Good Morning!

The first thing I would say is that your friend has probably been through a relationship or relationships that made him feel he could not be available emotionally. Either that, or perhaps his male role models were not emotionally available. I have three amazing dads (Dad, step-dad and godfather) who are all emotionally available and are just wonderful people to confide in and get advice from. As such, I am extremely emotionally available to those with whom I am close, especially my 8-year-old daughter.

That being said, my wife has Borderline Personality Disorder. I had not idea what that was until our third marriage counselor (no, I’m not a quitter) diagnosed her. She immediately stopped going to see him, I continued for over a year. BPD is a terribly frustrating disorder because there is no medication, the sufferer has to acknowledge the problem and get counseling. My wife will never, ever do that and attacks me in a verbally aggressive manner when I suggest it. She often threatens to take my daughter away in the process because she knows my baby girl is THE most important thing in my life. My wife walks around in her own little world of feeling inadequate and believing that nothing about life is fair – and she holds the rest of the world accountable for her feeling that way. It all stems (I have learned over the years) from the terrible (scream, yelling, cussing) relationship she had with her bi-polar mother when she was growing up. It got so bad that her father would go get a hotel for the night when they started going at each other. My wife has never grown beyond that relationship with her mother. She has never recognized that as the root of her issues, meditated on it and moved on.

The result of the way my wife chooses to treat me is that I have become extremely emotionally unavailable to her. I simply cannot allow myself to be open, as any time I share anything like a feeling or a sincere thought about something she winds up judging, criticizing and then using it against me in some way. Studying the Buddho-Christian path is a perfect example. I rarely feel stressed, rarely raise my voice even when I’m bothered by something and I focus on letting many, many things go. This is what the Buddha taught, and most of what Jesus taught in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) reflect a deep understanding of Buddhist teachings. There’s a wonderful book by Marcus Borg entitled Jesus and Buddha: The Common Sayings that might just change the way you view Christianity.  My wife is an evangelical Southern Baptist and gets ZERO peace from her religious experience (which doesn’t surprise me at all).

So in my case, I am an emotionally available man when it comes to my close friends, my daughter and my parents. There are definitely situations, though, where I am intentionally very unavailable.

Your friend may or may not be able to express or even identify the source of his emotional problems. Maybe you can talk with him about it and see where the conversation goes. It may also be that he is simply that way because of some circumstance and is unable to process it or deal with it. If that’s the case, you would be doing yourself a great disservice by trying to pursue a relationship with him. If things aren’t pretty awesome when you’re first dating, keep in mind they only go downhill from there.

My best suggestion is to just meet someone else. That’s what I plan to do when my daughter gets old enough to deal with her mother’s issues.