Mixed and conflicted: The role of ambivalence in romantic relationships in light of attractive alternatives.

Abstract

People in romantic relationships tend to have positive feelings toward their partner and want their relationship to last. However, maintaining a romantic relationship over time is challenging, and people can often experience mixed and conflicting feelings (i.e., ambivalence) toward their significant other. While research has identified the serious consequences that ambivalence can have for personal and relational well-being, very little is known about the factors that can lead people to experience ambivalence in relationships. The present work examines how extradyadic desire (i.e., desire for someone other than the partner), a common difficulty people face in the context of monogamy, is a situation in which people feel more ambivalent toward their partner. In three studies (N = 1,178) using experimental, daily diary, and longitudinal approaches, we find that feelings of desire for an attractive alternative increase ambivalence toward the current partner, above and beyond how much people actually value their partner, and that this has short-and long-term negative consequences for personal and relational well-being. Furthermore, while most people could identify an attractive alternative in their life, desire for the alternative-rather than just their presence-seems to play a stronger role in increasing ambivalence. This work highlights the emotional processes through which attractive alternatives pose a threat to romantic relationships and the role that ambivalence plays in daily life and over time.

Implicit Ambivalence: A Driving Force to Improve Relationship Problems

“…Given that different types of measures (implicit vs. self-report; Hicks et al, 2020) and different types of ambivalence (objective vs. subjective, explicit vs. implicit; (van Harreveld et al, 2015; Zayas et al, 2017) are weakly associated and frequently have different effects, we expect implicit ambivalence does in fact offer incremental predictive validity, but future work would prove informative. Second, future research may also benefit from examining how implicit ambivalence relates to or translates into explicit ambivalence, which prior work suggests may occur when individuals have more tolerance for conflicting feelings (e.g., dialectical thinkers; Shiota et al, 2010), reduced opportunities to engage in motivated reasoning (e.g., under stress; Hicks et al, 2020), or external threats making their ambivalence salient (e.g., attractive alternatives; Zoppolat et al, 2021). Third, future research may also illuminate the factors explaining how and why explicit ambivalence then becomes detrimental for relationships.…”

Investigating Social Benefits of Long-Distance Romantic Relationships During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Moreover, considering the increasing prevalence of LDRRs, the continually-changing public health response to COVID-19, and the possibility of other public health crises (Fahrni et al, 2022) whereas others interpreted this item more concretely (e.g., only in-person time), and this contributed to the heterogeneity found in the within-person association between time spent together and conflict and passion. While we could not empirically test this, it may be consequential, given recent work on couples' use of technology for relationship maintenance (Belus et al, 2019;Stafford and Merolla, 2007;Zoppolat et al, 2022b).…”

Do couple- and individual-level ambivalence predict later marital outcomes? The mediating role of marital conflict

“…Although the direct and indirect measures of ambivalence have been shown to be correlated with each other (Lendon et al, 2014), indirect measures of ambivalence conceptually have higher construct validity as they emphasize contradiction in the form of simultaneously holding opposing feelings or evaluations (Connidis, 2015). We used the indirect method to measure ambivalence in this study as it allows us to infer ambivalence in the relationship, a particularly valuable approach as individuals are not always aware of their ambivalence (Lendon et al, 2014; Zoppolat et al, 2022).…”