in our Lord and Savior in the depths of our souls. We desperately need the WHOLE armor of God. Without it, many of us are tricked into clinging to people and situations that are harmful to our spiritual relationship with the Father.
We fall in love with the physical attributes of the person and this attraction makes us blind to the corruption in their souls. You can’t excuse this, because no man can be responsible for emotionally feeding the sterile places inside a woman. Did you get it? Please make sure you do. If your emotional well is empty and you feel a spiritual drought within you, the human being is unable to replenish your reserves. This is a job that only Christ can accomplish. Only Jesus Christ can restore a soul.
My beloved ones, love is a choice and we can definitely help who we want to fall in love with. So if you’re single, trying to love an emotionally unavailable man is not a winning strategy; it’s a bad choice. No one is perfect, and you can’t expect the man you marry to be perfect either, but you CAN expect him to be as willing to love you wholeheartedly as you are willing to love him wholeheartedly.
THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2010 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used with permission. All rights reserved throughout the world.