Unavailable Man Quotes

The traditional gender ideals of the strong-silent man who plays his cards close to his chest and the mysterious woman who disguises her feelings with coyness go so far as to make a virtue of being unavailable and secretive. But wholehearted intimacy can develop only where two people are equally forthcoming and self-revelatory. To take the risk of loving, we must become vulnerable enough to test the radical proposition that knowledge of another and self-revelation will ultimately increase rather than decrease love. It is an awe-ful risk.

CAUSE AND EFFECT You can give a man who has never given you a good word, Volumes of knowledge. And you can give a man who has never given you a gift, A thousand gifts. You can give that same man who has never given you a blessing, A thousand blessings. And you can offer that same man who has never Offered a hand to help you grow, Seeds to help him grow a garden. And while you have never seen true kindness from his direction, You still offer to help push him up. And in the end, He only wants to be the hand that pulls you down. Do not worry, my friends. Cause and effect was written by the stars of the universe. He who passes suffering onto others Will also have that suffering passed onto his own children. Gifts he feels he should have in the next lifetime will be unobtainable. And the help he needs to grow in the next lifetime will be unavailable. And the people he cuts down that were good to him, Will cut him down in the next lifetime. What goes around does come back again, Even through your children. There is a vibrational effect In every action, Just as there is A vibration that rings From every letter In every word. No cause occurs without effect And no effect occurs without cause. No unjust action goes without penalty And no action or thought Flows unnoticed Throughout The universe.

you need to address your own availability because if you were truly available, a relationship with an unavailable man that detracts from you wouldn’t be attractive and you’d have ‘folded’ ages ago. You wouldn’t participate in the emotional dishonesty and avoidance because it would be in conflict with you being emotionally available and emotionally honest.

It takes confidence to be wholeheartedly intimate and passionately committed. Men who are emotionally unavailable have a self-confidence deficit, plain and simple. So man up and get rid of those insecurities or whatever it is that keeps you from opening up. Because if you're not man enough to talk about your own feelings, then you're not man enough to be in a committed relationship.

People THRIVE on positive reinforcement. They wither with criticism.

The biggest problem with being with an emotionally unavailable man is that his words and actions tends to confuse women,

Mr Unavailable’s inadvertently complicit partner is you, the Fallback Girl, the woman he habitually defaults to or ‘falls back’ on to have his needs met while selling you short in the process. Accommodating his idiosyncrasies and fickle whims, you’re ripe for a relationship with him because you are unavailable yourself (although you may not know it) and are slipping your own commitment issues in through the back door behind his. You get blinded by chemistry, sex, common interests and the promise of what he could be, if only he changed or you turned into The Perfect Woman. Too understanding and making far too many excuses for him, you have some habits and beliefs that are standing in the way of you having a mutually, fulfilling healthy relationship…with an available man. Pursuing or having relationships with Mr Unavailable is symbolic of your need to learn to love yourself more and to set some boundaries and have better standards.

After such knowledge, and given the persistence of racial violence and the unavailability of legal protection, I asked myself, what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter?

The flesh,' as Saint Paul used the term, refers, ironically, not to our bodies but to fallen human nature. The 'carnal' spirit is the one that devours things for itself and refuses to make them an oblation to God. The carnal spirit is cruel, egocentric, avaricious, gluttonous, and lecherous, and as such us fevered, restless, and divided. The spiritual man, on the other hand, is alone the man who both knows what flesh is for and can enter into its amplitude. The lecher, for example, supposes that he knows more about love than the virgin or the continent man. He knows nothing. Only the virgin and the faithful spouse knows what love is about. The glutton supposes that he knows the pleasures of food, but the true knowledge of food is unavailable to his dribbling and surfeited jowls. The difference between the carnal man and the spiritual man is not physical. They may look alike and weigh the same. The different lies, rather, between one's being divided, snatching and grabbing at things, even nonphysical things like fame and power, or being whole and receiving all things as Adam was meant to receive them, in order to offer them as an oblation to their Giver.

You do not have to fix the whole equation. You do have to fix your part of it. This is done by accepting complete, 100 percent responsibility for everything you are thinking, feeling, doing, or not doing. It is letting go of blaming ANYone for ANYthing. It is growing up and being an adult.

They have learned not to expect their father to attend to them or to be expressive about much of anything. They have come to expect him to be psychologically unavailable. They have also learned that he is not accountable in his emotional absence, that Mother does not have the power either to engage him or to confront him. In other words, Father’s neglect and Mother’s ineffectiveness at countering it teach the boys that, in this family at least, men’s participation is not a responsibility but rather a voluntary and discretionary act. Third, they learn that Mother, and perhaps women in general, need not be taken too seriously. Finally, they learn that not just Mother but the values she manifests in the family—connection, expressivity—are to be devalued and ignored. The subtext message is, “engage in ‘feminine’ values and activities and risk a similar devaluation yourself.” The paradox for the boys is that the only way to connect with their father is to echo his disconnection. Conversely, being too much like Mother threatens further disengagement or perhaps, even active reprisal. In this moment, and thousands of other ordinary moments, these boys are learning to accept psychological neglect, to discount nurture, and to turn the vice of such abandonment into a manly virtue.

The bottom line is you must do your part to change the system. It will not get better without your active, loving participation.

it would make things much simpler for a man like him if he knew she were unavailable.

I’m not running,” he growled. “I’m making myself unavailable,

Most people in the psychology field believe that if we do not get a child to bond at a deep level with someone by age eight, we have lost them. We can never recover them and teach them empathy. Never.

Oh, it is true enough. I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb (an old country saying, not of much account, but it will do for a rough soldier), and so I will speak my mind, regardless of your pleasure, and without hoping or intending to get your pardon. Why, Miss Everdene, it is in this manner that your good looks may do more harm than good in the world." The sergeant looked down the mead in critical abstraction. "Probably some one man on an average falls in love with each ordinary woman. She can marry him: he is content, and leads a useful life. Such women as you a hundred men always covet—your eyes will bewitch scores on scores into an unavailing fancy for you—you can only marry one of that many. Out of these say twenty will endeavour to drown the bitterness of despised love in drink; twenty more will mope away their lives without a wish or attempt to make a mark in he world, because they have no ambition apart from their attachment to you; twenty more—the susceptible person myself possibly among them—will be always draggling after you, getting where they may just see you, doing desperate things. Men are such constant fools! The rest may try to get over their passion with more or less success. But all these men will be saddened. And not only those ninety-nine men, but the ninety-nine women they might have married are saddened with them. There's my tale. That's why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race.

Why did it have to be this way? Why did she not feel attracted to this boy, who was kind and personable, close to her in age and probably good for her? Instead it was the professor for whom she secretly yearned - a man not only old, unknown and unavailable, but also wrong. It puzzled her endlessly that she was not, and had never really been, interested in happiness - that magic word that was the subject of so many books, workshops and TV shows. She did not want to be unhappy. Of course, she didn't. It just did not occur to her to seek happiness as a worthwhile goal in life. How otherwise could she allow herself to carry a torch for a man like Azur?

Thus despite the bland assertions of sociologists, “high visibility” actually rendered one un -visible—whether at high noon in Macy’s window or illuminated by flaming torches and flashbulbs while undergoing the ritual sacrifice that was dedicated to the ideal of white supremacy. After such knowledge, and given the persistence of racial violence and the unavailability of legal protection, I asked myself, what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter?

Mr Unavailable blindly assumes that he acts as he does because he’s never met the ‘right’ woman. His ego forgets to remind himself that in his unavailable state, he’s not the right man – for anyone. By playing silly games (even if he doesn’t think he is), he gets to let himself off the hook and continue looking to the future where he thinks that his perfect woman exists. He’s failed to recognise that his resistance in relationships isn’t caused by the women he’s involved with, but by himself.

What a set up for little girls! What a set up to be taught a wonderful prince will come along and meet all your emotional needs while at the same time we are teaching our little boys not to feel. To be tough. To cut off from their emotional selves. The

It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000). The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between “I wrote” and “I have written.” The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care [all cited in The New York Times, June 18, 1989]. English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. “Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist” [The Miracle of Language, page 54]. On the other hand, other languages have facilities we lack. Both French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition (respectively connaître and kennen) and knowledge that results from understanding (savoir and wissen). Portuguese has words that differentiate between an interior angle and an exterior one. All the Romance languages can distinguish between something that leaks into and something that leaks out of. The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. (Wouldn’t they just?) It’s sgriob. And we have nothing in English to match the Danish hygge (meaning “instantly satisfying and cozy”), the French sang-froid, the Russian glasnost, or the Spanish macho, so we must borrow the term from them or do without the sentiment. At the same time, some languages have words that we may be pleased to do without. The existence in German of a word like schadenfreude (taking delight in the misfortune of others) perhaps tells us as much about Teutonic sensitivity as it does about their neologistic versatility. Much the same could be said about the curious and monumentally unpronounceable Highland Scottish word sgiomlaireachd, which means “the habit of dropping in at mealtimes.” That surely conveys a world of information about the hazards of Highland life—not to mention the hazards of Highland orthography. Of

Why? Because we are setting up little boys to be emotionally unavailable men and, at the same time, setting up little girls to be emotionally unhappy women. How? By teaching our little girls that they are princesses. Special. And that someday their prince will come. Not only will their prince come, but he will be strong, smart, romantic and will take care of their every princess need and desire. Little princesses are taught the fantasy that they will be whisked away by the man of their dreams. That man being, of course, someone who will meet all of her needs — especially emotionally. That man will have undying love and devotion for the princess. And, by the way, no needs of his own.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. (page 86) Even under the most horrific circumstances, Frankl reminds us that we all have choice. Everyday, at every juncture. Choice about our thoughts, our feelings, our attitudes

women are socially conditioned to believe that they need a man in their life pretty much as soon as they become adults, whereas men are programmed to sow their wild oats and spread their options. Unfortunately while he’s terrified of missing out, his friends all drop off the radar and settle down, and after a while he becomes the odd one out, clinging to his bachelorhood and claiming that he hasn’t met the ‘right’ woman yet and that they’re all ‘psychos’ or ‘too needy’. At some point he’ll likely have a midlife crisis and panic himself into his version of commitment to some poor woman who thinks she’s hit the jackpot.

Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole Where the words had to come to an end. And end they did there, last words, famous or not. It suited me down to the ground. So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems, hovers about while she reads them, calls her His Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns. Just picture my face when I heard - Ye Gods - a familiar knock-knock at Death’s door. Him. Big O. Larger than life. With his lyre and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize. Things were different back then. For the men, verse-wise, Big O was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee, silver tears. Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself, I should know.) And given my time all over again, rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc. In fact girls, I’d rather be dead. But the Gods are like publishers, usually male, and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal. Orpheus strutted his stuff. The bloodless ghosts were in tears. Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years. Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers. The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears. Like it or not, I must follow him back to our life - Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife - to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths… He’d been told that he mustn’t look back or turn round, but walk steadily upwards, myself right behind him, out of the Underworld into the upper air that for me was the past. He’d been warned that one look would lose me for ever and ever. So we walked, we walked. Nobody talked. Girls, forget what you’ve read. It happened like this - I did everything in my power to make him look back. What did I have to do, I said, to make him see we were through? I was dead. Deceased. I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late. Past my sell-by date… I stretched out my hand to touch him once on the back of the neck. Please let me stay. But already the light had saddened from purple to grey. It was an uphill schlep from death to life and with every step I willed him to turn. I was thinking of filching the poem out of his cloak, when inspiration finally struck. I stopped, thrilled. He was a yard in front. My voice shook when I spoke - Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece. I’d love to hear it again… He was smiling modestly, when he turned, when he turned and he looked at me. What else? I noticed he hadn’t shaved. I waved once and was gone. The dead are so talented. The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.

What more she said, or what de Crucis answered, he could never afterward recall. He had a confused sense of having cried out a last unavailing protest, faintly, inarticulately, like a man struggling to make himself heard in a dream; then the room grew dark about him, and in its stead he saw the old chapel at Donnaz, with its dimly-gleaming shrine, and heard the voice of the chaplain, harsh and yet strangely shaken:— “My chief prayer for you is that, should you be raised to this eminence, it may be at a moment when such advancement seems to thrust you in the dust.” Odo lifted his head and saw de Crucis standing alone before him. “I am ready,” he said.

The doctrine of justification by faith—a Biblical truth, and a blessed relief from sterile legalism and unavailing self-effort—has in our time fallen into evil company and been interpreted by many in such manner as actually to bar men from the knowledge of God. The whole transaction of religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless. Faith may now be exercised without a jar to the moral life and without embarrassment to the Adamic ego. Christ may be "received" without creating any special love for Him in the soul of the receiver. The man is "saved," but he is not hungry nor thirsty after God. In fact he is specifically taught to be satisfied and encouraged to be content with little.

Between the pleasure of a kiss and of what a man and woman do in bed seems to me only a gradation. A kiss, for instance, is not to be minimized, or its value judged by anyone else. I wonder do these men grade their pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a question of pleasure after all, and what's the use debating the pleasure of an ice cream cone versus a football gamme--or a Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa. I'll leave that to the philosophers. But their attitude was that I must be somehow demented or blind (plus a kind of regret, I thought, at the fact that a fairly attractive woman is presumably unavailable to men). [...] The most important point I did not mention and was not thought of by anyone--that the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing that happens between men and women. It was said or at least implied yesterday that my present course would bring me to the depths of human vice and degeneration. Yes, I have sunk a good deal since they took you from me. It is true, if I were to go on like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial thing--that is degeneration. Or to live against one's grain, that is degeneration by definition.

she had to question Mariana’s assessment of him as a loving parent. The man Ruth heard described sounded authoritarian, cold, emotionally unavailable, often critical and highly unkind—even cruel. None of these qualities had anything to do with love. “Love isn’t conditional,” Ruth said. “It’s not dependent on jumping through hoops to please someone—and always failing. You can’t love someone if you’re afraid of them, Mariana. I know it’s hard to hear. It’s a kind of blindness—but unless you wake up and see clearly, it will persist throughout your whole life, affecting how you see yourself, and others too.” Mariana shook her head. “You’re wrong about my father,” she said. “I know he’s difficult—but he loves me. And I love him.” “No,” said Ruth firmly. “At best, let’s call it a desire to be loved. At worst, it’s a pathological attachment to a narcissistic man:

CONFESSIONS OF A CLING-ON If a man is walking in a forest and makes a statement, but there is no woman around to hear it, is he still wrong? Or if a woman is walking in the forest and asks for something, and there is no man around to hear her, is she still needy? These Zen koans capture some of the frustrations people have with the opposite gender. And where is the dividing line between someone simply having a need, and someone being a needy person? Is it written in heaven somewhere what is too much need, too little need and just right amount of need for the “normal person?” Ask pop radio psychologists Dr. Laura, or Sally Jessie Rafael, or any number of experts who claim to know for sure, and you’ll get some very different answers. And isn’t it fun to see the new sophisticated ways our advanced culture is developing to make each other wrong? You better keep up with the latest technical terminology or you will be at the mercy of those who do. Whoever has read the latest most recent self-help book has the clear advantage. Example: Man: “Get real, would you! Your Venusian codependency has got you trapped in your learned helpless victim act, and indulging in your empowerment phobia again.” Woman: “When you call me codependent, I feel (notice the political correctness of the feeling word) that you are simply projecting your own disowned, unintegrated, emotionally unavailable Martian counterdependency to protect your inner ADD two year old from ever having to grow up. So there!” Speaking of diagnosis, remember the codependent. Worrying about codependency was like a virus that everyone had from about 1988 to 1994. Here’s a prayer to commemorate the codependent: The Codependent’s Prayer by Kelly Bryson Our Authority, which art in others, self-abandonment be thy name. Codependency comes when others’ will is done, At home, as it is in the workplace. give us this day our daily crumbs of love. And give us a sense of indebtedness, As we try to get others to feel indebted to us. And lead us not into freedom, but deliver us from awareness. For thine is the slavery and the weakness and the dependency, For ever and ever. Amen.

listening to Mariana, and saying very little … one day Ruth finally interrupted. What she said was simple, direct, and devastating. Ruth suggested, as gently as she could, that Mariana was in denial about her father. That after everything she had heard, she had to question Mariana’s assessment of him as a loving parent. The man Ruth heard described sounded authoritarian, cold, emotionally unavailable, often critical and highly unkind—even cruel. None of these qualities had anything to do with love. “Love isn’t conditional,” Ruth said. “It’s not dependent on jumping through hoops to please someone—and always failing. You can’t love someone if you’re afraid of them, Mariana. I know it’s hard to hear. It’s a kind of blindness—but unless you wake up and see clearly, it will persist throughout your whole life, affecting how you see yourself, and others too.” Mariana shook her head. “You’re wrong about my father,” she said. “I know he’s difficult—but he loves me. And I love him.” “No,” said Ruth firmly. “At best, let’s call it a desire to be loved. At worst, it’s a pathological attachment to a narcissistic man: a melting pot of gratitude, fear, expectation

This fear of life is not just an imaginary bogy, but a very real panic, which seems disproportionate only because its real source is unconscious and therefore projected: the young, growing part of the personality, if prevented from living or kept in check, generates fear and changes into fear. The fear seems to come from the mother, but actually it is the deadly fear of the instinctive, unconscious, inner man who is cut off from life by the continual shrinking back from reality. If the mother is felt as the obstacle, she then becomes the vengeful pursuer. Naturally it is not the real mother, although she too may seriously injure her child by the morbid tenderness with which she pursues it into adult life, thus prolonging the infantile attitude beyond the proper time. It is rather the mother-imago that has turned into a lamia.63 (Cf. pls. XXXVIIIa, XLVIII.) The mother-imago, however, represents the unconscious, and it is as much a vital necessity for the unconscious to be joined to the conscious as it is for the latter not to lose contact with the unconscious. Nothing endangers this connection more in a man than a successful life; it makes him forget his dependence on the unconscious. The case of Gilgamesh is instructive in this respect: he was so successful that the gods, the representatives of the unconscious, saw themselves compelled to deliberate how they could best bring about his downfall. Their efforts were unavailing at first, but when the hero had won the herb of immortality (cf. pl. XIX) and was almost at his goal, a serpent stole the elixir of life from him while he slept.

Indeed, at 92.5, LeMond’s is among the highest VO2s ever recorded by any athlete. VO2 is reckoned to be the most significant measurement in endurance athletes; it refers to the volume of oxygen, in liters per minute, transported by the athlete during exercise. The Norwegian cross-country skiers Espen Harald Bjerke and Bjørn Dæhlie are believed to have the highest ever recorded VO2, at 96. By way of comparison, Lance Armstrong’s has been reported as 85; that of another multiple Tour winner, Miguel Indurain, was 88. Figures appear to be unavailable for Bernard Hinault. LeMond’s VO2 of 92.5 could, therefore, be the highest ever recorded by a cyclist. By way of further comparison, the “normal” VO2 for a man in his 20s is between 38 and 43.

THE NEXT DAY WAS RAIN-SOAKED and smelled of thick sweet caramel, warm coconut and ginger. A nearby bakery fanned its daily offerings. A lapis lazuli sky was blanketed by gunmetal gray clouds as it wept crocodile tears across the parched Los Angeles landscape. When Ivy was a child and she overheard adults talking about their break-ups, in her young feeble-formed mind, she imagined it in the most literal of essences. She once heard her mother speaking of her break up with an emotionally unavailable man. She said they broke up on 69th Street. Ivy visualized her mother and that man breaking into countless fragments, like a spilled box of jigsaw pieces. And she imagined them shattered in broken shards, being blown down the pavement of 69th Street. For some reason, on the drive home from Marcel’s apartment that next morning, all Ivy could think about was her mother and that faceless man in broken pieces, perhaps some aspects of them still stuck in cracks and crevices of the sidewalk, mistaken as grit. She couldn’t get the image of Marcel having his seizure out of her mind. It left a burning sensation in the center of her chest. An incessant flame torched her lungs, chest, and even the back door of her tongue. Witnessing someone you cared about experiencing a seizure was one of those things that scribed itself indelibly on the canvas of your mind. It was gut-wrenching. Graphic and out-of-body, it was the stuff that post traumatic stress syndrome was made of.

The common man need not ask because I am unavailable to him, but for a man who matches me in strength and purpose—there is no cost.

-§ But just because we grew up in that kind of a culture does not mean we need to keep creating it in our present relationship. I recommend we ask different questions, like, “How could I make your life more wonderful?” and “Would you like to know how you could make my life more wonderful?” and “What are your needs right now?” and “Would you like to know what I need right now?” Now if none of this appeals to you because you prefer a relation-dinghy to a relationship, here are some suggestion to help you prevent your relation-dinghy from growing into a relationship: 1. Keep your attention focused at all times on who is right or wrong in a discussion, fair or unfair in a negotiation, selfish or unselfish in giving (it helps to keep a list of who has done what for whom), kind or cruel in their tone of voice, rude or polite in their mannerisms, sloppy or neat in their dress, and so on. Be careful not to realize that your attempt to be right is really an attempt to protect yourself from thinking you are wrong and then feeling shame. 2. If you need some support for this I recommend certain selfhelp groups who can give you the latest scoops on the most powerful, politically correct labels with which to overpower and confuse your partner. Members of these groups will collude with you in validating that your partner really is a man or woman who is commitment-phobic, emotionally unavailable, counterdependant, needy, spiritually unevolved, dysfunctional, immature, judgmental, sinful, bi-polar, OCD, clinically depressed, or adult-onset ADD. It is important to keep your consciousness filled with such terminology to prevent any fondness from developing. This also helps in keeping you caught in the “paralysis of analysis” and clueless about what you or your partner are needing from each other. 3. Adopt this test for love: If your partner really loves you, he or she will always know what you want even before you know—and then give it to you without your having to go through the humiliation of actually asking for it. And your partner will do this regardless of the sacrifice it requires. If your partner does not give you what you want, choose to believe it means he or she does not love you. 4. Ask for what you do not want instead of what you do want. I heard of a man who asked his wife to stop spending so much money shopping. She took up gambling on the internet. 5. In case your relationdinghy starts to grow, here are a few torpedoes guaranteed to sink it again: “It hurts me when you say that.” “I feel sad because you…fill in the blank (won’t say ‘I love you,’ or ‘I’m sorry,’ or won’t have sex, or won’t marry me, etc.)” If you really want to choke the life out of any relationship meditate on “I need you.” Then you will know how I felt for about thirtyfive years of my life. I felt like a drowning swimmer and I would grab hold of anyone who came near me and try to use them as a life raft. Now I want relationships to be flowers for my table instead of air for my lungs. When I Come Gently To You by Ruth Bebermeyer When I come gently to you I want you to see It’s not to get myself from you, it’s just to give you me. I know that you can’t give me me, no matter what you do. All I ever want from you is you. I know your fear of fences, your pain from prisons past. I’m not the first to sense it and I’m plainly not the last. The hawk within your heart’s not bound to earth by fence of mine, Unless you aren’t aware that you can fly. When I come gently to you I’d like you to know I come not to trespass your space, I want to touch and grow. When your space and my space meet, each is not less but more. We make our space that wasn’t space before. Chapter HEALING THE BLAME THAT BLINDS

personal thoughts and feelings with people you hardly know is telling too much. Sharing things with other people that were told to you in confidence is telling too much. Sharing the arguments and discussions you have with your partner with friends and family is telling too much. All indicate poor boundaries. All indicate a need for boundaries. You

You really have three choices with your relationship: leave it, keep it the same, or make it better. Keeping

You never mentioned a single thing about running into Everett.” “Because you just got home, and again, I’m trying to take a bath, and just so everyone knows, the water is turning a little chilly.” She sent what she hoped was a pointed look toward the door, but her message was ignored. “Chilly water is incredibly beneficial for a lady’s skin, but back to Everett.” Lucetta scooted her chair forward. “Did his wards run off another nanny, and did he ask you to accept a position with him, and . . . did you feel compelled to turn down his offer because of that pesky attraction you feel for the man?” “I’m not attracted to Mr. Mulberry,” was the only protest she could think to respond. “How could you not be attracted to the gentleman?” Abigail countered. “A person would have to be blind not to notice that he’s incredibly handsome. Add in the fact he’s now responsible for three children, and well that must make him downright scrumptious to a lady who has a soft spot for little ones.” “I do not find Mr. Mulberry scrumptious,” Millie argued, wincing when Abigail sent her an incredulous look. “Oh, very well, I might have, when I first laid eyes on the man, thought he was a little handsome—although not scrumptious, mind you. But after he refused to consider me as a nanny for his wards, his handsomeness faded in a flash. Furthermore—” A knock on the door interrupted her speech. “Mrs. Hart? Are you in there?” Mr. Kenton, Abigail’s butler, called through the door. Abigail rose to her feet and moved across the room. “I am, Mr. Kenton, but Miss Longfellow is in the middle of her bath, so in order to preserve her modesty, I suggest you don’t open this door.” “Very good, ma’am, but I’m here to tell you that Miss Longfellow has a visitor. He gave his name as Mr. Everett Mulberry. May I tell him Miss Longfellow is receiving this evening?” “Of course she’s receiving, Mr. Kenton. Tell Mr. Mulberry she’ll be down directly.” “Tell him I’m not available,” Millie called. “Do no such thing, Mr. Kenton,” Abigail countered. “Millie is certainly available, and she’ll receive Mr. Mulberry in the drawing room in five minutes, ten at the most.” “Very good, ma’am.” Listening to Mr. Kenton’s departing footsteps, Millie frowned at Abigail, who’d turned away from the door and was beaming back at her. “I have no desire to see Mr. Mulberry, and since I am in the middle of my bath, which does, indeed, make me unavailable, you’ll need to go and make my excuses to the man.” “You’ve been complaining that your water is getting cold. That means you’ll have to get out of the tub soon to avoid freezing to death, making you available to speak with Mr. Mulberry.” “Perhaps I’ve decided to heed Lucetta’s advice and enjoy the benefits cold water is supposed to deliver to my skin.” Abigail

men were incredibly frustrated because they could never book a night with her, but at the same time her unavailability made her even more desirable. To be blessed with a smile or a wink from Angel was to walk among the heavens for several minutes. She had the unique capability of making each man she gave even the slightest attention to feel as though he

Apparently you haven’t gotten the memo. I am the Ice Man. Rude, honest to the point of brutal and emotionally unavailable. Women aren’t exactly throwing themselves at me.” A pause. “Anymore.

Butler used slaveholders’ own insistence that slaves were legal property to release slaves from owners’ grasps and illustrated how war could create possibilities unavailable in peacetime. The phenomenon of the Civil War contraband camp was born.

A young man’s heart is wounded when he has no one to take him into the adventures his soul craves, no one to show him how to shoot a free throw or jump his bike or rock climb or use a power tool. This is how most young men experience fatherlessness—there is no man around who cares and who is strong enough to lead him into anything. His father might be physically present, but unavailable in every way, hiding behind a newspaper or spending hours at the computer while the young man waits for the father who never comes.

The man of the house has very politely informed guests who have come to see the baby that I am unavailable, as I am ‘milking’, and thereby sealed my status from cool chick to mooing cow. 10.

in our present state of society woman possesses not; she is under possession,” referring to laws that barred married women from owning or inheriting property. From girlhood, “woman is educated with the tacit understanding, that she is only half a being, and an appendage.” Once married, she “spends life in conforming to” her husband’s wishes “instead of moulding herself to her own ideal. Thus she loses her individuality, and never gains his respect.” After becoming a mother, “she is only the upper nurse,” whereas the father is “the oracle. His wish is law, hers only the unavailing sigh uttered in secret.” Through it all, “she looks out into life, finds nothing there but confusion, and congratulates herself that it is man’s business, not hers.

You have choice whether or not to believe someone’s assessment of you. You have choice about how you respond to something or someone. You have choice whether to stand there and get emotionally battered. You have choice about your attitude, about how big or small you make something, about how good or bad you make it. You have choice about making the cup half empty or half full. You have choice about your relationship. If it’s bad you have three choices: make it worse (end it), keep it the same (stay in victim and act out), or make it better (get in your adult ego state and change things). YOU get to decide.

To review, in facing the storm, take your 5 tools with you: You are not a victim. You have needs and the right to expect those needs to get met. Get conscious of your fear-based thoughts and actions. Have a voice. Have boundaries. You won’t be good at facing the storm at first. It will not go smoothly. It will be scary. That’s okay. Expect it. You’ll feel like you’re bungling along at first. You will be. Don’t get discouraged. Practice. Remember, the first time you swung a baseball bat you probably didn’t hit a home run.

I was emotionally tied to a man who was emotionally unavailable to me.

with him; and second, to challenge him not to spend one dime at the club for

Rule number two of dating, Grandma—never go after a man who's emotionally unavailable . . . you'll only be signing yourself up for heartbreak.

not to know that ages of incessant labour, by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed! Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness! Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunities misused! Yet such was I! Oh, such was I!" "But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself. "Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!" It held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again.

Of course, most of us, in the service of sanity, don’t fixate on the end. We go about the world focused on worldly concerns. We accept the inevitable and direct our energies to other things. Yet the recognition that our time is finite is always with us, helping to shape the choices we make, the challenges we accept, the paths we follow. As cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker maintained, we are under a constant existential tension, pulled toward the sky by a consciousness that can soar to the heights of Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Einstein but tethered to earth by a physical form that will decay to dust. “Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”2 According to Becker, we are impelled by such awareness to deny death the capacity to erase us. Some soothe the existential yearning through commitment to family, a team, a movement, a religion, a nation—constructs that will outlast the individual’s allotted time on earth. Others leave behind creative expressions, artifacts that extend the duration of their presence symbolically. “We fly to Beauty,” said Emerson, “as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.”3 Others still seek to vanquish death by winning or conquering, as if stature, power, and wealth command an immunity unavailable to the common mortal. Across the millennia, one consequence has been a widespread fascination with all things, real or imagined, that touch on the timeless. From prophesies of an afterlife, to teachings of reincarnation, to entreaties of the windswept mandala, we have developed strategies to contend with knowledge of our impermanence and, often with hope, sometimes with resignation, to gesture toward eternity. What’s new in our age is the remarkable power of science to tell a lucid story not only of the past, back to the big bang, but also of the future. Eternity itself may forever lie beyond the reach of our equations, but our analyses have already revealed that the universe we have come to know is transitory. From planets to stars, solar systems to galaxies, black holes to swirling nebulae, nothing is everlasting. Indeed, as far as we can tell, not only is each individual life finite, but so too is life itself. Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam,” is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be barren. Motes of dust, nearby or distant, dance on sunbeams for merely a moment. Still, here on earth we have punctuated our moment with astonishing feats of insight, creativity, and ingenuity as each generation has built on the achievements of those who have gone before, seeking clarity on how it all came to be, pursuing coherence in where it is all going, and longing for an answer to why it all matters. Such is the story of this book.

I’m in love with a man who’ll never be mine—who’s unavailable in every way, shape, and form—and I’m certain it’s going to ruin me.

My vagina wakes up from her six-month nap and screams at me that though this man looks like the emotionally unavailable type with major control issues, she would very much like to be wrecked by him.

On one of those nights in January 2014, we sat next to each other in Maria Vostra, happy and content, smoking nice greens, with one of my favorite movies playing on the large flat-screen TVs: Once Upon a Time in America. I took a picture of James Woods and Robert De Niro on the TV screen in Maria Vostra's cozy corner, which I loved to share with Martina. They were both wearing hats and suits, standing next to each other. Robert de Niro looked a bit like me and his character, Noodles, (who was a goy kid in the beginning of the movie, growing up with Jewish kids) on the picture, was as naive as I was. I just realized that James Woods—who plays an evil Jewish guy in the movie, acting like Noodles' friend all along, yet taking his money, his woman, taking away his life, and trying to kill him at one point—until the point that Noodles has to escape to save his life and his beloved ones—looks almost exactly like Adam would look like if he was a bit older. “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.” – William Shakespeare That sounds like an ancient spell or rather directions, instructions to me, the director instructing his actors, being one of the actors himself as well, an ancient spell, that William Shakespeare must have read it from a secret book or must have heard it somewhere. Casting characters for certain roles to act like this or like that as if they were the director’s custom made monsters. The extensions of his own will, desires and actions. The Reconquista was a centuries-long series of battles by Christian states to expel the Muslims (Moors), who had ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula since the 8th century. The Reconquista ended on January 2, 1492. The same year Columbus, whose statue stands atop a Corinthian custom-made column down the Port at the bottom of the Rambla, pointing with his finger toward the West, had discovered America on October 12, 1492. William Shakespeare was born in April 1564. He had access to knowledge that had been unavailable to white people for thousands of years. He must have formed a close relationship with someone of royal lineage, or used trick, who then permitted him to enter the secret library of the Anglican Church. “A character has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure what he/she’s supposed to be doing.” – Anthony Burgess Martina proudly shared with me her admiration for the Argentine author Julio Cortazar, who was renowned across South America. She quoted one of his famous lines, saying: “Vida es como una cebolla, hay que pelarla llorando,” which translates to “Life is like an onion, you have to peel it crying.” Martina shared with me her observation that the sky in Europe felt lower compared to America. She mentioned that the clouds appeared larger in America, giving a sense of a higher and more expansive sky, while in Europe, it felt like the sky had a lower and more limiting ceiling. “The skies are much higher in Argentina, Tomas, in all America. Here in Europe the sky is so low. In Argentina there are huge clouds and the sky is huge, Tomas.” – Martina Blaterare “It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.” – George Orwell, 1984

The Mooning Hearts Club.” She tugged on the bottom of my braid to turn me around but I didn’t budge. “For those of us strong, smart, and independent women with advanced degrees and good jobs who find ourselves somehow braying like lost sheep after an unavailable man.

I wondered: dies any man ever fully know any woman? He thinks he does--she is the girl living down the lane, the girl fetching water from the communal well, the girl who speaks in accents familiar, and suddenly one day, he finds out that she has been a stranger all along, a dreamer of dreams he never suspected, a poet of verses better than his, or a more effective physician, or a saint, ultimately unavailable to him or any man. [Tony]

To the extent that power is the result of idol making and idol playing, it will almost always distort our deepest relationships. That distortion does not necessarily have to take the form of divorce; for every family visibly broken by a powerful member’s incapacity to keep his promises, there is another where spouse and children know the equally cruel reality of unavailability and unreliability. As the funny but also sadly cynical T-shirt puts it, “Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes.

Put your imagination hat on, because we are going back to prehistoric times. I don't know if you are a dude, a chick, or somewhere outside the binary, but for simplicity’s sake, let's pretend that you are a caveman. You’ve got yourself a nice little cave with some sick stick figure paintings and a partner who can light a mean fire with some twigs and stuff. Well one day you are out in the plains looking for some food or doing whatever the hell you cavemen do all day and you decide to drop back by the crib to rest for a bit. You roll up to the cave and notice some other dude's loincloth outside. Aw, hell no. You peek your head in and see that asshole Grock from down the street about to make your mate reproductively unavailable for 9 months. Are you just gonna take that? No way, man. Evolution's got your back.

Here would be a rock! And such a handsome man as he was, too, — not exactly a Corsair, as he was great in authority over the London police, — but a powerful, fine fellow, who would know what to do with swords and pistols as well as any Corsair; — and one, too, no doubt, who would understand poetry! Any such dream, however, was altogether unavailing, as the major had a wife at home and seven children.

I recently came up with a great quote regarding relationships and felt it deserved to be post. If someone doesn't take the lead, there is no point in having the dance! Of note, I just found 3 books by Patti Henry. Imagine that!!!! I have posted one of them which seems fitting. Don't remember writing a book!

I want you to see that his behaviour isn’t about you so that you can stop making yourself responsible for making him into a better man.

Just because it’s all he’s capable of doesn’t mean it’s enough for you, and just because he gives what he’s capable of doesn’t make him great. This is exaggeration of the worst kind and it will set you up for a fall. Ever seen someone settle? It’s because they decide that something is better than nothing, but that something may be very insubstantial. It’s like you’re saying “Wow! Look at how much of a limited contribution is coming from a limited man!”, which is like celebrating the obvious and championing mediocrity.

Would you help me process something?” In one breath, you went from being emotionally un-available to emotionally available. From robot to human. From distant to present. “Would you help me process something?