Do you keep finding yourself dating emotionally unavailable people?

Does it frustrate you when you find out that the person you’ve just started seeing is JUST out of a relationship… or that they want to move even more slowly than you’ve already been going… or that they’re emotionally constipated and are unable to show you their true selves and be vulnerable with you? 

If any of this sounds familiar to you, it’s highly likely that you’ve found yourself in a trend of attracting and dating emotionally unavailable men.

RELATED: How To Tell If He's Emotionally Unavailable Or... Just NOT Into You

While this is undoubtedly frustrating, it’s also preventable.

Today, we’re going to go through the top three reasons that you keep meeting and attracting emotionally unavailable people, and then give you an action plan for how to stop this pattern, once and for all.

Here are the three reasons you keep dating emotionally unavailable men:

1. You are emotionally unavailable and afraid of being hurt.

We don’t attract what we want, we attract what we are.

If you consistently find yourself in relationships with people who are emotionally unavailable, the harsh (but highly likely) truth is that you yourself are emotionally unavailable as well, and you’ve simply matched with yet another person who mirrors you in that way.

Maybe you’re still healing from a broken relationship or marriage and you secretly don’t want to get close to anyone.

Maybe you’ve been repeatedly cheated on in the past and you have a baseline level of distrust of every person that you date. Maybe you still carry toxic shame about yourself because of a challenging childhood.

Whatever the reasons, if you consistently find yourself meeting and attracting emotionally unavailable partners, then it’s highly likely that you aren’t as emotionally available as you like to tell people you are.

2. You have low self-worth and you don’t think you deserve to be truly met by a partner.

People with low self-worth often struggle with anxiety, seeing the positive side of situations, and intimate relationships.

I mean, if you don’t think very highly of yourself, how could you think highly of the person who thinks that you’re an amazing, one-of-a-kind snowflake?

If you constantly worry you’re either too much or that you’re not enough (which are two sides of the same coin), then you will be highly prone to attracting emotionally unavailable partners into your life.

If you secretly don’t think that you deserve to be met by a significant other, then your belief will aim to prove itself right, over and over again.

RELATED: This Is The Kind Of Love You Deserve

3. You benefit from making your partner into a project because then you don’t have to face the reality of fixing your own life

In my coaching practice, I tend to work with a lot of self-employed, hyper-driven overachievers. And one common trait that I see amongst them all is that they are risk-tolerant in business and risk-averse in intimacy.

In other words, they have no problem writing a check for $100,000, or having a monthly payroll of half a million dollars… but the notion of getting close to other people who truly know, sees, and appreciates them is enough to make their heart rate beat double time.

And so to avoid being truly met or seen by someone who they see as their equal, they tend to date people who are guaranteed to not meet them emotionally (that’s right… they favor — no surprise here — emotionally unavailable people).

If there are glaring holes in your life (you eat terribly, you barely sleep, you have no real friends, your relationships are non-existent or clearly toxic, etc.) then those holes are much easier to ignore if you have another person to treat like a project.

In this instance, your significant other is merely a distraction to keep you numbed away from facing the pain in your life that you feel afraid to face.

Ultimately, these project-type relationships crumble as the fixer-upper becomes dissatisfied with the illusion of their partner (regardless of whether or not the person being ‘fixed’ changes for the better, worse, or stays much the same).

So… with all of that cheerful news out of the way… how do you undo this pattern of dating emotionally unavailable people? The answer is as challenging as it is simple.

Love yourself first.

If you want self-esteem, do estimable things with your life. Build yourself into something that you’re proud of.

And then face into the mirror and do your individual work of sorting yourself out.

Be the kind of person that you would want to ideally date, and you will start (like some kind of otherworldly magic) to meet and attract emotionally available people (even if they never seemed to have existed anywhere in your life before).

That’s it.

Love yourself. Face into your life with appropriate courage. Do your best. Repeat.

RELATED: How To Tell If Your Emotional Baggage Is Making You Emotionally Unavailable

Relationship coach Jordan Gray helps people remove their emotional blocks and maintain thriving intimate relationships. 

This article was originally published at Jordan Gray Consulting. Reprinted with permission from the author.