I was watching a movie the other day and one of the central characters made a statement that caught my attention. She said “A person can’t help who they fall in love with.” I paused for a moment and wondered to myself, “how many people will be led astray by believing that bunch of nonsense.” The statement sounds very sincere and romantic, but it’s a notion that will rob you of experiencing the kind of love you deserve if you’re not careful.
A few days before I watched this movie I had received a letter from a woman and had been in deep contemplation regarding how I would respond to her. She was involved with a man who she believed to be a good catch, but he had gone through a traumatic relationship experience in the past she said, and was emotionally unavailable. He ran hot one day and cold the next, and she could never gauge his true feelings for her. The only thing she felt she knew for sure was that she was in love with him. I suspect that this woman’s letter is the reason why my ears perked up when I heard the actor make this very misleading statement.
Emotionally unavailable men are aloof, uncatchable if you will. This man will give a woman just enough of a hint of who he could be if he didn’t have issues. He enjoys the chase, may be charming and attractive, and he’s seemingly sympathetic to the fact that he’s stringing you along, but he lacks entirely the desire to commit himself to a relationship with you. Some women will flock to this kind of man because deep down the woman has fear. She is insecure and afraid of real commitment as well or else she would not indulge this kind of man.
Proverbs 4:23 (NIV) says “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” If you and I didn’t have the capacity to guard and protect our hearts from foolishness, then God would not have told us to do so, but we very definitely have this capacity and we must use it. As children of God, sometimes we have a bad habit of picking and choosing which scriptures we’ll heed. Well, you can’t get much plainer than Proverbs 4:23, and it would be a gross error in judgment not to heed it, especially when it comes to partnering. God is telling us to watch what goes in and what comes out of our hearts because what goes-in and comes-out affects our quality of life.
When it comes to guarding your heart, Sisters, you’ve got to put on your superwoman cape. Not only do you have to be able to recognize an emotionally unavailable man a mile away, but you must understand from the giddy up that it’s not a beneficial move to invest your emotions. The woman who wrote me fell for a man like this because she allowed herself to do so. Truth be told, the man didn’t give her enough to build a quality relationship. He gave her the leftovers and she accepted them. She accepted them because she thought that it was God who placed the man in her life in the first place; therefore, she reckoned that God must intend for her to be with the man. This is how we think sometimes. We think with our emotions instead of with our spiritual and mental intellect.
Every man that is interested in you is not sent by God. And every man that you are interested in is not sent by God. We can’t be so gullible, so needy for a man’s attention that we let ourselves invest in someone who will not yield a bountiful return.
1John 4:1 KJV says “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God:” This is extremely wise counsel when you’re seeking a marital partner. God is telling us forthrightly not to believe every spirit, because that’s our tendency. We want to believe that just because the brother looks good, smells good, and talks a good game that we can give our hearts to him. Well, take a look at Ephesians 6:12 as well. It reminds us that the physical is just a shell and we would do well to look much deeper. It tells us that we are not wrestling with flesh and blood. In other words, our battles are not with a person’s physical being. We are wrestling against the spiritual wickedness that may have usurped the man’s mind and heart.
Understand that we fool ourselves into thinking that emotionally unavailable men will love us because we haven’t dealt with what’s going on in our own souls. And if you haven’t wrestled with your own stuff, how in the world can you wrestle with his. It is so incredibly important to develop a solid and strong relationship with Jesus Christ before we get married, because partnering these days demands that we are secure in our Lord and Savior at the very deepest part of our souls. We desperately need ALL of God’s armor. Without it many of us are tricked into latching on to individuals and situations that are harmful to our spiritual relationship with the Father.
We fall in love with the person’s physical attributes and this attraction causes us to be blind to the corruption in their souls. You can’t excuse this away, because no man can be responsible for emotionally feeding the barren places within a woman. Did you get that? Please make sure that you do. If your emotional well is empty and you are feeling a spiritual drought within, a human being is incapable of replenishing your reserves. This is a job that only Christ can fulfill. Only Jesus Christ can restore a soul.
My beloveds, love is a choice and we very definitely can help who we chose to fall for. So if you’re single, trying to love an emotionally unavailable man is not a winning strategy; it’s a poor choice. No one is perfect, and you can’t expect that the man you will marry will be perfect either, but you CAN expect that he will be as willing to wholeheartedly love you as you are to wholeheartedly love him.
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