Did you know that men become emotionally available or unavailable for psychologically predictable reasons? The problem that many women face, however, is a lack of knowledge of the conscious and subconscious psychological factors that make men into good or bad bets for committed relationships. Women looking for committed relationships need to understand the specific factors that make men emotionally available and how women can go about finding and getting involved with them. Women should understand how deep-seated psychological influences operate behind the scenes to keep certain types of men immature and emotionally unavailable long after they should have learned how to act their age, and learn whether men who seem to be lost causes can become good bets for committed relationships.
This book explains how certain psychological factors, including male peer group pressures and workplace social roles, end up producing psychological and behavioral effects that limit the ability of men to engage in mature relationships with women. Men take on social roles in life, and some social roles are so all-encompassing that they block men from being able to engage in mature relationships with women. For example, a man who is dedicated to being a workaholic chooses to leave no room in his life for relationships that are inconsistent with being a workaholic, and the same applies to a man being dedicated to being a gang member, or some other all-encompassing social role.
Emotional availability is a byproduct of being a psychological adult, which requires adult men to learn how to behave in multiple social roles such as employee, neighbor, father, lover and other roles as they mature, including the particular social role that involves men learning the emotionally expressive behavior needed to interact with women in an adult manner. Some men learn, but others resist learning to interact with women in an adult manner.
Men who are not psychological adults resist learning how to behave in multiple social roles, including when they interact with women, by limiting themselves to a single immature social role - such as gang member, workaholic, or drinking buddy - on all public and private occasions, including when they interact with women. Choosing to have one-track minds blocks them from learning how to behave in other roles, so their immature roles become the default templates for all parts of their lives, such as a gang member who always acts out his unemotional tough-guy single social role in every area of life. One-role men are bad bets for adult relationships and emotional availability.
Male peer groups and workplace social roles contribute to making men emotionally unavailable. The social roles that men take on in male peer groups such as gangs often involve pressuring members to conform to group behavior expectations by keeping relationships with women on the superficial or adolescent level. Another example is the sort of workaholic who keeps his relationships with women on the superficial level by subordinating his relationships to his all-encompassing, round- the-clock social role of workaholic.
Immature social roles such as workaholic and gang member expand to fill the unused space in a man's personality where multiple roles such as husband, boyfriend, father, and more should have taken root, but were not allowed to do so. The end result is that an immature social role, such workaholic or gang member, winds up spreading out like a weed to fill all of the vacant space in a man's personality where multiple social roles should have taken root, but failed to do so. Anything that is inconsistent with that immature social role, including the ability to develop mature relationships with women, gets pushed aside.
This book shows women how to readily distinguish between emotionally available and unavailable men, and includes social science research references.
