What does it mean to have relationship ambivalence?

is associate professor at the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology at the VU Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the psychology of close relationships, investigating processes related to relationship quality and maintenance. We tend to talk about our relationships as either satisfying or unsatisfying, healthy or toxic.

This either/or perspective shapes a lot of relationship advice, and filters through to the ways many of us chat about our relationship dilemmas with friends. But the reality is that many of our most consequential relationships in life are both positive and negative at the same time (or neither positive nor negative – which I’ll come back to later). You can love your partner tremendously and hate their lack of responsibility.

You can feel deeply grateful to your in-laws for all the support they offer while at the same time feeling extremely annoyed by their intrusiveness. You can admire your boss’s effectiveness and be irritated by their micromanaging. My colleagues and I recently put forward a new four-quadrant framework for how people evaluate their relationships.

The experiences I just described would fall into the ambivalent quadrant, which is characterised by having both strong positive and negative feelings toward another person at the same time. The other quadrants are feeling mostly positive, mostly negative or indifferent. We believe that ambivalence in relationships has been largely overlooked up until now, even though it’s such a common and consequential experience.

It’s important to say that being in an ambivalent relationship is not the same as finding it mildly satisfying – the distinctive nature of these relationships is that you experience strong positive feelings and strong negative feelings. It’s also important to distinguish ambivalence from indifference, which occurs when neither positive nor negative feelings are strong and the relationship instead feels emotionally neutral. In other words, ambivalence is ‘I care a lot, but I’m torn,’ while indifference is closer to ‘I’m not especially drawn in, upset, or emotionally invested.’ How does ambivalence arise in relationships?

Certainly, some relationships are a mixed package from their very beginning: offering great warmth and connection alongside quirks, costs or complications that never quite disappear. Since their start, they stir both gratitude and frustration, attraction and hesitation. But ambivalence can also grow over time.