How I stopped falling for unavailable men

Follow this path to find healthy love

In my previous post, I asked, ‘Why do I keep falling for unavailable men?’ - a question I grappled with from my 20s to my 40s.

I also shared my answers to that question, which can be summarised as:

I was emotionally unavailable myself because of my childhood attachment wounds and therefore didn’t want to risk getting hurt again by falling for an emotionally available man.

Emotionally unavailable people, by which I mean commitment-phobes, those attached to someone else, alcoholics, workaholics, those living on other continents and so forth, felt ‘safe’ to me. I could get close but not too close. We were the perfect match.

So, how did I change the habit of a lifetime?

How did I stop being drawn to unavailable guys and start being drawn to the available ones who, in the past, had seemed so dull, so dreadfully boring?

That’s what this post is about - it’s about my journey from commitmentphobia and love avoidance to true intimacy with an emotionally available man.

To me, it’s a remarkable journey and one I never thought would happen.

I thought I’d always be the one staring in bemusement at the women with diamond rings on their fingers, wondering how on earth they’d found love, or the one gawping at cosy couples, struggling to understand how they’d managed to get together and stay together, beyond six months.

But everything changed for me. It didn’t happen overnight. There was no magic bullet, quick fix or life-changing pill.

It took time, it took tears and it took tonnes of transformation (don’t you love alliteration?).

But it did change.

The answer lies within

The first step on my journey to a healthy relationship (and the title of Chapter 1 of my book, How to Fall in Love) was to step inside.

I had to get to know myself, connect with and feel my feelings and become available to my own emotions.

Some of you may already be doing this. It may come naturally to you.

If so, bravo.

For me, twenty years ago, this was a completely new behaviour.

For the previous few decades, I’d escaped my emotions, numbed them, run from them, anaesthetised them, with excess food (mostly sugar and carbs), copious amounts of booze, the highs of sex, the lows of heartbreak, punishing exercise, and the adrenaline buzz of compulsive work in a high-stakes profession (I was a news journalist for 15 years).

This process of hiding from my feelings began when I was a young girl.

My emotions, back then, were too hot to handle. I didn’t have the tools within to process how I felt about what was going on around me when I was small, and there were no healthy adults on hand to help me to make sense of my feelings and work through my pain.

Nor was it safe to express my emotions. My truth wasn’t welcome in the family home.

So I stuffed everything inside.

Goody two shoes

I became a ‘good girl’, in the words of Adam Ant, a ‘goody two shoes’ - perfect at schoolwork and sports. I was head girl, team captain and an ‘A’ student.

The only time I rebelled was when I was out of sight of my parents - on nights out with the girls when I’d drink to excess and vomit in the back of my pal’s Dad’s car or down my friend’s toilet.

At home, I towed the line.

Throughout university (at Oxford), I continued to stuff my feelings with food, booze, work, exercise, constant activity and a range of unhealthy relationships (from the ones I fantasised about in my head to the real ones that always ended, but never ended well).

Working abroad as a foreign correspondent in my 20s, I repeatedly stained the corners of my Mexico City neighbourhood with the contents of my stomach after too much booze.

Back in London in my 30s, reporting for Reuters from parliament, I blacked out in my bathroom after an extended happy hour in Covent Garden.

I ate and ate and ate, hiding my binges behind closed doors and the empty wrappers at the bottom of the bin, even though I lived alone.

And I worked myself into the ground, until I burnt out and broke down.

Self-care was an alien concept to me. Meditation was something monks did in the Tibetan hills. As for slowing down, what a ridiculous idea. Don’t you know how busy I am?

This self-harming rhythm continued until my body couldn’t take the beating anymore and until the food and the other stuff I’d used to numb my feelings stopped working.

Eventually, the pain of binge eating and my other addictive behaviours outweighed the pain I was trying to escape.

My feelings were crying out to be heard.

Scared to feel

So, I learned to feel them. Slowly at first, because feeling my feelings after years of running away from them felt terrifying (to quote a line from my TEDx talk). I honestly thought I wouldn’t survive if I felt all the pain I’d buried and suppressed for years.

But while I sometimes cried my heart out or raged into a pillow, my emotions didn’t kill me.

And gradually, I understood that feeling my feelings was the only way to heal.

I had to get in touch with my fear, my anxiety, my sadness, my anger, my loneliness, my hurt and my pain and find healthy ways to soothe myself rather than the old habits that had caused me harm and brought me to my knees.

I had to become emotionally available to myself.

This was the first step.

How could there be any other?

You’ve no doubt heard that we have to love ourselves before we love someone else.

We also have to feel our feelings before we can connect with another person on an emotional level. And we have to continue to do this in our relationships otherwise we’ll sabotage them and bring them tumbling down.

But what about the other steps beyond step one?

I will summarise a few more of them here for you but I’m already at 1000 words and our attention spans are limited these days, so I’ll reserve the full explanation for future posts and hope you’ll subscribe and stay tuned.

In brief, though, I had to heal my self-worth wounds, grow in self-esteem, come out of denial about my relationship patterns, understand my fears about falling in love, overcome my attachment disorder, find the courage to change my relationship dynamics (not easy but doable, with support), let go of a whole load of stuff, learn about boundaries from scratch, understand why I pulled and then pushed and why certain men triggered my childhood stuff, stop fantasising about a Mr Perfect who didn’t exist and understand how to date and relate as a grown-up rather than a wounded child.

Phew! I did say there was no quick fix.

I look forward to sharing all this and more with you in future posts.

Please stick around.

PS If you’re stuck in a cycle of falling for unavailable people and you’re in pain, I see you, I hear you, I’ve been there and transformation is absolutely possible.

If you need some emergency relief before my next posts, you might want to take a look at my book, How to Fall in Love, or my online course called ‘How to Find an Emotionally Available Partner’ (use the code frommidlifewithlove for fifty percent off).

PPS If you want to receive my posts on life and career but would rather not read my love, dating and relationships posts, you can switch off ‘Finding Love in Midlife’ via your account settings here: your.substack.com/account