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 be led astray by believing that bunch of nonsense.” The statement sounds very sincere and romantic, but it’s a notion that will prevent you from experiencing the kind of love you deserve if you’re not careful.
A few days before watching 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 believed was a good catch, 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 gauge her true feelings for her. The only thing she felt that 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, unreachable, if you will. This man will give a woman enough of a hint of who she could be if she didn’t have problems. He enjoys the chase, he can be charming and attractive, and seemingly sympathetic 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 actual 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 mistake in judgment not to pay attention to it, especially when it comes to a couple. God is telling us to watch what goes in and out of our hearts because what goes in and 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 from a mile away, but you have to understand from the giddiness that it’s not a beneficial move to reverse your emotions. The woman who wrote to me fell in love with a man like that because she let her. In truth, the man did not give her enough to build a quality relationship. He gave her her leftovers and she accepted them. She accepted them because she thought it was God who put the man in her life first; therefore, she considered that God must have intended her to be with man. This is how we sometimes think. 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’re interested in isn’t sent by God. We cannot be so gullible, so in need 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, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God:” This is extremely wise advice when looking for a partner to marry. God is frankly telling us not to believe in every spirit, because that is our tendency. We want to believe that just because 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 a person’s physical being. We are fighting against the spiritual evil that may have usurped the mind and heart of man.
Understand 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 couples these days demand that we be 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 a person’s physical attributes 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 inside, 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, 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 just as willing to love you wholeheartedly as you are to love him wholeheartedly.
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