The Ambivalence Trap: When Emotional Complexity Feels Like Falling Out of Love

There’s a moment in most relationships when something shifts. It’s subtle at first. The person you’ve been experiencing as almost entirely good — attractive, charming, aligned with you, surprising you in delightful ways — begins to show you their other sides. Not because they’ve changed. Because you’re finally seeing them more completely. And when you do, you feel something confusing: alongside the love and warmth, there’s friction. Doubt. Irritation. Things that didn’t bother you before now feel bad. And many people interpret this single, straightforward shift as a catastrophic one: you’re falling out of love.

But something else is actually happening. To understand it, you need to know about something called valence—This is a term that refers to the emotional tone or charge of what you’re feeling. Something has positive valence (it feels good) or negative valence (it feels bad).

What can happen is something called ambivalence—and it’s worth understanding the construction of the word itself. “Ambi” means two or both. Ambi-valence is when you feel both positive and negative valence about the same person at the same time. Love and friction. Connection and doubt. Most people have never been taught how to tolerate that. So when it happens, they panic. They rewrite the story. They convince themselves the relationship was never real, or that something has gone wrong, when actually something has gone right: you’re finally seeing complexity, and you’re being asked to grow up emotionally and hold it.

But understanding what’s actually happening requires understanding something deeper: The emotional narratives and scripts that make up your personality aren’t created by random, floating thoughts. They’re housed in containers. These are psychological structures that hold your identity together. And your sense of self doesn’t exist in just one. You exist in two containers at once.

There’s your personality container—the emotional scripts, frames, and narratives you’ve internalized from your past experiences and the voices you’ve absorbed. And there’s your relational container—the relationship itself, with its own set of roles, rules, and expectations that you and your partner have jointly created. Both containers shape who you are. And ambivalence arrives when negative feelings start to signal that something is wrong in one or both of these container. Whether that’s discomfort with how you see yourself in the relationship, friction with how you see your partner, or constraint from the roles and expectations you’re both living by.

Let’s start with the personality container. Your personality isn’t a fixed self. It’s a collection of scripts (habitual patterns of responding), frames (how you interpret experience), and narratives (the stories you tell about who you are and what you deserve). All of these come from your past: the voices you absorbed, the relationships you had, the way that you learned to navigate your world.

Now, when you enter a relationship, something specific happens: your partner begins to influence your personality container. When they validate you, they’re reflecting back a version of you worth believing in. When they see you as special, capable, and worthy of attention, you come to see yourself that way too. They help you rewrite your internal narratives. They become part of your inner voice.

But they’re also doing something else: they’re co-creating a relational container with you. This is a distinct thing from your personality. The relational container has its own roles—the parts you each play. You might be the caretaker, they might be the one who needs care. You might be the planner, they might be the spontaneous one. You might be the emotional processor, they might be the steady one. These roles emerge naturally at first, from who you both are. But they harden into patterns you both follow without questioning them, until finally they just become the way things are done.

And from these roles, rules emerge—unspoken agreements about how things work. Maybe the rule is: we process conflict through conversation. Maybe it’s: we don’t talk about money. Maybe it’s: you handle your family, I handle mine. Maybe it’s: I need space when I’m stressed, you need connection. These rules spring directly from the roles you’ve established. If you’re the planner and they’re spontaneous, the rule becomes: you organize, they respond. If you’re the emotional processor, the rule becomes: you initiate vulnerability, they support it. They feel natural because they fit the roles you’ve both agreed to play.

And from these rules come expectations—assumptions about who you’ll be, what you’ll do, how you’ll respond. Your partner learns to expect that you show up a certain way because of your role. You learn to expect that they respond a certain way because of theirs. These expectations create a kind of stability. You know how to be in this container. It’s predictable. And that predictability is actually a form of safety.

In the beginning of relationships, “the honeymoon phase,” both containers are working beautifully. Your personality container is being rewritten in healthy ways. Your partner is validating you, responding to you, supporting you. The scripts you learned in your past about how others might perceive you are being challenged and replaced by this new person. Simultaneously, the relational container feels perfect. The roles fit. The rules make sense. The expectations are being met. Your inner voice might be saying something like: I am seen. I belong. I can become someone better. And I know how to be in this relationship. This is mono-valence. Everything feels positive because everything is actually working.

But here’s what happens over time: You change. You grow. Your personality evolves. The scripts that used to protect you become limiting. The narratives that used to make sense no longer fit your experience. You start to realise there’s a different version of yourself: someone with different needs, different values, a different ways of being. And you need your partner to be supportive of this evolution. You need them to help you rewrite your internal narratives.

But simultaneously, the relational container also needs to shift. Because the roles that used to work don’t anymore. The rules that made sense are now constraints. The expectations you had of each other are no longer accurate. The container that held you perfectly at the beginning of the relationship is now too small.

When both of these things happen at once, so when you’re trying to evolve your personality and simultaneously the relational container needs to evolve, everything becomes ambiguous. You’re no longer sure what the rules are. The roles feel confusing. The expectations don’t match reality. And your inner voice might say: I may love this person, but something is broken. I feel trapped. I feel misunderstood. I don’t know how to be in this relationship anymore. That’s ambivalence. It’s the experience of being caught between a personality that’s trying to evolve and a relational container that’s resisting that evolution.

Most people misread this as falling out of love. But it’s actually one of three different problems, and they require different solutions.

Problem One: Your partner isn’t supporting your evolution. They’ve become less available, responsive, or supportive of who you’re becoming. Maybe they’re threatened by your growth. Maybe they’ve withdrawn for other reasons. Maybe they don’t see the changes you’re undergoing and are therefore unable to respond to them. In this case, the relational container’s rules and roles are too rigid. They’re not adapting as you evolve. This is a communication and repair problem. You need to tell them: I’m changing, and I need you to change with me. Besides being available, and responsive to me, I need you to be supportive of this evolution.

Problem Two: The relational container itself has become incompatible with who you’re becoming. It’s not that your partner won’t support your growth. It’s that the fundamental structure of the relationship including the roles you play, the rules you’ve established, the expectations you have, are preventing you from becoming who you need to be. Maybe the role you play in this relationship requires you to be passive and accepting. Maybe the rules of the relationship require you to suppress parts of yourself. Maybe the expectations lock you into a version of yourself that you’re outgrowing. In this case, you need to renegotiate the relational container entirely. You need to ask: Can we redefine the roles in this relationship? Can we change the rules? Can we update the expectations so that I can become who I need to become? This is deeper work than communication. It requires both of you to be willing to fundamentally restructure how you relate.

Problem Three: Contempt is forming. But here’s what’s crucial: contempt is not the same as the other two problems. And it’s not just an intensification of them. Contempt is something categorically different. Because contempt is the moment when your ambivalence collapses. You stop feeling mixed emotions. You stop feeling love alongside frustration, connection alongside constraint. Instead, you move into pure negative mono-valence. The positive feelings disappear entirely. Your inner voice might be saying something like: This person is beneath me. This person is inadequate. This person is fundamentally flawed. And once contempt solidifies, the relationship is in serious danger. It’s not because of a communication problem or a structural mismatch, but because you’ve stopped believing in your partner.

But contempt doesn’t form just from lack of support. It forms in a particular way, and understanding how requires understanding a crucial distinction. Studies indicate that anger and contempt have very different emotional appraisals underneath them.

When you feel angry at your partner, you’re appraising something as an instrumental problem—they’re doing something that blocks your goals, that gets in your way, that prevents you from what you need. You’re angry at their behavior. And anger, paradoxically, often leads to reconciliation. Because if the problem is instrumental (they’re blocking me), then the solution is also instrumental (they could change what they’re doing). Your nervous system mobilizes to try to change them, to communicate, to repair. There’s hope embedded in anger.

But contempt appraises something very different. Contempt appraises an intrinsic problem—not what they’re doing, but who they are. It’s not: they’re doing something I don’t like. It’s: they ARE something I don’t like. They’re not inadequate because of their actions. They’re inadequate because of their essential nature. It’s not that they’re not unwilling to grow, they’re incapable of growth. They’re not threatened by your evolution, they’re too small to understand it. And once you make that appraisal, reconciliation becomes nearly impossible. Because you can’t negotiate who someone essentially is. You can only reject them.

And here’s where it gets complicated, and why contempt is so insidious: it often develops out of repeated anger. You have an incident where your partner doesn’t support you. You feel angry. That’s an instrumental appraisal. But then another incident. And another. Especially if the intimacy between you has diminished, if you’ve lost the closeness and understanding that once bound you together, you start doing something crucial: you shift your appraisal. You stop seeing their individual behaviors as situational. You start treating them as evidence of their character. You lose granularity. The repeated moments blur into a pattern. And the pattern becomes the person.

And this is where that lost granularity becomes dangerous. Without it, you’re left with a blurred feeling: something is wrong. But wrong with what? Wrong how? You know something is wrong, you feel a negative valence, a sense of constraint, repeated disappointment. But you can’t distinguish between the three different sources: Are you feeling bad about how you experience yourself in this relational container? Are you feeling bad about who your partner is as a person? Or are you feeling bad about the structure of the relationship itself: the roles, rules, and expectations that constrain you? Without the granularity to tell them apart, all three are all blurred together into one signal: Something is wrong. And from that coarse emotional data, you have to make a guess about what the actual problem is. Because your partner is right in front of you—the most visible, immediate thing in your awareness—you attribute all of it to them. You make an appraisal: they ARE the problem.

And then the attribution error happens. When your partner withdraws, when they don’t respond to your growth, when they seem unsupportive. What you’re actually observing is what they’re doing in this moment. It’s temporary. It’s external. It’s shaped by the relational container, by their own dynamic personality, by circumstances you may not even see. It’s fluid. But you treat it as permanent. You decide: This is who they are. They are unwilling. They are threatening. They are inadequate. You freeze a moment into an identity. You take behavior and turn it into character.

And the more this happens, ie: the more you encounter moments of disappointment or misunderstanding without the intimacy and granularity to interpret them accurately, the more you lose faith that they can change. You stop believing it’s about what they’re doing. You start believing it’s about who they are. And that’s when contempt solidifies. That’s the collapse from ambivalence to negative mono-valence.

This is the contempt trap: You recognize that your own personality is dynamic and changeable (that’s why you’re evolving). But you treat your partner’s as if it’s fixed. You hold yourself to a standard of growth while holding them to a standard of permanence. You’ve made an appraisal (an intrinsic appraisal) and you’re treating it as truth. And in doing so, you foreclose on the actual possibility of renegotiation. Because renegotiation requires believing that both of you can change. That who they are in this moment is not who they have to be. That their personality, like yours, is dynamic and shaped by circumstances and containers. But contempt requires forgetting all of that.

Here’s what’s crucial to understand: These three problems feel the same at first. They all produce ambivalence. They all make you feel trapped. They all make you question whether the relationship can work. But they require completely different solutions. And most people don’t stop to figure out which one they’re actually facing. They just assume the relationship is wrong and leave.

But before you leave, you need to ask yourself: Is my partner unwilling to support my evolution? Or is the relational container itself the problem? Or am I making appraisals that create contempt and how accurate are those appraisals? These are different questions. And the answers determine what you should actually do.

Because here’s the thing: If it’s Problem One or Two, the relationship might actually be salvageable. You might be able to communicate differently. You might be able to renegotiate the container. You might be able to help your partner understand who you’re becoming and ask them to grow with you. But if you just leave without understanding what the actual problem is, you’ll take it with you into the next relationship. And you’ll recreate it.

Because when you leave, you don’t actually escape the problem. You just find a new relational container. At first, it feels amazing. Your new partner is available, responsive, supportive. They validate you. They belong with you. They help you realise the person you want to be. The rules are different. The roles feel fresh. The expectations are new. And you think: This is what I was missing. This person is better. This relationship is different.

But it’s not actually different. You’re just in a different relational container with a different person. And inevitably, time passes. You grow. The container that felt perfect at first becomes too small again. Your partner stops being as responsive to your changes. The rules and roles that made sense stop making sense. The expectations shift. And ambivalence arrives again. And you think: Oh no, this is happening again. I need to leave….again.

This is what serial monogamy looks like: moving from relational container to relational container, looking for one that will never become too small, never stop fitting perfectly. But that container doesn’t exist. Because you’re constantly changing. And any relational container, eventually, will constrain you.

The real problem isn’t that you’ve chosen the wrong person. The real problem is that you’ve never learned to renegotiate the relational container. You’ve never learned to ask your partner: Can we change the rules together? Can we redefine the roles? Can we update our expectations? You’ve never learned to communicate that: I’m evolving, and I need this relationship to evolve with me. So instead, you just leave and start over.

Now, there’s also the problem of the personality container. Because even if you manage to renegotiate the relational container, you still need to develop the capacity to author your own scripts and narratives. You still need to be able to validate yourself, to belong to yourself, to be the person you’re becoming, independent of what validation (or not) your partner provides.

Why? I’ll tell you why. Because if you don’t have the capacity to validate yourself, you’ll become entirely dependent on your partner to do that work for you. And when they inevitably can’t (like when they have their own stuff going on, when they withdraw, when they stop being as responsive) your entire sense of self will collapse. You’ll feel invisible. You’ll feel like you can’t grow. You’ll feel trapped.

Here’s the truth: Your personality container is made of Emotional scripts, frames, and narratives that came from your past—from the voices you absorbed, the relationships you had, the perspectives you learned. And your relational container is made of roles, rules, and expectations that you and your partner co-created. But neither of these containers should be your entire identity. You need to develop the capacity to author your own scripts. To write your own narratives. To validate yourself. To create meaning independent of relational affirmation.

This doesn’t mean you don’t need relationships. It means you don’t need relationships to hold your entire identity. It means you can show up in a relationship already partially whole, already able to validate some of your own worth and already capable of believing in your own capacity to grow. And from that place, you can build something real with another person, not something based on mutual need and desperation, but something based on genuine choice and genuine capacity.

So here’s what the real work actually is. It’s threefold.

First: Understand what’s actually happening in the ambivalence. Are you facing Problem One (your partner isn’t supporting your evolution)? Problem Two (the relational container itself has become too small)? Problem Three (contempt is forming)? Or is it a combination? Because each requires different work, and if you misdiagnose the problem, you’ll take the wrong action.

Second: Learn to renegotiate the relational container. This means having conversations about the roles you play. Do we still need these roles? Are they serving both of us? Can we redefine them? It means examining the rules. What were these rules protecting us from? Do we still need them? What new rules would serve us better? It means updating the expectations. We’re different people than we were when we started. What do we need from each other now? This is collaborative work. Both people have to be willing to do it. And if they’re not, then you know you’re facing contempt, and you have a different decision to make.

Third: Develop your own capacity to author your personality container. This means learning to validate yourself, not just receiving validation from your partner. It means developing narratives about yourself that feel true, independent of their confirmation. It means building the capacity to be the person you’re aiming to become, to see yourself with respect regardless of whether anyone else sees it. It means creating your own inner voice, not just absorbing the narratives of those around you. This is solo work. No one can do it for you.

And here’s what happens when you do this work: You stop being entirely dependent on your relational container to hold your identity. Which means you can actually be in relationship from a place of wholeness, not desperation. You can ask your partner for what you need without it defining your entire sense of self. You can tolerate moments when the relational container doesn’t fit perfectly, because you have other sources of validation and meaning. You can negotiate and communicate because you’re not panicking about dissolution. You can stay in relationships that are actually workable, or you can leave relationships that are truly contemptuous, but with clarity rather than desperation.

The next time you feel ambivalence arise: STOP. Take a breath. Ask yourself: Is this about my partner not supporting my evolution? Is this about the relational container being too small? Or has contempt already formed? Figure out which problem you’re actually facing. Then do the appropriate work.

If it’s a communication problem, communicate. If it’s a renegotiation problem, renegotiate. If it’s contempt, do the harder work: develop granularity around what you’re actually appraising and attributing. Learn to distinguish between what they’re actually doing (temporary, shaped by circumstances) and who they are as a person (dynamic, capable of change).

Deliberately practice holding a more nuanced view of your partner. This won’t necessarily bring back the love. But it will make intimacy tolerable again. It will break the contempt appraisal enough that you can actually be in the same room, actually listen, actually communicate or renegotiate. Because contempt creates a wall that no amount of communication can penetrate—not until you do the appraisal work first.

And regardless of which problem you’re facing, start doing the internal work of developing your own capacity to author your personality container. Because that’s the work that actually changes your relational capacity. That’s the work that makes you capable of genuine partnership.

Everything else: every new relationship, every fresh start, every search for a container that will never become too small, is really just running from yourself. And the self you’re running from will follow you into every relationship you’ll ever have.

References & Academic Sources

Gottman, J.M. (2024). “This One Thing is the Biggest Predictor of Divorce.” The Gottman Institute. Research demonstrating that contempt is the strongest predictor of divorce and relationship dissolution.

Gottman, J.M. & Schwartz Gottman, J. “The Problem of Contempt in Marriage.” Couples Therapy Inc. Examination of how contempt develops from unresolved anger and chronic negative views of a partner, and its destructive effects on relationships.

Smith, C.A. & Ellsworth, P.C. (1988). “From Appraisal to Emotion: Differences among Unpleasant Feelings.” Motivation and Emotion. Foundational research on appraisal theory showing how contempt (along with anger and disgust) differs through specific appraisals of other-agency and moral judgment.