Our Love of Unavailability

We are used to feeling pity or comic disdain for people who fall in love with those who are very obviously unavailable; for example, the obsessive teenager who swoons over a famous singer; the fan waiting outside the house of a celebrity who barely registers their presence as they make their way to their limousine; the stalker who has spent a decade tracking the movement of a star who couldn’t care whether they lived or died.

It can seem far removed from us, a dramatic case in the psychology of unrequited love. We laugh at the absurdity of the situation: to deliver one’s deepest wishes for intimacy to someone who doesn’t know one even exists. To develop feelings for someone one will never meet. To use a word like love – associated with cuddles, hand-holding and lovemaking – for someone who is many hundreds of miles away and has only scorn or disgust for one.

Yet this mockery can shield us from an uncomfortable reality: how much closer we may be to this sort of love of the unavailable than we imagine. We too may, in a surreptitious manner, also be drawn to those who are not there for us in any meaningful way.

Our chosen loves aren’t necessarily film stars. We aren’t in love with an elusive singer. We have no interest in legendarily athletes. But this doesn’t put us in the clear. For if we look more closely, there is one thing that our loves have in common with those of delusional fans: they are not able to offer us what we claim to want.

The Psychology of Unrequited Love in Everyday Life

The reasons for their unavailability are subtle and quasi-invisible. They are unavailable because, though they are physically present, their minds and hearts aren’t free. They are married to someone else. They are drunk most evenings. They never stop finding fault with us. They are addicted to porn – or the news. They sleep with us but won’t let us know when they are next around. They’re out with their colleagues all the time. They still haven’t introduced us to their family. They want to see us but only as friends (unless they’re bored).

There are, in other words, different ways of being unavailable, some less obvious than others. But the net result is the same: we are substantially in love with a ghost.

Why might we be drawn to the tedium and pain of unavailability, even in its less stark forms? Why would we be detained by absence when the entire ostensible purpose of love is to connect?

Because there are, in truth, a great many upsides to unavailability.

An unavailable person will never call us out because they never really cared for us. They won’t judge us because they don’t see us. They won’t reject us because they never accepted us. They won’t spark disappointment because they never allowed us to hope. They won’t frighten us with their absence because they never graced us with their presence. They won’t harm us the way a parent might once have done because they don’t allow us to be close the way a proper partner would. They don’t force us into the terrors of love because they never properly partake in its joys.

The difficulty is that we may be entirely unaware of the scale of our peculiarities. We cannot reduce our fears because we don’t know the extent to which we are in their grip; we can’t get better because we don’t know how unwell we are.

We are too good at covering our tracks. We tell ourselves our situation is difficult but only temporarily and rather coincidentally. We put it down to a spot of bad luck. There are signs that things might improve. Our lovers do know our names; they are around a little. Things were great seven years ago at the start.

What True Mutuality Requires

But we should compare ourselves more pointedly with stalkers and fans. We should reflect on a simple but acute question to measure the health of our situation: is the person I am interested in as committed to me as I am to them? Am I loved as much as I love?

If we cannot give a plain and immediate answer, if it turns out that (for whatever plausible-sounding reason) the interest isn’t balanced and our faith in the relationship is founded more on what it could be rather than what it is, we should question our commitment to the love we say we seek. We aren’t innocently in a spot of romantic bother: we are below the surface, systematically building a life in which tenderness cannot reach us.

We should be more curious about the obsessive fan we claim to have nothing in common with. The lure of unavailability is the same whatever form it takes, whether it focuses on a famous singer or an unknown person who nevertheless leaves very quickly after sex and never finds time to reply to our messages.

We should note too how much more interested we are likely to be in such people than in the warmer, more responsive types who regularly enter our orbit without us properly noticing, the kind who want to give us affection, tell us we are funny and interesting, are always reliable – but whom we, not so coincidentally, swiftly dismiss as ‘boring’ or ‘unsexy’: code words for ‘overly likely to terrify us by their presence and sweetness’ or ‘unlikely to repeat patterns of suffering which feel both ghastly and compulsively familiar.’

We start to move away from quasi-fandom when we look more closely at the psychology of unrequited love; when we accept how devoted we may be to a lack of mutuality; when we take on board a strange underlying idea: that we are terrified of love, that we are as threatened by hope as we are reassured by absence and impossibility.