Feeling Too Much or Feeling Too Little

Abstract

Romantic partners are among the most influential figures in a person’s adult life – they can provide invaluable support, closeness, and intimacy, but they can also be a source of interpersonal conflict, rejection, and neglect. It comes as no surprise, then, that people can experience a wide variety of feelings and evaluations toward their partners, which theoretical work has organized into four broad patterns: mostly positive, mostly negative, ambivalent (simultaneously positive and negative), and indifferent (neither positive nor negative). However, while empirical work on mostly positive and mostly negative partner evaluations is abundant, relatively few studies have examined ambivalence and indifference, resulting in a strikingly incomplete understanding of people’s experiences in romantic relationships. The present dissertation fills these gaps by investigating the intrapersonal and interpersonal functioning of ambivalence and indifference in romantic relationships, over four empirical chapters employing cross-sectional, experience sampling, longitudinal, and experimental designs. The findings from this program of research indicate that people find both their own and their partner’s ambivalence and indifference influential, however, these two evaluative patterns leave rather different marks on a romantic relationship. On the one hand, ambivalence appears to be quite a turbulent experience – it arises from emotionally intensive relational events that simultaneously activate positive and negative reactions, and makes one seem unpredictable and difficult to understand for their partner. On the other hand, indifference is more emotionally numbing – it is linked to experiencing boredom and a lack of connection in the relationship, making one seem under-stimulated and inattentive to their partner. These insights highlight the importance of examining ambivalence and indifference as distinct evaluative states that can occur in interpersonal relationships, with specific psychological implications both for their experiencers and for their targets.