Why We Attract Unavailable Single People Is Not What It Used To Be

My dating life has been quite the social experiment as an adult. A common thread through the entire history of it has been attracting unavailable women. The commonly held reason/theory for why people attract unavailable people is tied to some deep-rooted childhood trauma from the clinical perspective, and from the marriage-minded perspective we’re just unavailable ourselves.

With the roulette game that is online dating, it’s become dated.

I’m not saying that I am free from childhood trauma by any stretch. In fact, the earliest experience of childhood trauma was the sequence of events starting with my best childhood friend Robbie moving away from our town in the summer of 1986 to Arizona and starting the revolving door that has been my social life ever since. That year I started the first grade, and didn’t know anyone, and my best friend of a few years had moved away.

Is this why emotionally unavailable 51 year old contact me (first) online to eventually after a week and a half of interaction told me that what they’ve been through with their spouse — whom they were “madly in love with for 30 years” — and didn’t leave when the situation became toxic until 10–12 years later gives them a free pass at hating men?

Don’t worry, she doesn’t hate men.

It was definitely a mistake to interact with this person, but the interaction wasn’t long, and it’s all a crap shoot.

The most important connection I had growing was with my parents. My mom especially, because as I was born in an era when maternity leave did not exist in higher education. I was born on the Saturday after Thanksgiving and my mom was back teaching classes on Tuesday. I spent quite a bit of time quietly on my mom’s back as she taught her college classes, and as I grew older I was sometimes sitting in her college classes as she taught drawing stuff with those great toxic markers we had in the ’80s.

Does being particularly close with my mom mean a recipe for lots of short interactions with emotional trainwrecks?

In my 20s I know for a fact I was not available, even though I worked at dating. I was a trainwreck myself. I was my own worst enemy to the max and didn’t learn to take responsibility for my self-centered-ness and financial ruin until I was nearly 30 and left the bankruptcy hearing finally feeling a sense of relief and the ability to afford to eat. And people started lining up in back of me in line at the grocery store in ways that hadn’t in the years previous.

By the middle of my 30s I figured out relationships (romantic or otherwise) are not completely about me. I stopped taking the rejection personally, and more importantly, I started looking for quality over quantity — I finally realized when someone online invites you out for coffee or a drink after a short interaction, it’s not an invitation. It’s a veiled form of rejection that someone who was not interested in the first place says because they’re not secure enough to be honest, because they won’t get what they want (a meaningless social interaction for self-serving purposes) if they were honest.

Nobody wants to meet anyone who says “I’m not at all interested in you, but would you like to meet for a drink so I can get what I want from this transaction without any regard for your time or feelings?”

Or put another way, nobody checks into a hotel with a wrecking ball in front of it.

Which brings me to the whole point of this essay. By the time we get to our 40s and 50s, the psychological reasons for attracting unavailable single people simply becomes a function of what’s available. If you’re a guy, who’s average looking, and emotionally mature, you’re going to be surrounded by an online dating market that is made up of people your age who are carrying around baggage that has manifested itself from adulthood itself.

Hmm…let’s see:

Ugly recent divorce. Pretty self explanatory. Who is telling these people it’s a good idea to date? Or better yet, who is telling these people not to disclose this information in their dating profiles only to find out like right when you’re about to meet?

Self-worth is derived only through personal achievement. Career-focused with two side hustles. Or just career-focused expecting happiness from a partner who is even more career-focused. Because money. And because who needs emotional maturity anyway?

One of the beauties of online dating is that you don’t even have to meet these trainwrecks to know they’re trainwrecks. You’re not attracting them. They’re there. Telling you in plain sight that they have no time because all of their time is devoted to their job, their side hustles, and that their kids will always come first, or in some cases, they’ll pick an animal over you every time. Now that last one, is that just repressed Puritanism?

The point is that it’s gotten so bad in the US that you can spot unavailable people without even having to go out with them. We’re beyond the deep-rooted-child-trauma causes for attracting unavailable people. Unavailable single people are like the fruit flies in the trash every summer in my place, except they’re there every season.

We’re also beyond the traditional stereotypes that only men are unavailable. Nope. This has become a more evening playing field just as well-to-do white women are thinking more and more that what’s best for well-to-do white women is what’s best for *all* women. But that’s for a different day, and a much more delicate subject matter, because white women telling white men to “check” their white privilege need to look in the mirror and see that ghost of well-known white supremacist Susan B. Anthony cackling before pointing that finger.

Anyone notice nobody’s talking about intersectional feminism anymore?

Anyway…

I’ve been super fortunate not to have long interactions with the various trainwrecks I’ve met on my dating odyssey — it’s absolutely better to be single than to be in a toxic relationship. This is an absolutely true thing. Being married to a complete asshole is an emotionally damaging thing. Choosing to stay married to a complete asshole and doing it a decade late, and resenting the person for it is your problem, not theirs.

Now, my brother and I are polar opposites. Not only has he managed to attract emotionally unavailable women, but he’s managed to marry them. Twice. But he is codependent, just like his father (not my dad, tho — we’re half siblings) and he can’t be single for more than 5 minutes, and he got engaged to his second wife before divorcing his first. What could possibly go wrong? Well, his second wife decided to get a tummy tuck in Mexico, and well, it went wrong and she’s been in a US hospital for weeks battling a life threatening infection.

And mind you, these are professional people!

What rational person goes to Mexico to get a tummy tuck? And has a significant other who thinks it’s a perfectly great idea?

It’s not like getting a root canal in Canada…or maybe it was supposed to be like getting a root canal in Canada?

Psychologists need to study the nature of single people over the age of 40 and the struggles people have with vulnerability and intimacy. It’s gotten so far beyond whatever childhood trauma. Self-centered-ness is self-centered-ness. You either figure out that having a real relationship is not entirely about you, or you and your job, or you and your kids, or you, your job, and your side hustles, or you, your job and your jet-setting hobby, you, your job, and needing to be on a mountain top all the time.

Therapy is really letting people down, too. People learn all the buzz words in therapy. They learn all the things that are good and they put that stuff in their dating profile. But these are aspirations. Until people learn to be honest with themselves which starts with taking responsibility for their part in whatever adulthood trauma they’re dealing (Like taking responsibility for holding onto angst caused by a defective parent for decades) we can’t be honest with ourselves. At some point we have to forgive people because it’s better to forgive then it is to hold onto old shit for decades.

We just need to stop assuming that we’re attracting unavailable partners in our 40s and 50s because of some ancient unresolved childhood trauma because unavailability is so rampant that you can see it without interacting with someone.

Well that was a fun rant. Hopefully there is some entertainment value in it.