• Another does everything he can to put the choice he’s facing out of his mind. He asserts his right to complain about everything, and yet he stands next to this mountain of complaints and denies that he wants to leave. Occasionally one too many things go wrong or he spends just a little too much time with his partner, and then all his thoughts of leaving creep back in.
• Another talks to everyone, asking all the people who know her and care about her to tell her what to do.
• Another person obsessively and endlessly and constantly thinks about whether to stay or leave all day and half the night until her head’s ready to explode.
• Another denies there’s anything to be ambivalent about in the first place: he thinks it’s not the relationship that’s iffy, that the problem is just his fear of commitment.
• Another spends hours meditating alone, trying to remove all thought from his mind, so that he can allow an irrefutable signal to emerge all by itself and show him what’s best.
• Another goes for the superrational approach, assigning a numerical value to every positive and negative, so he can add up the score and get a single number that will tell him what he’ll be happiest doing, and he always gets some number but he never trusts it and never acts on it.
• Another keeps walking out, not because she wants to but because she’s hoping that breaking up will make things clear. But then she keeps starting the relationship up again.
But while everyone expresses ambivalence a little differently, there’s one thing people have in common: ambivalence in your heart goes hand in hand with distance in your relationship. When you feel ambivalent about your partner you make distance from your partner. You spend less time together. You talk less, and about less important things. You stop doing things together. There’s a cool, formal, ritualistic quality to the relationship. You make distance from your partner because you’re having an emotionally intense affair with your own ambivalence.