What does it mean to have relationship ambivalence?

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. Relationships evolve and studies show that even relationships that start out mostly positive (such as romantic relationships) often accumulate negative feelings as life unfolds and significant challenges emerge. Partners change, circumstances shift, responsibilities grow heavier. What once felt effortless now involves compromises, mismatched needs or recurring patterns we didn’t see in the early glow. When these negative feelings first emerge, the positive ones do not suddenly dissipate, thus creating ambivalence.

Think about a relationship in your own life that leaves you feeling torn. Maybe you care deeply about this person and value the bond, yet also feel hurt, frustrated or disappointed by them. If that feels unsettling, our findings suggest there is a reason: people are often distressed by the mixed feelings of relationship ambivalence. We do not want to feel pulled in opposite directions about someone who matters to us. In fact, our studies (and research by others) have shown that ambivalence in romantic relationships undermines both relationship quality and personal wellbeing. And the strain is not only psychological: experiencing ambivalence has been linked to higher blood pressure, greater inflammation and other early markers of cardiovascular risk.

Uncertainty doesn’t just chip away at relationship quality, it also affects wellbeing

Despite this tension, we’ve found that ambivalence doesn’t tend to mean that people check out of a relationship – if anything, it often means the opposite. When someone feels both pulled in and pushed away, they tend to stay mentally busy trying to ‘solve’ the ambivalence: they want to either like or dislike someone; they want to figure out whether the relationship is worth investment or whether it is best to pull away. In fact, in our studies we found that the more ambivalence someone experiences in a romantic relationship, the more they think and ruminate about it.

These ruminative thoughts tend to swing in two directions. At times they are constructive and people think about ways to improve things, fix patterns, reconnect. Other times, their thoughts are pretty destructive, focusing on all the difficulties, problems and flaws of the relationships. That same push‑pull shows up in behaviour. Some days people act warmly and constructively, trying to connect with the other person. On other days, people are destructive, by withdrawing or blaming and criticising others. And in our studies that have tracked people over time, we see that ambivalence reliably produces these swings, making people fluctuate substantially between these two different types of thoughts and behaviours on a daily basis.

So feeling ambivalent does not seem like a walk in the woods. It is stressful and consequential for how people behave in their relationship. And what about the person on the receiving end? What happens when your partner has both strong positive and strong negative feelings toward you: one day they want to connect, the next they pull back or critique, and the cycle repeats? Being on the receiving end of those mixed signals can feel destabilising. And those shifts – from connection to distance, from support to irritation – aren’t just confusing; they can take a toll on the sense of safety and stability in the relationship. In fact, in our studies, we find that recipients of ambivalence often experience their partner as unpredictable and hard to read. That uncertainty doesn’t just chip away at relationship quality, it also affects the wellbeing of the recipient of the ambivalence. Recipients report feeling more stressed, in a more negative mood, and less satisfied with their lives overall. It’s clear that ambivalence isn’t a solo experience, it tends to spill over, influencing (and potentially damaging) the person on the other side of the relationship, too.

If you recognise these descriptions of relationship ambivalence including the challenges involved, you might be wondering if there’s anything you can do about it. There’s no quick fix, but there is some good news. First, ambivalence means that the relationship matters to you. Mixed feelings – strong positives and strong negatives – show up only when someone is important to us. If the relationship didn’t matter to you, you wouldn’t feel torn; you would feel indifferent. Indifference is the state where even the negative feelings have faded – you’re no longer frustrated or hurt, you’ve simply stopped noticing. So ambivalence, uncomfortable as it is, signals that this is still a meaningful relationship. Second, ambivalence makes you reflect on the relationship. You are involved, you want to understand what is going on, and decide what should happen next. Ambivalence is an important signal that shows you that a rewarding and valuable relationship poses significant costs too, nudging you to ask whether to repair, recalibrate or step back.

All this means that if you are now recognising for the first time that a significant relationship in your life is ambivalent for you, this awareness is already an important first step. Becoming aware of your mixed feelings creates an opportunity to reflect on the relationship.

This is a good moment to intervene and influence what happens next. After all, if you are having these mixed feelings, it means two helpful conditions are present:

There’s still some positivity to build on. The relationship has rewards; the task is to reduce the negativity, not to build positivity from scratch; and You are still engaged. You care, you’re motivated, and you’re open to making things better – whether through conversation, reflection, counselling or other forms of support (in other words, you are not in the indifferent quadrant of our framework, which would be worse news for the relationship!)

If negativity comes to overwhelm the positives – or if you find yourself starting to drift into indifference – then your window for change will have narrowed. Ambivalence, in contrast, sits in a workable in‑between zone, where effort still has room to make a difference. It can be a moment to approach the other person, communicate your needs, and see whether you can find ways together that allow the relationship to improve. After all, ambivalence is the emotional equivalent of a blinking yellow light: not a stop, not a go, but an invitation to pay attention. And with the right attention, many relationships can still find their better path.