Mercedes Coffman on how modern dating culture is systematically disadvantaging emotionally available people — Mercedes is a therapist who works primarily with emotionally available clients, and she argues that the combination of dating apps, swipe culture, and an “era of immediacy” has created an environment that rewards avoidance and punishes depth. The core problem is that everything — from app design to cultural norms — is built around speed, novelty, and dopamine, which means emotionally unavailable people thrive while emotionally available people are left lowering their standards, burning out, or dropping out of dating entirely.
What Avoidant Culture Is and Why It Matters
Avoidant culture means avoiding anything inconvenient, uncomfortable, or slow — It encompasses anything that requires time, effort, consistency, or follow-through. Dating apps are specifically designed to reinforce this: they reward novelty, dopamine hits from new matches, and disposability rather than gradual emotional investment.
Emotionally available people are being psychologically damaged by this environment — They get pulled in by lovebombing and intensity from emotionally unavailable partners, then experience micro-grief, cortisol spikes, sleep disturbances, appetite disorders, and mood disorders as that person withdraws. The nervous system gets attached, then forced into repeated cycles of excitement and crash.
This creates a race to the bottom in the dating pool — Rarely do broken people get fixed, but fixed people become broken. Emotionally available people either leave dating or become emotionally unavailable themselves after repeated damage. The few emotionally available people who remain become targets, and the overall system trends toward entropy.
Why Emotionally Available People Are Especially Vulnerable
They want depth in a world that doesn’t reward it — They’re looking for substance, slow burn, gradual development, and consistency. But modern dating offers the opposite: convenience, speed, and endless options that make people less invested in any single connection.
They get pulled in by intensity, then ghosted — Emotionally unavailable people often present with lovebombing and high intensity early on, which hooks emotionally available people. Then contact slowly decreases, ghosting occurs, and the emotionally available person is left not trusting themselves or dating in general.
Mercedes is building a dating app specifically for emotionally available people — She’s noticed her clients are completely fatigued and discouraged. Chronic loneliness is just as unhealthy for the nervous system as being in toxic situationships. She envisions a platform with accountability, where people are held to standards of emotional investment rather than disposability.
How to Assess Emotional Availability Early
Watch for patterns, not potential or chemistry — Don’t rely on immediate intensity. Instead, notice how someone reacts when there’s no physical reward at the end of the night, how they treat service workers, how they handle delayed food, whether they can sit through discomfort without withdrawing or getting defensive.
The gold standard for alignment has three tiers:
Willingness to invest time — Someone can be emotionally intelligent and mature, but if they have no time for a relationship, you will not be aligned. This is the first thing to assess.
Emotional capacity — Can they hold their own emotions and yours? Can they deal with discomfort, conversations about growth, intentions, and feedback without retreating or avoiding?
Emotional maturity — Can they manage rejection without becoming aggressive or reactive? Can they remain responsive rather than defensive?
Surface-level bonding is why people attach to the wrong person — Dating profiles advertise age, hobbies, and physical attraction but never assess conflict repair style, love language, emotional availability, or emotional maturity. People bond over shared schools or food preferences rather than relationship values.
Why Great Ingredients Don’t Always Make a Great Relationship
Unresolved personal stuff is what derails otherwise aligned people — Even when both people have emotional availability, capacity, and maturity, unhealed trauma or unresolved issues in either person can prevent the relationship from working.
People attach backwards — chemistry first, values second — There are a lot of broken hearts because people attach to intensity and chemistry before assessing alignment. Social circles used to be smaller and more interconnected, which created accountability. Now people can ghost with a tap on their phone and bad behavior goes unpunished.
The Biochemistry of Falling for the Wrong Person
Early-stage obsession is a red flag, not a green one — Mercedes explains that obsession in early dating is nervous system activation driven by uncertainty, not genuine compatibility. When someone is inconsistent and doesn’t give clarity, your nervous system tries to create certainty by fixating on them. This is the same intermittent variable reward schedule used by slot machines and social media.
We’ve been conditioned to call dysregulation “butterflies” — Calling nervous system activation “butterflies” makes it sound cute and romantic, when in reality it signals that something is uncertain and potentially unsafe. This conditioning starts young and is reinforced by romantic media.
The MOP framework for staying grounded in early dating:
M — Match effort — Don’t overgive when chemistry hits. Overinvestment accelerates the addiction cycle and clouds mental clarity.
O — Observe for patterns — Wait weeks or months before fully investing. Patterns reveal character; potential does not.
P — Pace access — Especially physical access. Once physical intimacy begins, dopamine surges and clarity drops dramatically. You become a “full-blown addict” at that point.
Desire routinely outpaces capacity — Many people genuinely want a relationship but cannot sustain the growing pains: arguments, unresolved conflict, conversations about the future. They had capacity in the novelty phase, but consistency and effort reveal their actual limitations.
Self-Sabotage and the Fear Driving It
63% of people self-sabotage in relationships — A 2021 study in the Journal of Couples and Relationship Therapy found the most common drivers were fear of getting hurt, fear of rejection, and low self-esteem. People end relationships before they can get too attached.
Ghosting has normalized rejection and made it more damaging — Ghosting wasn’t always this common or anonymous. Now it happens without shame, and being ghosted triggers real grief and biochemical withdrawal — not something you just “get over” because you only knew the person for two weeks.
This creates two destructive barbells:
People who withstand too much and stay in damaging dynamics
People who can’t withstand anything and self-sabotage at the first sign of difficulty — they get instant relief but never grow their emotional capacity or maturity
Building Emotional Capacity
Sit through uncomfortable conversations — Practice staying present during anxiety, constructive feedback, or difficult topics without withdrawing. Recognize that feelings won’t swallow you whole.
Don’t overload your life — You might have capacity during good times, but if your nervous system is flooded with cortisol from an overloaded schedule, you won’t have capacity for connection or conflict repair.
Stabilize your nervous system through discipline — Meditation, gym routines, and consistent practices help regulate the nervous system over time, which builds capacity for sustained intimacy.
Trauma, Self-Abandonment, and the Cost of Being “Nice”
Trauma doesn’t have to look dramatic to be real — Many people dismiss their own trauma because they think it has to involve severe abuse. Trauma is anything that made you feel deeply dysregulated at any point in life. A key indicator is reactivity: if you get disproportionately triggered during increasing intimacy, it’s usually unresolved trauma from childhood relationships with caregivers.
Self-abandonment shows up in small, everyday ways — Prioritizing other people, places, or things over your own needs. Not pausing to ask yourself if you feel safe. Overriding your own feelings to people-please. Every time you do this, you disconnect from yourself.
Overgiving and over-consideration often come from wounded places — Suffering breeds compassion, but that compassion can become self-destructive. Many people who were abandoned as children continue the trauma themselves by abandoning their own needs. Society sees this as noble — “they’re so kind” — when it may be driving inflammation, immune suppression, and early death.
The pro-social mask hides anti-social costs — Making your displeasure known (anger, criticism, boundary-setting) is antisocial in the short term but healthy. Turning outward discontent into sadness or self-criticism is pro-social but self-destructive. It means you don’t get mad, you get sad. You don’t get angry at the world, you get angry at yourself.
Check on your nice friends — The person who always listens needs to be listened to. The person who always gives needs to receive. We assign people roles (the nice one, the therapist, the reliable one) because our brains crave certainty, but this traps those people in self-abandoning patterns and doesn’t allow them the flexibility to be fully themselves.
Limerence: The Addiction of Uncertainty
Limerence is emotional fixation fueled by uncertainty — Signs include unusual fixation, constant rumination, extreme mood highs and lows, and craving validation. It happens early, before you really know the person.
64% of people experience limerence, with 32% at the level of full person addiction — This is far higher than the previously circulated estimate of 5%.
Who is most vulnerable:
People with unresolved childhood wounds, especially those who grew up with unpredictable love
Highly imaginative people who build fantasies around chemistry
Highly empathic people who extend understanding to justify inconsistency
Anxiously attached people, who are dramatically overrepresented
Introverted, intuitive, feeling-oriented personality types (INFPs, INFJs, INTJs, INTPs, ENFPs are most prone)
Unpredictable praise in childhood wires the brain for limerence — When a child doesn’t know what standards they need to meet to be seen or valued, they develop a hypervigilant nervous system that spends adulthood trying to earn consistency that was never provided. This makes intermittent reinforcement from a romantic partner biochemically addictive.
Why the Wrong People Are the Hardest to Get Over
They’re the most addicting because they’re the most uncertain — Wrong people create dopamine spikes through unpredictability and cortisol spikes through stress. Your nervous system becomes obsessed not because the person is great, but because it’s trying to resolve uncertainty and get clarity.
Gaps in clarity create space for fantasy — When someone gives you limited pieces of themselves, your brain fills the blank canvas with whatever you want. You’re not addicted to the person; you’re addicted to the fantasy you built around them. Fantasy is always more compelling than reality.
“Would you choose this person as your child’s model of love?” — Mercedes’s friend reframed the question of partner selection: the way you and your partner communicate, relate, and disagree is what your kids will think love is. It’s not abstract — it’s the template they’ll internalize for their own identity and future relationships.
Practical Advice for the Emotionally Available
Stop being so hard on yourself for being a “bad picker” — Your picker isn’t broken; your nervous system is starting from a dysregulated baseline because modern life is built on uncertainty. You’re likely picking based on intensity because that’s what your nervous system has been conditioned to seek. Realign with your standards and boundaries through self-reflection and therapy.
Boundaries protect relationships; they don’t push good people away — Reframe boundary-setting: speaking up about something that hurt you is advocacy for the relationship, not an attack on the other person. If you don’t speak up, you’re abandoning the relationship’s needs. The fear of abandonment is real, but boundaries are what keep good relationships intact.
Treat yourself as a future drug addict when you start dating — While your prefrontal cortex is still functioning, be incredibly discerning. Soon serotonin will drop, dopamine will rise, and you’ll lose the ability to reason clearly. Steward your future self by being deliberate now.
