What 'ambivalence' in a relationship actually means.

You're at lunch with your sister. She is being, by her standards, warm. She has remembered the project you mentioned last month. She has ordered the dessert you like and asked the waiter to add an extra spoon. And yet, three hours after the lunch, you are tired in a specific way — the tiredness that comes not from a bad meal but from a meal where you were carrying something the whole time. You're not sure what you were carrying. The lunch was, on paper, fine. You leave thinking, I love her, but it's complicated.

The phrase is so common it has stopped being heard. I love her, but it's complicated. He's a good guy, but I don't know. We're close, but it's exhausting. These are not throwaway phrases. They are precise descriptions of a relational pattern that the research has now studied carefully for thirty years, and the findings are more specific, and more consequential, than the casual phrasing suggests.

Ambivalence is its own category

The field that has spent the most time on this is social epidemiology — the study of how relationships affect health. The dominant figure in this work is Bert Uchino, a psychologist at the University of Utah, who has spent close to three decades studying the cardiovascular and immunological correlates of different relationship qualities.¹

The central finding of Uchino's research, replicated across many samples, is that close relationships divide into three types — not two. There are supportive ties (predominantly positive, low conflict). There are aversive ties (predominantly negative, the kind you would minimise contact with). And there is a third category, accounting for a substantial share of most people's closest relationships, called ambivalent ties — relationships that are simultaneously high in positive content and high in negative content. The same person who delights you also wounds you. The same lunch that warmed you also depleted you.

This is structurally different from a "bad" relationship. In a bad relationship, the negative content predicts the experience. In an ambivalent relationship, the experience is unstable. You leave one encounter glad you went and the next encounter wishing you hadn't, and you do not know in advance which kind of encounter the next one will be. The unpredictability is, in Uchino's framework, definitional.

The first thing the research is clear about, and the first thing worth carrying away, is this: ambivalence is a third kind of relationship, not a state on the way to one of the other two. It is stable. It can persist for decades. It is not, on its own, a sign that the relationship is failing.

The body knows even when you don't

The reason Uchino's lab studies cardiovascular markers is that ambivalent relationships have, in their data, a measurable physiological cost.

In a 2007 paper, Holt-Lunstad, Uchino, Smith, and Hicks brought participants into the lab with a friend they identified as either ambivalent or supportive, and measured cardiovascular response while they discussed a recent stressful event. Participants showed greater systolic blood pressure reactivity when discussing a negative event with an ambivalent friend than with a supportive one, along with elevated resting heart rate and lower respiratory sinus arrhythmia (a marker of parasympathetic regulation).² Subsequent work from the same programme has extended the finding: across a community sample, people with more ambivalent ties in their network have shorter telomeres — a marker of cellular ageing — independent of the number of supportive ties they also have.³

The proposed explanation is informational, not emotional. A purely negative relationship is, at least, predictable. The body knows what to expect and braces accordingly; the bracing has a cost, but it is a stable cost. An ambivalent relationship offers no such prediction. Each encounter requires the body to remain partially mobilised — for warmth, for hurt, for both — without knowing which is coming. This sustained, low-grade vigilance is, on Uchino's account, what wears down the cardiovascular system over time.

This matters because it explains the specific tiredness after the lunch with your sister. You are not tired because the lunch was bad. You are tired because for three hours your body was carrying the simultaneous possibility of two opposite outcomes, and the carrying itself was the work.

Why ambivalence is most common with the people closest to you

A second body of research, on what sociologists call intergenerational ambivalence, has shown that the relationships most likely to be ambivalent are not the ones you might expect. They are not acquaintances or coworkers. They are parents, adult children, siblings, and long-term partners.

The framework was articulated by Kurt Lüscher and Karl Pillemer in a 1998 paper that has become foundational in the family studies literature.⁴ Their argument was that close family relationships are, by their structural nature, sites of permanent contradiction. They are simultaneously based on profound interdependence and on persistent conflicts of interest, value, and identity. These contradictions are not bugs. They are what closeness is, maintained over decades. Ambivalence, in this framing, is the natural emotional consequence of being inside a relationship that you cannot opt out of and that contains people who do not entirely share your view of the world.

Subsequent empirical work, including Karen Fingerman's research on adult children and their parents, has shown that ambivalent feelings about parents are reported by a substantial majority of adult children, increase in middle age, and are associated with worse psychological wellbeing than either consistently positive or consistently negative parental relationships.⁵

This is worth saying clearly because of the cultural framing many people inherit. The popular framing treats ambivalence about a parent or sibling as a sign that something has gone wrong. The research treats it as the modal experience of close kinship — the thing that most adult relationships with parents and siblings actually feel like, once you measure carefully. It is, in this sense, normal. The exhaustion is normal. The not-knowing-how-you-feel is normal. The simultaneity is normal.

Why it is so hard to name

The vocabulary available for describing relationships is, on the whole, binary. Good or bad. Close or distant. We get along or we don't. The categories of ordinary relational language are designed to produce a single answer to the question how is it going, and ambivalent relationships do not have a single answer.

This is the source of much of the confusion. Asked how things are with your mother, you say fine. The word is not a lie. It is a compression. The fine of we had a lovely Sunday together last week and the fine of I cried in the bathroom for an hour after our phone call on Tuesday both emerge as the same word, because the binary is what the conversation expects. Over time, this compression starts to feel like dishonesty even when it isn't. You begin to lose track of which week the relationship is in, because the language has been collapsing the weeks together.

This is also why journals are particularly useful for ambivalent relationships. The journal does not ask you to compress. It allows you to write the good week and the bad week separately, in their full specificity, and to look at them later as the same person — at which point the simultaneity, which the compression had concealed, becomes visible as the actual structure of the relationship.

The clinical psychologist Esther Perel has written extensively about this in the context of long-term romantic relationships, arguing that the maintained simultaneity of "I love this person" and "I am sometimes desperately frustrated by this person" is closer to what intimate adult life actually is than the cleaner narratives popular culture produces.⁶ Naming the simultaneity is, in her work, the precondition for staying inside the relationship without quietly leaving in your head.

What writing about an ambivalent person can do

The practical move with an ambivalent relationship is not to resolve the ambivalence. The ambivalence is, in the research, a relatively stable feature of the relationship. The move is to write about the person in a way that lets both threads exist at the same time, on the same page, without forcing one to resolve into the other.

A small structure that helps:

Two columns, not one. When writing about a specific encounter, write down separately what was warm and what was costly. Not what was good and bad in summary. The specific warm thing — she remembered the project, she sent the photo, she said the thing she rarely says. The specific costly thing — the comment about my weight, the silence when I mentioned the new job, the small look when my partner spoke. The structure of two columns trains the mind to hold both threads as real at once, instead of letting one column's content erase the other's.

The week as the unit, not the encounter. Single encounters are too volatile to characterise an ambivalent relationship. A week — three or four interactions, mixed in their valence — is closer to the relationship's actual shape. Once a week, write a short passage that includes both the high point and the low point of the week's contact with the person. The two together, week after week, are the data.

Naming the unpredictability itself. Many ambivalent relationships become more manageable, not when the ambivalence is resolved, but when the unpredictability is named as such. I do not know which version of her I will get on Sunday. Written down, this sentence stops being a private confusion and becomes a description of the relationship. The relationship, named accurately, is easier to enter.

None of this dissolves the ambivalence. It is not designed to. What it does is move the ambivalence from a private, formless tiredness into a specific, articulated account of how this person and you are with each other — which is, in most cases, what the tiredness was actually asking for.

A note on what we're building

Loopn is built to hold the kind of relationship complexity that the standard journal collapses. Every person you mention is tracked across time as a distinct thread, with the warmth and the friction held side by side rather than averaged. The Sunday Loop draws on the week's writing to surface what the relationship has actually felt like across multiple encounters, not just the most recent one — which is the only honest way to look at an ambivalent person, because any single encounter is, by definition, not representative.

We don't think the goal is to resolve your relationships into clean categories. The goal is to give them somewhere honest to live in language, so that what is actually there can be looked at over time.

If any of this resonated, you can read more about how to journal about a difficult parent without making it about them or why your relationship patterns keep repeating.