I was reading a man’s journal entry about his attraction to emotionally unavailable women and how this is acting out a familiar pattern from his childhood of having an alcoholic and therefore emotionally unavailable mother. He talks about meeting a woman who he feels he could “fall madly in love with” and how it immediately lets him know that she is potentially an unavailable woman – because that is who he is attracted to on a deep level.
He says he enters the relationship not as a victim but to see what happens as a lesson for him and his life. He says he wanted to explore if he could do it differently and so he made a commitment to himself to let the romantic love energy vibrate around him because he hadn’t been in love in a while but he made a commitment to himself to not let himself get hurt if she wasn’t doing what he wanted her to do, or wasn’t opening up to the potential of how wonderful they could be together, especially when she was reacting to her own fears and wounds, and to keep in constant mind that he chose to venture down the path that way and any feelings would be his responsibility or the consequences of his choice and they would not be her fault. “She does not have the power to hurt me.”
He also writes about knowing that he doesn’t give her any power over his self-esteem. How she reacts to him will not be because there is something wrong with him, or because he has done something wrong, because his self worth is not dependent on an outside source, including, and especially, the person he choose to fall in love with. Also he commits himself to not beat himself up for the choices he makes but rather strives to have compassion for the wounds he has uncovered.
In the end, the woman marries a man who cannot tell her he loves her and he spends endless hours on the phone commiserating with her.
Is romantic love a choice? Are we powerless over our addictions, who we fall in love with? Perhaps I have been behaving this way with a recent person I chose to give my heart to – I went once again for unavailable because it is so familiar – and what better time than the present to look at my patterns and try to move into a different cycle of being and loving?