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,

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.

All by yourself, you do what the opposing lawyers do at a trial, each lawyer piling up evidence on one side or the other. Then after acting as lawyer for both sides, you act as the jury, looking to see which pile of evidence weighs more. It’s instinctive. It’s universal. And it’s guaranteed to drive you crazy.

It’s as if you’d already advised yourself to leave. Quick take: If you look like you’re leaving your relationship and act like you’re leaving it, you’re leaving it. You know best.

I rarely see people in relationship ambivalence who haven’t worked hard to make things better. And that means there’s a good chance you’ve already tried some kind of couples therapy or workshop. So I’m reluctant to urge people who’ve already worked on their relationship to work still more on it. At some point enough is enough.

You make distance from your partner because you’re having an emotionally intense affair with your own ambivalence.