I'm Emotionally Unavaliable

That thought terrifies me, absolutely. And I never thought that it was true, until about five minutes ago.

I spent high school bouncing between boyfriends, never spending more than around seven months single before I got a new boyfriend. Which was fine by me, it was a casual way to spend the time, I learned an awful lot about myself, and I had a lot of fun in the process.

Which in my mind is exactly what high school relationships should be like. Fun, relatively non-commital, and positive. My longest relationship ever has lasted eight months. Looking back on all of them, I realize I was always the one to break it off (read: run away first). In more than one instance, I pulled away because things were getting too serious. Other times I would convince myself that I "got bored", or "lost interest", both of which were absolutely true for all but two of my relationships. But I think what that ended up meaning is that I was terrified of making a commitment that was lasting and real and profound.

I like to believe that at 18 I was in no shape to start committing myself to another person. I didn't know shit about who I was, who I wanted to be, and what I wanted to do with my life. I still don't have answers to two of those questions. But since I've been single (it's been almost fifteen months), I've learned so much about myself.

One of these things is that I'm emotionally unavailable.

I'm not sure why I didn't figure this out sooner, because it's so obvious. I broke up with my summer fling when I got to college because I didn't want to do the long distance thing with him. While at school, I would meet guys and then just never follow up with them. In the first example I had of college "dating", I'm pretty sure the guy is gay and just doesn't know it, and I'm 100% sure that I was friend-zoned on the second date when he offered me a bro handshake instead of a hug at the end. In the second example, I ran away because he was looking to make me his girlfriend and I just didn't feel the same way.

Has college turned me into an emotionally unavailable person, or was that how I always was?

I can tell you that college has caused me to get a thicker skin, to decide things for myself, and to become a lot more self-aware and self-sufficient. I don't have anyone to lean on here, so I have to do a lot of things by myself, which is super hard and frustrating at times, but also is so good for me. Throughout all of this, I see my friends with long-term boyfriends, and the majority of me just kinda cringes a little bit. The sentence "we've been together for three years!" is more terrifying to me than the sentence "holy shit look at that huge spider over there I think it's going to eat us." The thought of knowing who I'm going to marry already is absolutely terrifying. At face value, I define this thought something like "well, I'm so amazing and I know I deserve so much out of a potential life partner, and there really isn't anyone I've met that can give me everything I need and/or is compatible enough with me to last a year or more, so it's fine if I just keep brushing things off." The problem with this logic is in the sense that I haven't really gotten to know any guys very well since I've been here.

The "dating scene" here is very much one of "let's hang out at a few parties, start making out on the reg, eventually have sex, then we can start hanging out sober and doing things like watching movies together, but not in public and we can't put a label on it until way way later when people won't find it weird." That's so not even close to how I approach things it's not even funny.

I keep my feelings close, because I don't like having them hurt. Nobody does. But instead of advancing me into this new realm of being amazingly self-aware, it's hindered me in a lot of ways. I'm very straightforward when it comes to guys here. I hate playing games, I won't take it as a marriage proposal if you say you want to see me again, and the fact my most recent flirtation took offense to the pronoun "us" is incredibly out-of-line (I referred to the two of us in the sense that I told him I showed my mom a picture of us and she showed her college class. His response to that was ...."us"?? I then had to spend an incredible amount of time convincing him that we weren't an "us" and it was just a weird scenario. My mom is also super embarrassing, which doesn't help anything). But I don't open up and get emotionally close to people, especially guys, very easily. And in an environment such as the one I'm in, there isn't really much merit to getting to know girls well if you can just make out with random drunk girls at your party the next weekend.

But there's a guy right now that I really really like. We get along really well, and I want to see him again. He feels the same way (or so he told me). I trust him, he's funny, we talk, and although I'm not trying to make him my boyfriend this second, I can see the potential in the relationship in the long term.

This sounds completely contrary behavior to everything I just described, and it is, but there's a reason: four weeks ago, this guy got out of a long term relationship with a psycho girlfriend and is so freaked out by the thought of a relationship that he pretty much stopped talking to me over my use of the pronoun "us".  He's completely and utterly emotionally unavailable, in every sense of the world.

You wanna know what type of people fall in "like" with emotionally unavailable people? Emotionally unavailable people.

This means that when things eventually don't turn into anything and I have to deal with the boo-boo on my heart and in my life, it'll, again, be my own damn fault. But it will also mean that there's a scapegoat for my hurt: he wasn't in the wrong, and neither was I, but he was just really emotionally unavailable! Nothing anyone can do about that, right? Which means that I'm not left with the confusing tangle of feelings associated with a break-up. I still win. I still protect my emotions, my feelings, my head, and my heart from getting hurt by another person.

I don't know that I've ever been in love. But I'm in love with the idea of being in love. And I really want to be in a relationship now (on the surface). But deep down, I'm still the same emotionally unavailable person that I've always been, and I don't know how to change that.