Emotionally Unavailable

About a year ago I met a guy who I soon deemed “emotionally unavailable.” For the first couple dates it was great, no red flags. But as we continued to go out and I continued to get more invested the relationship seemed to get harder and harder and the connection between us seemed to grow more distant. I wanted quality time and communication, he wanted the label without the effort. A month into it we talked and he admitted that he wasn’t emotionally invested but didn’t necessarily want to break up. I didn’t get that. To me, if you’re in any type of relationship with someone, friendship or romantic, there has to be an emotional connection because emotions are a defining part of being human right? His response to me was “maybe if we stay together I can start to feel something for you again.” No, thanks. He wanted to artificially generate emotions in hopes that they would become real. This is like the concept of Masahiro Mori’s “Uncanny Valley.” We are less drawn to something that closely looks like a human, but isn’t, than we are with something that acts like a human without looking the part. This uncanny valley gets deeper, further away from the human likeness line the more the being resembles an unhealthy human. Yet, he believes that we are drawn to things that resemble a human if it a healthy person. A great example of this is in Be Right Back where same Uncanny Valley principle is applied. The resurrected, fake Ash looks like a human, acts like a human, but is he human? Throughout the movie he’s what the world would call emotionally unavailable. He doesn’t feel happiness, sadness, pain, or pleasure. He’s not sexually aroused, doesn’t know how to comfort Martha, or how to argue. If robots are defined as being artificially generated and have trouble feeling things, an aspect that makes humans unique, then what is the difference between an artificially created human and an emotionally unavailable human? We’ve become a world where physically speaking, robots are nearly humans. The argument lies in that they cannot feel emotion, something that cannot be taught or known with fact. Yet, I think the same argument can be applied to emotionally unavailable people, who, in the extreme sense, are described as sociopaths--no moral compass, no emotion, no ability to see consequences. If you take away human’s ability to emotionally reason and weigh consequences, would they be robots? If you give robots the ability to feel deeply to the point of joy or mourning, are they human?