Kate paid another price for a lifetime of not deciding. The tension and misery she felt, directly traceable to living stuck in ambivalence, put a strain on her relationship with her children that took years to heal.

The woman I call “Kate” is my mother, with some details changed to protect her privacy (as I’ve done with all the people you’ll meet in this book), and her husband was my stepfather. In many ways, Kate’s a heroine, as a Holocaust survivor and a self-made businesswoman. But in this important way she didn’t know how to choose happiness. And in her ambivalence she’s like far too many of our parents, far too many people in middle age, and far too many people just starting out. I wrote this book to save others, to save you, from going through what my mother went through.

You may be wondering if there’s something wrong with you to feel so stuck. But the fact is that there’s an epidemic of ambivalence about many things these days. We live in an age that promotes self-awareness but fails to show us how to use our self-awareness to arrive at good decisions. We learn more and more things about ourselves without learning ways to sort them out or to sort out the feelings they generate in us.

This is particularly true when it comes to our relationships. As one actress said on TV, being interviewed about her marriage, “You’re supposed to reevaluate your relationship every day, aren’t you?” Only if you want to confuse and exhaust yourself. We’re told so many contradictory things: to be responsible to ourselves and to our partner, to be happy in ourselves and to be mature about our obligations, to fix our own lives above all else, and to fix our relationships no matter what.