Ambivalence

Ambivalents are men and women who want love but are also afraid of it. Many people are ambivalent and don’t know it. One way to tell if you are ambivalent is that you have a history of falling in love with the wrong partner over and over again and passing up opportunities for a healthy relationship. Ambivalence is usually unconscious before you become self-aware.

Ambivalents have the following characteristics:

▪ You crave love, but you also fear it.

▪ You only get involved with emotionally unavailable people.

▪ You sabotage relationships once they get serious or our fear of intimacy comes up.

▪ You often initiate relationships with more than one person at the same time in order to avoid moving to a deeper level with any one person.


▪ You break up and make up over and over again in the same relationship and become addicted to this pattern.

▪ You sexualize relationships to such a degree that emotional intimacy is non-existent, and then become addicted to either the sex or the relationship—often both.

▪ You cannot commit to the future. You insist on living in the moment.

▪ You can love and commit, but this will go hand in hand with avoidance tactics, such as a difficulty with affection and opening up emotionally.

▪ You are there and yet You are not there.

▪ You come close, and then move away.

▪ You let other things outside of the relationship get in the way, i.e., hobbies, work, friends, lovers, addictions—anything.

▪ You just cannot open up to a deeper level of emotional intimacy, and yet you are unable to let go of the relationship.

▪ You have affairs to avoid emotional intimacy with your partner.

▪ You separate from a spouse, but you never get around to a divorce.