How The Ambivalence Of Your Partner Is Negatively Impacting Your Mental Health
Having someone in your life who is ambivalent about the future of the relationship can take an emotional toll on many of us. While we are busy struggling with our own uncertainty and confusion, we may not realize how this situation is impacting our mental health in a very negative way.
Ambivalence can lead to a cycle of distress, despair and depression if not managed properly. The lingering uncertainty that comes with having an ambivalent partner can create a negative impact on your self-esteem and outlook on life, eventually eroding away at any notions of stability or security. I will try to look at how this turmoil impacts our mental health and suggest strategies for managing it effectively.
Sadly, singing Katy Perrey’s “Hot and Cold” at the top of your lungs is not gonna solve all the emotional crises.
The Effect of Your Partner’s Ambivalence on Your Mental Health
You feel like you can’t rely on them
When your partner is giving a vibe of not wanting to answer anything with a straight Yes or No, they may have trouble committing to plans or making decisions. This can leave you feeling uncertain about how to proceed and question their trustworthiness. Not being able to depend on your partner results in further feelings of isolation and frustration, which can take a toll on your mental health over time. Especially when it comes to your clear statements of boundaries.
It’s Exhausting Trying To Keep The Peace
When your partner is constantly changing their opinions, it can be difficult for both of you to make progress in any direction. This pressure may lead you to feel overwhelmed and exhausted from spending all of your energy trying hard to keep the peace. As a result, this confusion between you two leads to mental fatigue that manifests in other areas of your life such as work and relationships with others.
Don’t even get me started on what happens when you ask for reassurance, due to comments that denote they assumed something that trespasses your boundary, but!
It Causes Conflicts To Become Severe
In an effort to establish more clarity within the relationship, individual opinions become more polarizing when someone is ambivalent about a topic. This makes conflict harder because there are no shades of gray — only differing stances towards an issue resulting in a black-and-white outcome where one party is either right or wrong while the other is deemed completely wrong without any resolution or compromise in sight.
Even leaving clear loopholes saying “I never said that”, “I didn’t mean it like that”, asking for reassurance, anything has been rejected when you are trying to make sure you are on the same page, can take a heavy hit on you.
All these conflicts take a toll on both parties involved, ultimately leading to emotional exhaustion due to the strain it puts on both people — ultimately affecting their mental health negatively: if left unresolved and unclear long-term good feelings cannot be maintained among each other’s differences.
Emotional distance prevents shared intimacy
Ambivalence often means that couples don’t share the level of openness they would normally have without this type of behavior present in the relationship. While it’s normal for there to be times when partners need space from one another, having an ambivalent partner often leads individuals into trying to take the anxiety off their chest by pressuring for a mutual understanding — causing emotional distance that has the potential to hindering meaningful connections between partners later down the road (which then affects our mental wellbeing).
Feelings Of Low Self Esteem & Worthlessness Start To Develop
The constant feeling of being unsure about every decision made within a relationship caused by one person’s ambivalence leaves its mark emotionally too over time. Without steady support from one another (ever getting any closure on topics discussed within conversations), can lead individual beliefs about self-worth spiral downwards. For example, looking for everything on the internet about relationship communication, and applying it but still have no answer can make anyone question their role in the “problem”.
If left unchecked for too long you will have to come to the position to take the decision for them. Being unable to resolve issues together only adds further fuel to pre-existing worries about our place within the ambivalent partner’s life & worthfulness of the relationship. It is required to receive adequate levels of love & respect, we want to fill our purposeful existence with a secure strong sense of ourselves again — but continuously lacking to resolve issues creates a lack of significant closeness.
It is Harder For Individuals To Trust Others
After enduring months of dubious treatment, the feeling of security and connection had been replaced by doubt. Can you trust them to ever give them a straight answer? Therefore, it comes down to making a decision yourself, even if it should’ve been a mutual understanding. Communicating your position on the subject, and if it's seemingly impossible to imagine something better, an opportunity was given for them to work on the decision, but are only holding from the image of potential and hollow promises?
Simply choose to take this chance of renewal–believing in a successful do-over? Only if that’s what you want to do. With or without them. I’m not your therapist, nor understand your circumstances, but staying with someone that only gives you grief and sleepless nights is no way to live.
Does sacrificing your mental health bring long-term benefits?
Any kind of challenging situation caused by being in an intimate relationship with someone who struggles heavily with ambiguity — ends up leaving behind far worse feelings against us, perpetually stuck in a cycle sacrificing tons of our valuable mental health. Is the payoff a high price to repair you are willing to invest? Are you feeling defeated? Do you want to rebuild a new premise expecting a satisfactory outcome?
True victory is created under conditions of both people in the relationship wanting to be together. Hearing that they love you is not enough, don’t just expect the bare minimum of human decency in how they treat you. Words and actions are not the same things, and asking for them to match their actions to their promises is valid.