When I was a little girl, I was promised romance.

Not grand gestures or fairy tales necessarily, but something simpler: a man who desired you and wasn’t afraid to show it. Someone emotionally present. Someone who called because he wanted to hear your voice. Someone who made you feel chosen.

Instead, somewhere along the way, many of us seem to have been handed a very different reality.

You would think that a man who has been introduced to you for the purpose of marriage would be emotionally available or at least willing to invest time in getting to know you.

Well, you would be wrong.

It usually starts with butterflies, roses, and rainbows. He reaches out consistently, compliments you, and gives you hope for the future. Slowly, you begin to let your guard down and entertain the possibility that maybe, finally, you’ve met the one.

Then, just as you settle into the idea of a happily ever after, things start to shift.

He pulls back.

He becomes emotionally distant.

The compliments disappear.

The warmth fades.

Suddenly, you’re left confused, and the emotional labor of guessing begins.

You try to communicate. You ask whether something is wrong, and he reassures you that everything is fine.

So, you convince yourself of the same.

“Maybe I’m just overthinking,” you tell yourself.

But, the distance remains. And, no amount of reassurance changes the reality of how you feel.

And sadly, this isn’t just my story.

When I started talking to other women…the serial daters. The happily married women. The unhappily married women. The divorced women. The single women.

The details changed, but the stories felt remarkably similar.

There was a common theme in all these conversations: there seems to be a growing absence of emotional availability.

A reluctance to go deeper.

To be vulnerable.

To talk honestly about fears, family history, past wounds, or emotional needs.

A friend recently told me how frustrated and exhausted she was because her husband barely called or texted her for weeks at a time. Weeks?!

I used to think dating was rough, but when married women are struggling to receive basic communication from their own spouses, we’ve completely lost the plot.

There’s a pattern I can no longer ignore: men who won’t fully choose you, but won’t fully let you go either. They give you just enough attention to keep you around and just enough distance to keep you confused. They breadcrumb you into lingering, hoping, and waiting.

Maybe this sounds familiar.

Maybe right now you’re thinking about someone who’s just not that into you. You’re waiting on that person to choose you.

Or you’re teaching someone how to love you. How to talk to you. You tell yourself, “Maybe they’re just not good at expressing their emotions.” They disappear anytime things start to get real and deep.

You wait for them to come back.

To choose you.

To want you.

You are convinced that this is the real deal. You convince yourself that he’s just busy at work. But in reality, that’s just bullshit. We all know men who really love and want you will go through the depths of the earth to get to you if that’s what it takes. If he wanted to, he would.

The truth is, when someone genuinely wants to be in your life, you rarely have to spend this much time dissecting their intentions. We all know people make time for what matters to them. We all know what effort looks like when it’s freely given.

They say they are into you. But then act like talking to you is another chore to be checked off their to-do list. And some can’t even be bothered. They won’t fully commit or leave, but leave you in this limbo state to do the emotional guesswork.

It’s exhausting.

And, I am here thinking: Is he into me?

He must be, or else he wouldn’t be calling, wouldn’t be investing time. But as it turns out, I am wrong.

And that’s the trap, isn’t it?

We take crumbs of effort and build entire castles out of them. We fill in the silence with our own hope and then blame ourselves when the foundation collapses.

So how did we get here?

How did we collectively accept the idea that modern men are incapable of emotional depth?

Particularly because men historically have been really great poets, writers, philosophers, authors, painters, and composers. They wrote about love, longing, heartbreak, beauty, grief, and devotion with extraordinary depth.

Clearly, the capacity exists.

The older I get, the more I think the problem begins in childhood.

I remember watching a little boy cry while his father immediately told him, “Stop crying like a girl. Strong men don’t cry.”

Excuse me?

How did we decide this was normal?

We teach boys from an early age to suppress vulnerability, disconnect from their emotions, and equate emotional expression with weakness.

Then, years later, we wonder why so many grown men struggle to communicate their feelings, navigate intimacy, or sustain emotional closeness.

Meanwhile, women are often conditioned to interpret this emotional absence as compatibility. We’re told he’s mysterious. Stoic. Independent. Hard to read.

 Emotional unavailability isn’t a romantic mystery — it’s conditioning.

I’m sorry, but if someone is incapable of showing genuine interest, communicating consistently, or investing effort into getting to know me, I refuse to call that compatibility. I refuse to romanticize emotional unavailability or mistake confusion for chemistry.

Patriarchy doesn’t just harm women; it stunts men’s emotional growth as well. It teaches them that vulnerability is weakness, emotional expression is embarrassing, and detachment is somehow attractive.

Then, it rewards them for performing indifference while women are left doing the emotional heavy lifting.

And yet women are constantly expected to accommodate it.

Why are women responsible for managing everyone’s emotions?

Why is emotional maturity treated as our responsibility while emotional avoidance is excused as masculine nature?

Most women aren’t asking for the moon and the stars. We aren’t demanding perfection. We simply want emotionally intelligent and emotionally available partners.

When I got back into dating after almost six years, I thought I was the problem. My softness, my “easy-to-talk-to” personality, could be the reason why men (singular, him) didn’t want to invest in me as much.

What I’ve observed is this: most men want attention without any real intention of committing. They want emotional support without emotional responsibility. They want access without accountability.

Looking back, even with boundaries as strong as mine, I found myself “teaching” an emotionally unavailable man how to treat me. I was chasing clarity, knowing full well that when it’s not given freely, I already have my answer.

I explained my feelings to someone who had repeatedly shown me he wasn’t interested in understanding them.

I spent far too much time waiting for effort that never arrived.

I wasn’t asking for anything extraordinary.

I wanted to feel adored.

I wanted thoughtful communication, genuine interest, and affection that wasn’t dragged out of someone.

I wanted someone who was excited to hear from me, not someone who treated texting me like another task on a never-ending to-do list.

Women, meanwhile, are labelled needy for wanting more.

Too emotional.

Too demanding.

Asking for too much.

But wanting communication isn’t asking for too much.

Wanting affection isn’t asking for too much.

Wanting emotional availability isn’t asking for too much.

Wanting to be loved without constantly questioning where you stand isn’t asking for too much.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable realization wasn’t that emotionally unavailable men exist. It was recognizing how many women, including myself, are willing to wait for love that is clearly not being offered.

Why do we stay?

Why do we cling to potential instead of reality?

Why do we continue hoping that someone will eventually become the person they’ve shown us they are not?

Women are taught to hope.

To nurture.

To be patient.

To see the best in people.

Sometimes we become so attached to the possibility of who someone could be that we ignore who they actually are.

It’s depressing.

But hope cannot create intimacy where willingness does not exist.

Real intimacy doesn’t require endless waiting, fixing, teaching, convincing, or proving your worth.

It requires presence.

It requires two people who are both willing to show up emotionally and meet each other halfway.

When you finally step outside the cult of the unavailable man, something shifts.

You realize your worth was never dependent on someone else’s capacity to love you.

Their inability to meet you where you are is not evidence that you are difficult to love. It is evidence that they are unwilling or unable to show up.

And that is not your burden to carry.

Ladies, we have to stop accepting breadcrumbs and calling them romance. We have to stop celebrating bare-minimum effort as though it deserves a standing ovation.

We have to stop waiting for emotionally unavailable people to become emotionally available.

We deserve consistency.

We deserve reciprocity.

We deserve partners who communicate, who care, who are willing to grow, and who aren’t afraid to show us that we matter.

Most importantly, we deserve to stop confusing potential with love.

Because I don’t know about you, but I’m still wondering:

Where the fuck is the romance I was promised when I was a little girl?

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xo,

Yachna