MANTALK: The emotionally unavailable woman

She often sits at the window and stares at nothing. She’s like a child waiting for her mother to come back from the market, but the mother never shows up. So she sits there and waits, her head resting against the window, eyes with a faraway look.

Sometimes when she laughs, it sounds like a pebble falling to the bottom of an empty well. Her smile is made of polypropylene. Her emptiness doesn’t have a lid, it spills against the side without answers.

Even when she is with you, in your arms, she isn’t quite with you. She is like a cat; she might coil and purr around your feet, but she remains beautifully absent even in her own show.

Her cards, the few you know of, she plays close to her chest. She’s the emotionally unavailable woman.

So here is the thing. We are used to women who get too attached; attached to the hip, if you will. Women who spend all their time with you and forget who and what they were before they met you.

Women who stop doing the things they used to do over weekends and start doing the things you do over the weekend. They stop spending time with their friends and make your friends theirs.

They start crowding your space with their omnipresence. They want to be all up in your grill all the time. At some point they start talking serious stuff.

They ask if you want children one day or what you think of marriage. They send you pictures of Bali and say that you two should go together and do what it is people go to do in India – yoga and finding one’s inner peace and such things. Oh, and to see the Taj.

THE CLINGY TYPE

But you are already peaceful and you dislike yoga, anyway, because you can’t stand wearing tight things that get stuck between your buttocks.

But she is excited and keen and she is all up in your space with these Zen plans and when you appear uninterested she moans that you are emotionally aloof, that you are hard to read, that you don’t reciprocate feelings.

You want her to go easy on all that mushy stuff especially when she looks at you with those puppy eyes and asks you, “what are you thinking?” and the truth is that you are mapping out the route to the nearest petrol station to fuel your car, but if you dare say that she will screech, “You are lying here naked next to me and you are thinking about fueling your car?”

There is that girl. Then there is the one who stares out of the window waiting for her mom to come back from the market, so to speak. Oh, that one is an enigma.

She is like a lovely book that is written in French. Outside “bonjour” and “oui” you are lost at sea. So you have this beautiful book with a story you can’t read.

ENIGMATIC WOMAN

She is peculiar because she has her own life and time which she seems to love and invest in more than the time she spends with you.

You are used to your women dropping everything to meet you when you want to meet them or to do your will. You will call this one and say, “Hey, what are you doing, want to meet up for something to eat?” And she will say, “Hey, I’m not really hungry, how about we do lunch tomorrow instead?” She turned you down, how dare she!?

When she is with you she makes you feel like a lion, but when she is gone it feels like she is the lion. She never shows any undue emotion.

She is stoic in her mannerism, never revealing a crack. She is also fiercely self-reliant. She changes her own light bulb.

Your “maleness” you start to realise with increasing horror, isn’t even needed. She has built this high wall around her, and only she knows what’s on the other side. A beautiful book written in French.

You want to learn French. You want to ask her “À quoi penses-tu?” (What are you thinking about?) You are frustrated that she isn’t falling at your feet, that she doesn’t need you. And because you are male, because you tie your trousers with an ego, you are hooked on her emotional viciousness, or lack thereof. You want to figure her out. You want to jump over the walls. You go to bed thinking of how one day she will turn into a mushy puppy in your hands.

Then a weird thing happens. One day you look at her and you catch yourself just in time before you ask her the most dreadful question a man can ask a woman; “What are you thinking?” And right there you know she has won.

That she will never open that door for you. Even after you have long broken up with her, you keep thinking how you never quite knew who she was.

Yes, you knew what she liked, you knew what made her laugh, you knew what floated her boat, you knew her dreams, and all those things that you learn from women during pillow talk, but you realise, dauntingly, that you don’t really know who she is. She will always be the girl who sat at the window, waiting for her mom to come from the market. The one you couldn’t breach.

Catch me at the Hilton Hotel next Saturday, October 1st at 1.30pm, and let’s discuss how to have difficult conversations and to resolve conflict with your man.