When Your Partner Seems Emotionally Unavailable

Photo: Austin Curtis / Unsplash

A husband looks out the picture window and says, “Wow, look at that boat.”

His wife peers over her magazine and says, “Yeah, it looks like that big schooner we saw last summer, remember?”

The husband grunts, and that is the whole scene. It is on tape in the Love Lab, and Gottman’s own verdict on the footage is that if it were ever shown in a movie theater, “no one would be winning any Oscars.” They are his favorite tapes anyway. Couples who go on having exchanges like this one “tend to remain happy.”

The opposite of that scene has a search term. Searches asking what emotionally unavailable means have more than doubled in the United States over the past five years, and the pages that come up answer with lists of signs.

What Does “Emotionally Unavailable” Mean?

In everyday use, an emotionally unavailable partner is one who seems unwilling or unable to share their own feelings, or to respond to yours. Gottman research has never defined the phrase. What Gottman and his colleagues studied, over decades, was what two people do with each other in the ordinary moments of a day. The small, constant attempts partners make to connect are what Gottman calls bids, “the fundamental unit of emotional communication,” and the response that meets a bid is Turning Towards. The remark about the boat was a bid. The answer about the schooner, magazine still in hand, was Turning Towards.

The tapes of couples who later divorced look different. In those, “the wife doesn’t even look up from her magazine, and if she does, her husband doesn’t acknowledge what she says.” Over the six-year follow-up of newlyweds, the couples who stayed married had turned towards each other’s bids 86 percent of the time. The couples who divorced, 33 percent.

Dinner got a study of its own. A 2004 study in Family Process by Janice Driver and Gottman followed 49 newlywed couples through a ten-minute dinner and a fifteen-minute argument, and the playfulness and enthusiasm at dinner predicted how much humor and affection the couples brought to the argument. The authors call the data correlational.

Why Does My Partner Seem Emotionally Unavailable?

“Out of mindlessness, not malice” is Gottman’s answer, after decades of sitting with couples. Often both partners will complain that the other is “preoccupied and unavailable.” Kendra Han describes the longer arc in her article on why you may no longer feel close to your husband: conversations that turn surface-level or transactional, a partner who comes to feel unseen. Her word for it is emotional disconnection.

A couple named Carrie and Jeff came to Gottman because Jeff never shared his inner world with her. Gottman had them talk in front of him about the stress of their day, and Jeff began to complain about a difficult person at his volunteer job.

“I told you to resign from that job,” Carrie said. “It’s too much stress for you.”

Jeff stopped talking. Carrie turned to Gottman: “You see how he clams up! What did I tell you?”

Gottman had them start over with one instruction for Carrie, which was to offer no advice, and she asked Jeff instead what made the man so insufferable. Jeff opened up, and the two of them had a conversation that satisfied them both. The complaint had been about work, and Gottman calls that kind of end-of-day talk about stress from outside the relationship the Stress-Reducing Conversation. The rule at the top of it comes from the psychologist Haim Ginott: understanding must precede advice.

Is It Emotional Unavailability or Flooding?

A partner who goes quiet in the middle of a fight is a different case. In Gottman’s work that state is called Flooding, and in the Love Lab it shows on the heart monitor, above 100 beats a minute and sometimes as high as 165. At that pulse a productive conversation is close to impossible. What usually follows is Stonewalling, the Gottman term for withdrawing from the interaction, and from across the room it can look like not caring. The antidote is Physiological Self-Soothing: a break of at least twenty minutes, and the partner told that a break is coming.

How Do You Bring It Up Without Starting a Fight?

“It would never occur to you to clear the table, would it?” Lena says to Carl, exasperated, in one of Gottman’s examples.

Carl hears criticism, the first of the Four Horsemen, and answers with defensiveness, the second: “Well, when do you ever fill the gas tank?”

The bid inside Lena’s sentence was closer to “Please clear the table tonight,” and Carl missed it because it came wrapped in exasperation. Gottman’s advice goes to both of them. Carl could pause and look for the bid underneath the harsh words. Lena could soften the start-up, which in the Gottman formula means complaining without blaming: “I feel,” about what, and “I need.” Gottman compares it to the manners we keep for a guest. If a guest leaves an umbrella behind, we say, “Here. You forgot your umbrella,” and we leave it there.

Am I Emotionally Unavailable?

The therapist Satira Streeter Corbitt asks herself the question in her article on the ways we turn away without meaning to. When she notices she has steered a conversation toward her own interests: “is that me turning towards them, or am I always forcing them to turn towards me?”

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How Do You Reconnect With an Emotionally Unavailable Partner?

One day, by his own account, Gottman overheard his wife, Julie, grumbling softly as she unloaded the dryer. He could easily have pretended not to notice. The grumble was a bid, though, so he asked what was wrong, and she said she did not mind doing laundry but hated folding it. He liked folding. He piled the laundry on the bed, put on a Bill Evans record and went to work on it, and after a while Julie drifted into the room. They ended the evening at their favorite jazz club.

Gottman’s three steps to reconnect begin with Turning Towards, and the second step is Love Maps, knowing the little things about your partner’s life and keeping that knowledge current. The end-of-day conversation belongs here too: twenty or thirty minutes on how the day went, about anything except the relationship itself.

Once a week, Gottman suggests a short check-in. You read through a list of plain statements and tick the ones that fit, and if more than four fit, you find a gentle moment in the next few days to talk, somewhere other than bed. Ten of his statements:

Frequently Asked Questions