Table Of ContentMR UNAVAILABLE AND THE FALLBACK GIRL
Kindle Edition
Copyright © Natalie Lue 2008-2011
Published by Naughty Girl Media. All rights reserved, including the right of
reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Natalie Lue asserts the moral right
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Click here to skip to the beginning of the book
My Story
You’re Not Alone
Understanding Unavailable Relationships
He Blows Hot & Cold
He Keeps Things On His Terms
His Actions Don’t Match His Words
He Likes Fast Forwarding
He Loves Casual Relationships
He Deals In Crumb Rations of Commitment
He Keeps a Foothold in Your Life
He Uses ‘Timing’ To Manage You
He’s an Egotist Seeking Perfection
He Breaks Out the Sob Story & the Excuses
He Only Thinks of Himself
The Why’s of Mr Unavailable
He Blows Hot & Cold…You Become the Pursuer
He Keeps Things On His Terms… You Maintain the Drama Meter
His Actions Don’t Match His Words… Your Actions Don’t Match Your Words
He Likes Fast Forwarding… You Dine Off Illusions
He Loves Casual Relationships… You Confuse Sex With Love and A
Connection
He Deals In Crumb Rations of Commitment… You’ve Become a Disgruntled
Customer
He Keeps a Foothold in Your Life… You Keep Leaving the Door Ajar
He Uses ‘Timing’ To Manage You… You Seem To Have All The Time In The
World
He’s an Egotist Seeking Perfection… You’re Seeking A Feeling
He Breaks Out the Sob Story & the Excuses… You Inflate Your Emotional
Airbag
He Only Thinks of Himself… You Put All The Focus On Him
The Making of a Fallback Girl
The Yo-Yo Girl
The Other Woman
The Buffer
Renovators and Florences
The Flogger
Miss Independent / Miss Self-Sufficient
Moving Forward
Some Final Words
Resources
Acknowledgements
This book is for my girls.
MY STORY
Once upon a time I was an eight-year-old girl living next door to a hot boy who
was two years older. I wistfully watched him over the wall each day and hoped
that he’d fancy me back one day. He wasn’t interested in me but that didn’t stop
his smiles or our conversations from lighting up my world. A few years later and
I was 13, at summer camp and blindly in love with an aloof, miserable-looking
character called David. I actually don’t recall if we ever had a conversation and I
have no idea what I was interested in. Camp finished after two weeks but my
feelings stretched out for a year.
Fortunately I learned not to go for the miserable, self-absorbed, barely-say-a-
word ones anymore, but my interests turned to boys and then men who would
pursue me relentlessly, and then toy with my emotions until I didn’t know my
arse from my elbow. I had a string of relationships lasting from months to years,
so I assumed that I loved being in relationships - it was just a shame that they
were never with the right guy! My love life and penchant for showstopping
breakups, men that blew hot and cold, and the shift in my persona that I felt
around these life-sappers became entertainment fodder for my friends and
family, and eventually for my blog readers. As far as I was concerned, the issue
wasn’t with me and I was just damn unlucky in love.
Even when I was struck down with the autoimmune disease sarcoidosis in
the year that I both got engaged and broke it off, I couldn’t connect with the
notion that I might have needed to look within myself for the answers. I left him
because our relationship was a catastrophic mistake and I wanted to be true to
myself and live life on my own terms, but a couple of months later I took up the
starring role of the Other Woman to a guy with a girlfriend. I thought I was a
smart, sophisticated, single woman about town who was in control of this no-
frills arrangement but I rapidly slid into When Exactly Do You Intend On
Leaving Her? Mode, and even issued a few ultimatums where the deadline
passed and I was still there.
During this period, my health seriously deteriorated. As I struggled with my
vision, being able to breathe, move around, and the lumps that riddled my body,
I wondered if I’d ever lead a normal, healthy, happy life, but seemed to be stuck
in a vicious cycle of pain and a dangerous, co-dependent relationship. When my
mother said, “You need to love yourself and reconnect with your spirit,” I felt
offended that she would suggest that what was happening to me had anything to
do with a lack of self-love.
It took 18 months of drama and broken promises before I managed to
extricate myself from the affair. There were so many times that I should have
walked, but none more so than after a terrible panic attack. He’d been whining
about other men being interested in me and pressuring me about our ‘situation’,
and suddenly I couldn’t breathe and was sitting in a doorway in the middle of
London trying to pull myself together. It was one of the most devastating things
that ever happened to me and his way to deal with it was to escort me to the
Tube, and go home to his girlfriend as he was too afraid to make sure I got home
in one piece.
Shellshocked afterwards, my worth hit an all-time low. My primary thought
was “I am such an unlovable person that he put me on packed Tube on a Friday
night in the midst of a panic attack. If I was a loveable person, he would never
have treated me that way”. It took three weeks to recover and I realised that I
had to find a way for things to end because I didn’t think I could bear a repeat.
He apologised profusely and made every excuse under the sun but the damage
was irreparable. It was hard to let go but what kept me focused was putting
myself first. He put himself first and then his girlfriend and if I couldn’t
prioritise myself, who would?
Like an apparent breath of fresh air, another Mr Unavailable entered into my
life a short while later. He seemed so nice and normal, and he chased me until he
had my full attention. He’d broken up with a long-term girlfriend a few months
before and still shared a home with her. Because he’d pursued, I assumed that
not only was he interested, but that he must be ready to move on. After five
months in which the relationship barely got out the gate, he finally admitted, that
he wasn’t ready for another relationship.
The frustrations I experienced with him and what I wrote about on my blog
after ending it, were the beginning of a self-defining, life-changing period in my
life. While I’d learned some painful lessons, I recognised that I’d have to go
through some self-discovery to extricate myself from this unhealthy pattern.
Waking up at the age of twenty-eight and acknowledging that I seemed to have a
penchant for emotionally unavailable men (Mr Unavailables) was terrifying.
Confronted with the truth of my relationship history, I had to accept that
I’m the only recurring character in the soap opera called my life.
I am, of course, the common denominator in every single relationship I’ve
ever had, and if I’ve found myself in a pattern, I created it. I’d spent years
chalking up my experiences and patterns to bad luck and laughing it off, either
for my own sanity or for the benefit of others, but with the past ten years playing
out in my head and my health in tatters, it was time to stop using humour as an
avoidance prop and get serious.
When I began writing about Mr Unavailables and sharing my insights with
readers around the world, I was basically thinking out loud and organising my
thoughts and past experiences to do some self-evaluation. I genuinely thought it
was just me initially, but as soon as I declared my penchant for Mr Unavailables,
I heard from many others who seemed to be living my life. Initially I thought
recognising it was enough but I went on to date two more Mr Unavailables
(albeit briefly) and attracted plenty more. It became clear that my relationships
up to this point were about avoiding commitment and intimacy, only I was
discovering that pseudo-relationships were no longer enough because my self-
worth was improving.
When I admitted that being involved with these men meant that I couldn’t
possibly have been that happy within myself, others joined me in liberating
themselves from the pretence. There was an undeniable sense of relief and I
realised that many women numb themselves to the pain of what’s happening in
their lives because they don’t think they’re supposed to admit how difficult it is
to balance your self-esteem with your quest for a relationship and all of the
attendant external pressures. I’d buried so much of what was bothering me that it
seemed to have manifested itself by throwing out my mystery illness.
I used to wonder why I was the girl that these guys thought would be ideal
for a pseudo-relationship.
Why did they think they could disappear and then call me up and just expect
to pick up from where we left off? What happened to all the promise I saw at the
beginning? Why did I always seem to draw in men with girlfriends, wives, or an
ever-present mother in the background with long apron strings attached? Why
did I keep apologising for being me? Why did I always have to change myself in
order for things to ‘work’? There were so many questions.
Literally at the same time that I experienced my epiphanies about my
relationships with Mr Unavailables, my illness returned full force. Terrified of
the prospect of a life on steroids, I started kinesiology, a type of complimentary
therapy that works with your muscles and the meridian system used in
acupuncture to redress imbalances and underlying causes to health issues that
may be linked to allergies, emotional issues, physical issues, etc., and found
myself inadvertently having to confront many things that I’d buried. I was being
tested for food allergies but found myself discovering a lot of unresolved hurt
eating away at me.
My health dramatically improved and a sense of inner peace began to
descend on me that I’d never felt. Sometimes I wept with grief over the emotions
and memories that I pulled out and inspected at that time, but as I laid things to
rest and began to understand my own contribution towards my relationships, I
felt a sense of relief because I no longer felt that my future and the possibility of
happiness in a relationship was going to be down to ‘luck’. I had to make my
own.
Around the time that I dated the last Mr Unavailable, I started acupuncture
and the recovery process from my illness sped up, and so did my self-esteem.
When I told him to beat it, I did so because I acknowledged that when a woman
feels happier about herself and her life without the man in her life, there doesn’t
seem any point in being with him. I accepted that I might be single for a long
time now that Mr Unavailables were no longer attractive, but less than a week
later I met the most wonderful man and I didn’t chase him away because he was
nice or tar him with the ex brush. If we’d become involved any sooner than we
did, it’s unlikely that I’d have appreciated him or not created a boatload of
drama. As it is, we’re still together now and we have two daughters.
I’m in no way suggesting that my ‘ending’ is your ending. In fact, it’s not
even an ending and more like a ‘new beginning’. In order to change this
destructive pattern, it takes willpower, courage, and consistently doing things
differently than how you have before. You need to believe in yourself more than
you believe in them.
YOU’RE NOT ALONE
Every day through my site Baggage Reclaim (www.baggagereclaim.com) I come
across thousands of women (and men) that are ‘stuck’ in an unavailable
relationship. Some of them know they’re involved with someone that’s
emotionally, physically and spiritually unavailable, making their partners limited
in their capacity to have a relationship and commit, never mind love. For many
others, they have no clue what they are involved in. They think that their
situation is ‘unique’, that they said or did something to provoke their partner into
‘changing’, that they can do something to change their partner via fixing, healing
and helping them or changing themselves, or that they’re even losing their
minds. They think that they’ve misunderstood something or their eyes are
deceiving them. Often, they think that they know better.
When people discover my site it’s often because they went in search of
information to help diagnose their ‘problem’ and discover a solution. When they
embark on the search, while they may be looking for some support, they’re also
hoping that the solution will ideally involve 1) some magic move or strategy that
will help them ‘win’ over the object of their affections, 2) tactics for helping ‘fix’
their partners…into a committed relationship, or 3) confirmation that the
problem is all the other party. Generally, they’re hoping that the solution doesn’t
involve admitting that they’re in a relationship that cannot work and that is
highly likely to involve them opting out.
They’re often shocked when they discover that their story has been told
many times over, often with some readers asking “Are you sure you’re not going
out with my guy?”. You could be fooled into believing that these men have all
been reading the same playbook and learning the same moves because they all
follow a well-honed pattern of behaviour. Hell, you’d almost think they were all
part of a secret society following some unspoken code between unavailable men
because you can take one woman out of her story and put you into it to make
yours. All this time when you’ve been thinking that your situation is unique or
that they’re ‘unpredictable’ and it turns out that most of the stuff these guys do is
about as predictable as the surety that the sun is going to come up tomorrow.
Following my epiphany in the summer of 2005, I’ve been documenting my
experiences and observations about dating, relationships, and self-esteem on
Baggage Reclaim. Recognising that I’d been OK with substandard relationships,
the question “Why do I want someone that doesn’t want me or only wants to
be with me in a limited capacity?” needed to be answered.
