Shankar Kasynathan shares his theories on the soul searching hunt, for the few singles who are still emotionally available.
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A couple of weeks ago I went on a date with someone I had met online. She was engaging, and we got along really well. It was a comfortable and enjoyable date. I felt like I had made a solid connection with and we shared a great number of values and interests. Maybe that’s when the alarm bells should have been ringing. Discovering a great connection online (or on a dating app like Tinder,) who is interested in a long term relationship: is the stuff of urban legends.
Two dates later, I would come to fully appreciate that my date was emotionally unavailable. Still recovering from a tough long-term relationship, she needed more time, before she could properly move on. I counted myself lucky. In the short time we had been dating, I hadn’t developed any significant feelings for this person. I certainly hadn’t fallen for them—I just knew more than ever—what I was looking for. A connection with someone who was emotionally available, and I also knew that this would not be an easy search.
The fact that I walked away relatively unharmed is the good news and certainly makes for a rare story. The reality is—people do get burnt—and often, in their search for the emotionally available.
Which leads to the question I addressed in my previous column: why are there so many people on on-line dating sites who are emotionally UNavailable? The answer may be hidden in the words of a well-known Children’s song: ‘Going on a bear hunt.’
“…Can’t go over it, Can’t go under it, Can’t go around it, Got to go through it!”
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Unlike the bear in the song, at the end of a breakup, many of us—want to do everything but go through the pain in the aftermath of it. We want to avoid it, in any way we can.
- Some of us run for the door, so we’re not the last ones standing in the room.
- Some of us sit and hope for a reunion for the one we recently or even not so recently lost.
- Some of us have issues that we haven’t addressed or resolved and hope that these problems will miraculously go away.
The fix? We should just go on more dates—somehow someone out there might just fix us.
How many of us actually take a time out and go through this process?
- Face up to our hurt
- Address our problems
- Let go of the person we no longer are with.
- Deal with the fact that things just didn’t work out the way we wanted them to.
A process of facing up to ourselves and fixing ourselves, looks a lot like this:
- Accept that it hurts.
- Accept that it’s going to keep hurting.
- Accept that you will recover at some point, but simply don’t know when that will be.
This doesn’t sound like much fun at all.
Going through these steps, and facing pain and hurt into an uncertain future—you would think that it’s enough to make some of us run away from dating and relationships altogether. Relationship counselors tell us quite the opposite. Many of us prefer to run towards the fire, and into more dating, and with it glimpses of the intimacy that all of us crave—particularly the ones who had it and just lost it.
The potential for an escape from pain, hurt and short circuiting the road to recovery, encourages many of us to dive head first into the dating world a lot earlier than we perhaps should: tinder, Ok Cupid, dating apps and websites meet the need, and easily.
In the absence of a dating site designed specifically for the emotionally unavailable, these broken spirits go into a pool where they mix too easily with unsuspecting individuals waiting and living in hope of a meaningful, rich and fulfilling life-long relationship.
This is where the pandemic begins.
It begins with hope, which suffers from a bout of bad luck. Untreated, this then develops symptoms of being jaded and skeptical, and then ultimately: hurt and heart- broken: aka emotionally unavailable.
Each of us knows someone who has been hit by the virus, because it is quite like a virus—this seemingly continuous mismatch of individuals looking for a meaningful relationship, and folk who enter the dating world, refusing to get the antidote: taking the time to heal.
If the circuit stopped here, that would perhaps be fine—the loop would be closed off, but that’s not what happens.
The market expands exponentially, and certainly not in favor of the minority – that is the ever smaller number of emotionally available. We find more disappointed, hurt and/or heart- broken folk entering back into the dating world, albeit a lot more jaded due to their encounters with the emotionally unavailable.
Our seeming inability to:
- Stop and face up to our feelings
- Engage with a healthy recovery process that doesn’t involve another (a rebound,) … has directly contributed to an alarming situation in the dating world: mass emotional unavailability. It is in this context we must accept the role that dating apps and websites play in the digital age.
What could have been very useful aids to help the single folk amongst us, find potentially great partners; has now evolved into a largely corrupt process which serves instead as one massive sick bay for the walking wounded. This has created a purgatory where the emotionally unavailable come to find a quick fix, rather than work through their problems. The end result is a decline in the number of the emotionally available.
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I can’t speak for dating sites like e-harmony which require a somewhat substantial commitment of time and money (they want to get paid up front and require a contract for at least three months and then have you go through a questionnaire that’s just a shade less intrusive than an application for a top secret security clearance ) but other dating sites are little more than a walk through a neighborhood bazaar of people who are just one step away form giving up hope. Add to this that paid sites keep the men around by fabricating responses and keeping all… Read more »
To be clear, you’re asserting that services which report substantial success rates and positive user feedback like EHarmony, Match, and OKC are essentially fabricating their statistics? Because otherwise, they undermine this entire argument.
IMHO placing Tinder in the company of other dating apps is generous since it only takes slightly more information into account than Chatroulette and considerably less than say, Facebook.
It can be scaring to start new relationships. I’ve found article about widow recovering – https://victoriyaclub.com/about-online-dating/dating-advice-for-widowers-seeking-for-love
But break up recovering sometimes is even harder
I think one of the problems with online dating apps is how broad they’ve all become. You really lack the capacity to filter out and to try to find your match. I think Tinder is a huge example. Let’s face it, because it’s all about looks and nothing really deeper, a lot of people use that for emotional patchwork.
Compare this to apps like Color Dating, where you can filter out by race, for instance, and people there report a much higher rate of satisfaction.