Ambivalence is the shadow side of love. Feeling numb, separate, disconnected is actually a part of intimacy, but we are not giving the skills or the tools to work with these feelings. In this episode, you will learn some of the most powerful ways to work with ambivalence in love.

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Listen For

• 00:00 – Could ambivalence—feeling numb or disconnected—be a natural part of love that even strong relationships regularly move through?
• 04:47 – When love feels like it has disappeared, like an eclipse or a vanishing stream, is it still present beneath the surface even if we can’t see or feel it?
• 11:08 – In moments of conflict, do we tend to default to blame or reactivity instead of staying grounded and emotionally present?
• 16:27 – What might shift if we paused in difficult moments to reflect inward rather than immediately reacting outward?
• 21:40 – How can we stay connected to love while moving through different emotional seasons without allowing the heart to harden over time?

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When Love Feels Like It Disappeared

Understanding Ambivalence In Relationships

Ambivalence is the shadow side of love. When we feel numb, when we don’t feel connected, when we feel nothing, when we feel disconnected, we really do spend a significant amount of our relationship time in those states even in great relationships. But we are not given the skills or the tools or the techniques to handle that. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating podcast to learn some tools for living with, handling, and moving through the ambivalence in your relationships.

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Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating® podcast. I’m Ken Page, I’m the Author of the bestselling book, Deeper Dating, the co-founder of Deeper for Good™, which is our new online app. Where people can meet each other online in much more positive ways with events associated with that. And it’s for people who want to do good in the world and want to find love. To learn more about that, just go to DeeperForGood.com. I’m incredibly excited about this. This app has been a dream of mine for so many years, so yay. Anyway, I just had to say that first.

Today, we are going to be talking about ambivalence in love. The shadow side of love but first, I just want to say that in this and every episode, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love, grow love and keep love alive. And heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are the skills of intimacy. And those are the greatest, most important, most precious skills of all, including intimacy with ourselves. So, let me dive in.

What happens when you stop feeling love for the person you love? What happens when you’re feeling things other than loving with the person you love? How do you handle that? This is one of the richest and most challenging things in love. Those moments when the feelings just aren’t there. And I want to ask you a question. A question that I think is so important to think about, and as this episode progresses, I’m going to ask you a few different questions that you can think about, reflect on and maybe even share in response to me.

Love is like an eclipse. During an eclipse, neither the sun nor the moon is gone—you just can’t see them. Sometimes, that’s what love feels like: it’s still there, just not visible at the moment. Share on X

So, how do you handle ambivalence that you feel in your relationships and in your dating? When, all of a sudden, things don’t feel as good or you’re not really feeling much of anything. And those romantic feelings are just, at least for the moment, gone or you’re feeling the antithesis of romance. What happens for you then? Does it scare you? Do you doubt your love? Do you doubt the other person’s love? Do you doubt the reality of love? Do you ignore it and let it roll off your back? How do you deal with those episodes that all of us have of ambivalence?

I want to share two images that I think can kind of carry us through part of this journey. And the first is, this is something that somebody said to me. A partner of mine said to me years ago that I just thought I was filled with wisdom. We were having a really hard time together and I asked him. I said, “Do you still love me?” He said, “Well, of course, but it’s like an eclipse. When there is an eclipse, it’s not like the moon is gone. It’s not like the sun is gone, but you can’t see it. That’s what my feeling of love for you is like now. It’s an eclipse. It’s there, but I’m not seeing it at the moment.”

The Metaphor Of The Eclipse And The Stream

I thought that was so powerful and so real. And I wanted to share that story because eclipses happen. And the other image that I wanted to share was, if you’ve ever been in an environment with a brook or a stream like a little streamlet, and you follow it, follow it, follow it. And, all of a sudden, it seems like it disappears. It’s gone underground and then at a later point, it reappears. And I think that feelings of love and romance are like that as well. And we’re not taught that that is part of the experience of love, but it is a deep and real part of that experience.

This, for me, has been a difficult issue for so many reasons that I’m going to talk about. But when I used to experience the lack of feeling, that would terrify me. I would think I can’t love. Love is gone. I would kind of really kind of make it big and not understand that this is kind of part of the process. I would experience it either as a deficit in my capacity to love or a deficit in the quality of the relationship. Because from everything we’re told, that is not supposed to happen. The other thing that I would feel is this kind of fear when there was conflict in a relationship.

I would go to end game in my head. This means I’m going to have to leave. This means they are going to leave me. And to this day, I wrestle with those different fears to different degrees, but I’ve learned something in the process being in a marriage and now together seventeen years. Just in my journey and my life journey, I realize that those periods where I’m not really feeling much of anything, are true for me. They’re just something that happens for me in love, and I think they happen for a lot of us. This experience of, “I’m just not feeling much of anything.”

The feeling of love ebbs and flows. Share on X

Which, in our picture of what love is supposed to look like, it’s really supposed to be much more of a constant stream of romantic feeling and experience. I had to learn that it’s like the ocean. There’s this deep ocean there, but the waves come in and out. And I recognized that my capacity to connect deeply and feel it goes in and out like those waves, and I just need to trust that more. That’s been part of my journey. People with anxious attachment styles can easily worry at points like that because they feel like their love isn’t enough. And they can create pressure on themselves and pressure on their partner.

Their partner might be going through a period where they’re not really expressing love. And it’s scary to those of us with attachment style. Does that mean they don’t love us anymore? Or that we’re not enough? Or are they not enough? Or their love isn’t enough? Or our love isn’t enough? And people with avoidant attachment can take those experiences as a reason to pull away even further. This is not what love is supposed to feel like, so this can’t be right. So I can kind of pull away. But, in both cases, the underlying understanding makes no room for the fact that the feeling of love ebbs and flows. It’s kind of really similar to what we get taught about sex.

That, in sex, the feeling of intense excitement is supposed to remain, remain, remain as opposed to their being more of a flow where the excitement lessons and then maybe other things are called for at that time. More contact, more connection, more eye contact, and more gentle touch. Maybe something needs to be talked about. Maybe laughter needs to happen, but we’re not taught that that’s part of the romantic experience and the sexual experience. And, when it comes to this avoidant attachment pulling away because of that or anxious attachment getting really nervous and putting pressure on ourselves and our partner.

I can speak to both of those personally, not only as a psychotherapist but personally because I have both of those tendencies. And so, I experience both of those tendencies at different points. This cultural myth is very unwise, very unsophisticated, and very not adult. Maybe it’s kind of more of an American Hollywood thing. I’m not sure about that. It’s an interesting question. How true is this cross-culturally? So, now, I want to say something about conflict because there is this numbness or not even numbness. Just these periods where we’re not feeling the love in any particular concrete way.

We’re not feeling not love. We’re not necessarily feeling anger. That’s one thing, but then, what about conflict? Conflict is such a rich and complex piece. And our tendencies with conflict are either to act out or to act in. And acting in in the presence of conflict is telling ourselves that we’re wrong for feeling the way that we feel. That we should stop being so sensitive. We should stop being so intense. That probably the things that we think we’re perceiving or we’re feeling are inaccurate, and we should just kind of stop or calm down.

The Role Of Conflict And Intuition

Self-doubt is a powerful thing, but the powerful thing about self-doubt is that it backfires. And it backfires in a few different ways. It backfires because we become passive aggressive when we start doubting the things that don’t feel right. We internalize them and so, we may experience depression or emotional pain or psychosomatic kinds of experiences. All of those things can happen when we act in or we act out by blaming our partner, by having anger get the best of us. It’s so easy to do either of those two things.

And, I guess, one thing I would like to share about that is that, I think that the smartest thing to do is to separate our stories from our intuition by assuming that something we are picking up is real in most likelihood. But the stories that we fabricate around what that means are often incorrect, so that we can trust if something feels funny. If our partner feels like they’re pulling away, if it feels like our partners being critical or judgmental. We’re probably right, but the way we tell a story about that, “It’s because I did such and such. It’s because they’re hiding such and such. It’s because they want to break up. It’s because of whatever.” Those stories need to be checked out.

And it’s a wonderful thing if we have a partner who is sophisticated enough to be able to say, “Yeah. You were feeling something. You’re not making that up.” And then be honest enough to tell us more about what it is. So, when we don’t trust our nervous system, we create a gulf between us and ourselves. And we create a gulf between us and our partner. And I just want to recommend a book by the Gottman’s called Fight Right. It’s a beautiful research-based, technical approach for how to handle conflict. So, I think that’s all I’m going to say here about that now.

But I guess I want to say one other thing about the fear that comes up. When we experience conflict or when we experience this kind of more neutral state and then we apply pressure to ourselves and the relationship. And the image is, so I’m 69 years old, and I remember turntables very well. So, we had these turntables and the needle would go into the grooves of the record. Some of you are probably laughing because this is so obvious. And, I guess, everyone knows what vinyl records look like, but anyway.

In the old days, we would have these turn tables, these sound systems. And sometimes, the needle would not go into the groove enough, so the music wouldn’t play it. So, we would take dimes and quarters and nickels and tape them onto the top of the needle. And that would put the needle down enough so that you would hear the music but, here’s the thing. If there wasn’t enough pressure, you would miss the music. And the pressure is truth and immediate experience with our partner. When we take it to light and don’t express what we’re feeling, our joy, our enthusiasm, our delight, our sexual desire, our needs, our fears, our upsetness. When we don’t explain those things, it’s like that record needle. You don’t really hear the music because you’re not in enough.

But, if you put too many quarters on that needle, you tape too many coins on it. They’ll be the terrible grinding sound. You will lose the music because you’re grinding and pressuring too much. And I invite you to think about this. What’s the pressure? What’s the level of which kind of your needle, which is your present and aliveness and subjectivity can be engaged so that you can hear the music in the connection that you have? But, at what point are you putting so much pressure on the relationship that you’re missing the music? It’s something to think about.

Here is another thought and that thought is that there is a gathering of forces that happens in love. There’s this ebb and flow. And when we’re in the ebb, we may need to pull in. We may need to be private. We may need not to speak. We may not need to spoon in the middle of the night. That need for privacy is so powerful and so important, because in that time, there’s a gathering of forces. For me, as a therapist, there are often times when I’m just not sure or maybe there’s too much information for me to process or I’m kind of losing touch with myself.

Going Inside As A Gathering Of Forces

At those moments, I ask my clients if I could have a moment to just reflect and I do that frequently in session. And it’s such a great gift to me because whereas I might have otherwise just pushed and thought, “Oh, I need to come up with something, or I need to just be quiet and listen, or I’m not connected enough.” For all of the kinds of things I might think. Instead, I recognize that when I go in, almost always really rich, really practical things come up that are of a better thought quality than would have happened if I didn’t go inside.

So, my clients have been used to me doing that because when I stay focused outward for too long, I lose my intuition. I lose my juice. This inner swelling of insight or practicality or clarity that only comes from me sometimes when I separate. Mini separations in the course of the session. My clients are really good about that because they get that I care enough to do that, and I do that in my marriage as well. I say when I need time alone. I say when I need to go inside. And that same dynamic, lives not just as a therapist, but in our love relationships.

Going inside is a gathering of forces. Not a betrayal of connection, and that’s a question for each of you. How do you experience your need to go inside? Your need to disconnect from the outer and connect with the inner. And what happens for you when you do that, and what happens for you when your partner does that? And I just want to say that it really helps not just do it, but to give your partner notice so that they understand what’s happening.

Have you noticed that when you’re away from your partner or let’s say you’re dating somebody, and it’s in that period between the dates that you find yourself thinking of them. Maybe aching for them or longing for them. Maybe having sexual fantasies about them. It’s in those in-between periods that these tendrils of connection also really grow. I know, for me, when I go away on a meditation retreat, I usually have this thing happen. Where my appreciation for Greg kind of grows maybe by like the second day. I start remembering some very beautiful textures of the way that I love him.

The conscious choice to create a healthy space for love—sometimes close and physical, sometimes with distance—is about learning its natural rhythm. Each of us becomes a gardener, understanding how our love grows and flows. Share on X

A very tender feeling that in our day-to-day life, I don’t feel in the same way. And that’s a really rich thing, too, is how day-to-day life can kind of take us away from the magic of romance, and what brings that back? What are the things that bring that back? But I just want to ask first. Have you ever had that experience as well? Where you feel your love kind of returning or growing stronger after a stretch of quiet or a period of separation.

It’s funny how love really does have its own rhythms and we don’t get to decide those rhythms. And pressure does not help us understand those rhythms. Now I just want to say something about sex and the return of connection. I really believe that sex is like glue in a loving relationship. And Arielle Ford in her book, Turn Your Mate Into Your Soulmate, says something pretty funny. She says, “Even if you don’t want to have sex, even if they don’t want to have sex, or you don’t want to have sex. Nobody wants to have sex. Have sex anyway,” because it brings you back to the memory of your connection.

And that doesn’t mean forced sex. It just means that closeness. There’s some kind of biological sense of truth of connectedness that happens. I can go through a day. You know, just a typical day and dinner, washing the dishes and whatever Greg and I do. And when we come to bed and hold each other, it’s like the truth comes back. This physical, biological, spiritual truth. There’s a sense of joy and connectedness. Not every time but often. And it’s like I’m remembering something that I had forgotten. It’s so funny how love is like the seasons. It’s just like the four seasons in so many different ways.

Practices For Reconnecting And Softening The Heart

And what happens when we allow ourselves that space to live in each of those seasons and to stay connected. Because I think in day-to-day life, there’s a hardening that happens. I know that there is for me. There is a hardening. My spiritual teacher Paramahansa Yogananda wrote a book called Autobiography of a Yogi. He said that the human heart easily grows hard and flinty. And it’s our job to find practices and ways of being that soften our heart again and again. And I think that’s so true. Greg and I do something called the tantric hug.

Which is looking at each other, holding hands, touching foreheads, giving each other a kiss, then kind of wrapping our necks together like kind of a love birdy thing and holding that position. And then separating and looking at each other and then just being heart to heart. We do that in the morning and at night. And we don’t do it on the days that we’re too busy or whatever, but we really do try to do it. And sometimes, I feel nothing, but usually, I feel some wonderful things and so does he. It’s a way to connect. And he kind of tries to get our breathing to go together.

I’m not as good at that as he is, but it’s another kind of really nice thing that we do. But I think that the conscious choice to find ways that you can allow a healthy space for your love that sometimes means being really close and being really physical. Sometimes it means taking a little bit of distance. It means all different kinds of things and each of us gets to be a gardener, to understand the nature of our love pacing and how it works.

I’d love to hear from many of you or any of you about how your experience relates to this. How it feels like your love comes in and goes out and ways that you have learned to work with us that support your love in flourishing instead of pressuring it or avoiding it or pulling away. I’d love to hear your practices and your methods. And once again, I just want to remind everybody about my new dating app called Deeper for Good™ and you could go to DeeperForGood.com to get on our waiting list. It’s going to launch in late June, and it’s going to be a live incredible app for meeting. Thank you all for listening and I look forward to connecting on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

 

Important Links

• Deeper Dating
• Deeper For Good
• Deeper Dating
• Fight Right
• Turn Your Mate Into Your Soulmate
• Autobiography of a Yogi