7 Signs of Emotional Unavailability in a Person

Does your partner put up a wall? Or is it you?

Karen Nimmo
On The Couch
Published in
4 min readFeb 19, 2021

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Image by donterase from Pixabay

“Being alone is scary, but not as scary as feeling alone in a relationship.”- Amelia Earhart

“He’s emotionally unavailable,” a woman said of her partner.

“I can’t seem to break through and figure out what he’s thinking. I can’t get close to him. It’s like he doesn’t trust me with his feelings.”

She’d been dating this man for six months and it didn’t seem to get any easier. She wanted to know if emotional unavailability was an actual “condition”; was it something that could be changed?

It’s a good question. “Emotional unavailability” is a term commonly used by people who are struggling in their relationships, when they can’t access the other person’s true feelings. Or they’re just confused about why they feel loved one day — then shut out the next.

What’s Emotional Unavailability?

A person who is emotionally unavailable finds it difficult to share feelings and to get genuinely close to another. While they can come across as evasive, cold, inconsistent — or just hard to read — it’s not that simple. Mostly, it comes down to a fear of intimacy; a struggle…

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Karen Nimmo
On The Couch

Clinical psychologist, author of 4 books. Editor of On the Couch: Practical psychology for health and happiness. karen@onthecouch.co.nz