Lexicon ·
emotionally unavailable
adjective phrase
- Stated meaning
- Unable or unwilling to form emotional closeness, often as a result of earlier experiences.
- Operating meaning
- A closing diagnosis that turns a mismatch into a condition, locates the condition in one person, and spares both people a conversation about the specific Thursday it ended.
- Origin
- Therapy and attachment-theory vocabulary, carried into general use by self-help books and then by podcasts that recommend the books.
July 22, The Raven. She told me she has realized she is a bit avoidant in relationships, because of past experience. It is the eleventh of 14 disclosures in the file and the first with a cause attached. She said it about herself, unprompted, 20 days before it ended.
The term arrived from a clinical vocabulary and kept the lab coat. It sounds like a finding. In ordinary use it is issued after the relationship has closed, by one of the two parties, about the other, with no second opinion and no follow-up appointment.
Its appeal is administrative. A mismatch between two people requires a description of both of them, and that description runs long and tends to include the person writing it. A diagnosis requires only one patient. The phrase lets a person close the file on 4 months with a single entry, and the entry reads well aloud to friends, who nod in the manner of a consulting physician.
The phrase has a supply chain. There is a book on attachment styles, a podcast about the book, a short clip of the podcast, and a quiz linked from the clip. The quiz sorts the respondent into one of four categories. The categories are not the problem. The problem is that the instrument is self-administered, the result is self-reported, and the only person it is ever used on is absent.
The interesting case is the one this file records, where the diagnosis was issued by the subject about herself, out loud, unprompted, 20 days before the end. She said she had realized she was a bit avoidant, and she gave a reason. I wrote it down, filed it as candour, marked it as the first disclosure in the arc with a cause attached, and then held 2 more dates and spent a further $332.30. A diagnosis delivered by the patient, in advance, with a cause, is not a diagnosis. It is a disclosure, and the reason nobody in this vocabulary has a word for it is that it does not require anybody to be at fault.