Are You Emotionally Available?
Three different reasons the door stays shut
Emotionally unavailable is usually said about somebody else, and it is usually said as an accusation. It is more useful as a description, because there are at least three separate things it can mean and they have nothing to do with each other. You can be afraid of being known. You can find that the words simply do not come out, with anyone, about anything. Or you can be entirely capable of both and still be occupied by somebody who is no longer there.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
This one is more useful the more honest it is, and nothing you answer goes anywhere. Answer about how you have been over the last year or so.
What it measures
Three obstacles that produce the same complaint from the other side. Fear of closeness is anxiety about being fully known. Difficulty expressing is about the words rather than the willingness. Unfinished business is the space an earlier relationship is still taking up. They need completely different responses, and only one of them is about the person you are with now.
Based on: Fear of intimacy (Descutner & Thelen, 1991) and emotional attachment to ex-partners (Spielmann et al., 2013)
Possible results
Fear of closeness
Anxiety about being fully known.
Trouble expressing
The words not arriving, rather than not wanting to say them.
Unfinished business
Room an earlier relationship is still occupying.
Common questions
Can you be emotionally unavailable and still love someone?
Yes, and that combination is most of why the phrase causes so much confusion. Availability is not about the size of the feeling, it is about whether any of it reaches the other person in a usable form. Someone can love you a great deal and still be behind glass. That is also why the accusation lands so badly: the person hearing it knows exactly how much they feel, and hears themselves being told they feel nothing.
Am I just not ready for a relationship?
Look at which bar is high. If it is the third one, then yes, in a real and temporary sense - the room is occupied, and time plus less contact with the past is what clears it. If it is the first, waiting will not help, because fear of closeness does not decay on its own and the next relationship will meet the same wall at the same depth. The distinction matters because one of these is a reason to wait and the other is a reason not to.
Should I tell them my result?
If the middle bar is your high one, telling them is unusually useful, because it converts what they have been reading as indifference into a difficulty you are naming. That single act of naming is itself the behaviour that was missing. If the first bar is high, be more careful: a result is easy to hand over as an explanation and then used as a permanent excuse. It describes where you are now, not what you are allowed to keep doing.
Sources
- Descutner, C. J., & Thelen, M. H. (1991). Development and validation of a Fear-of-Intimacy Scale. Psychological Assessment.
- Spielmann, S. S., Joel, S., MacDonald, G., & Kogan, A. (2013). Ex appeal: Current relationship quality and emotional attachment to ex-partners. Social Psychological and Personality Science.
- Spielmann, S. S., MacDonald, G., & Wilson, A. E. (2009). On the rebound: Focusing on someone new helps anxiously attached individuals let go of ex-partners. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
An honest note Emotional availability is a popular phrase, not a clinical category, and this test builds it out of two research traditions rather than measuring any single validated construct. Fear of intimacy is the best supported of the three bars: the scale it comes from has strong reliability and has been linked to loneliness and low mood. The third bar rests on research that is longitudinal but correlational - longing for an ex predicted lower current relationship quality over time, which suggests a real cost but cannot prove the direction. The middle bar is the loosest, assembled from work on emotional expression rather than taken from one instrument. Read a high score as information about a habit rather than a verdict on your character, and bear in mind that difficulty with closeness is one of the things that responds best to talking to a professional.