TO BE AVOIDED AT ALL COSTS
Recently, we’ve had blogs from two ladies on our site who were disappointed and hurt by men they’d met on site.
This is painful – sometimes in online relationships, one factor gets overlooked – the woman or man you are talking to online is a PERSON, with feelings and emotions – they are not some inanimate object in cyberspace, on the receiving end of an email.
The worst kind of hurt comes from becoming enamoured with an emotionally unavailable person. I had such a man in my life once, an Englishman. He wanted to be loved, to feel that someone gave a damn if he was dead or alive, but he was incapable of returning any kind of a loving response. In fact emotionally, he was a barren wilderness, as sere, dry and unfeeling as a grain of sand. This man actually boasted to me that he’d never written a love letter to a woman – he was proud of it in fact. To him apparently, it was an achievement never to have loved a woman or committed himself to her to the point where he’d send her a love letter.
He was also the unhappiest man I’ve ever met, who drowned his sorrows in a massive consumption of alcohol, along with being a chain smoker, lighting one cigarette off the stub of another.
He’d once been a business tycoon, a partner in a highly successful international business making what he described as “shed-loads of money.” Unfortunately, it foundered, due to being unable to compete with the Chinese, who marketed the same products at a greatly reduced price. With the collapse of his business, his second marriage failed, and he shrank into a shadow of the man he once had been. The spark of life had gone, and he said to me “I don’t care if I live or die – what do I have to live for?”
Could it be that, if he’d had a happy marriage with a woman he loved, and who loved him, not for his money (which sadly was the case) but for himself, that just maybe he would’ve found some purpose in his life?
I wonder.
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Interesting Jojo. I think a lot of people are just not romantic or believe in having to express in words or letters, how they feel.I am a great believer in actions speaking louder than words. Some people cringe at love letters….all that gush and no kind acts to back up the words. I think your article brings us back to the “what if….” scenario, the corner all of us might have taken at some time in our life, if we had not decided to walk on.. A very thought provoking piece, thank you
Thanks for your insightful comment ilgner – I really appreciate it.
However, the thrust of my blog wasn’t centered on the fact that this bloke was proud about never having written a love letter in his life – the focus was on the fact that he was emotionally unavailable, because he couldn’t feel emotions.
jo jo as always a really good read, but there are quite a few folks like that…men and women who find it difficult to show love for someone or something 🙂
Great blog Jo. It’s one thing not to be expressive, but your readers might not understand that emotionally unavailable is something different. Someone who is emotionally unavailable can drain the life out of the person that loves them because they always have them at arm’s length. A friend of mine in such a relationship got to hate the phrase, “it goes without saying.” When you love someone, you should be able to express it. For those who can’t, they need to question what happened to them in their lives that makes them unable to let someone totally in.
In answer to sunflowers statement, Trust. When you’re stabbed in the back by someone close it hurts.
I hear you Mart.