When one of you is ready and the other isn't: ambivalence in a couple

“I don’t know if I love you any more.”

The sentence lands on a Tuesday evening, over the washing-up, without warning. He says it calmly, almost with relief, as if he had been carrying something heavy for a long time and had finally put it down. She freezes with a wet plate in her hand. The following week she reads everything she can find about couples therapy, sends him three links and suggests they go together. He shrugs: “We can go. But I don’t know if there’s any point.”

This is a situation we meet in couples therapy more often than you might think: one partner is ready to do anything to save the relationship, while the other already has one foot out of the door. Not leaving, but not really staying either. They are ambivalent — pulled in two directions at once. In this post I want to write about what is happening to each of the two people in such a couple, why ordinary couples therapy often stalls at this point, and what the American family therapist William Doherty thought about it when he developed a particular approach for exactly these couples.

When one steps back and the other steps forward

First, a distinction. I have already written about what to do when only one partner wants therapy and the other refuses to come, in When only one of you wants therapy: does couples therapy still make sense? This is something different. Both of you may be sitting in the same room. Both may say you came of your own free will. But you have not come for the same reason.

One came to repair the relationship. The other came to find out whether they still want to repair it at all — or so that later they can say they tried everything. Doherty calls these mixed-agenda couples. The partner who is moving away he calls leaning out, and the one who is moving closer and fighting for the relationship leaning in. I will put it simply: the partner who is leaning out and the partner who is leaning in.

It matters that these two positions are not character traits. The same person can be the one leaning out in one period of life and the one holding on in another. And the roles often swap within a few months: when the one who has fought for so long finally gives up, the other suddenly takes fright and starts to fight.

Ambivalence is not indecision

Ambivalence means feeling two opposing things at the same time, and both of them being true. It is not the same as indecision or laziness. Someone who is ambivalent about their relationship is not waiting because they do not care. Often they care too much — about their partner, the children, the shared history, the picture of themselves as someone who does not walk away. And at the same time they feel tiredness, emptiness, or a quiet conviction that they cannot go on like this.

Ambivalence in big decisions is the rule, not the exception. Those who study behaviour change know this well: William Miller and Stephen Rollnick, who developed motivational interviewing, write that being “for” and “against” at once is an ordinary part of the road to any significant change — and that pushing from one side almost always strengthens the other.

Ambivalence about a relationship is surprisingly common even where you would least expect it. Doherty and his colleagues studied parents who were already going through divorce and found that roughly one in four expressed at least some interest in holding off on the divorce or trying to rebuild the relationship — and in a smaller share of couples, both partners did. So even when the papers have been filed, the decision is, for many people, not as final as it looks from the outside.

The partner leaning out

People tend to speak less kindly about the partner who is leaning out. Others are quick to see them as the one who “has given up”, “has someone else” or “isn’t trying”. Sometimes one of these is true. Often the story is different.

Many people who lean out tried for a long time in their own way — quietly, without words, by adapting. For years they swallowed disappointments, avoided arguments, hoped something would change by itself. When enough has gone unsaid, resentment can set in — the kind that does not shout but cools. And when they finally say “I don’t know any more”, for their partner it comes out of the blue, while for them it is the end of a long process.

The partner leaning out often carries a great deal of guilt. They do not want to be the one who breaks up the family. At the same time they fear that if they stay, they will lose part of themselves for good. So they wait. They hope the decision will make itself — that the other will leave, that something will clearly show the way. This waiting is exhausting for both, but it is understandable: as long as you do not choose, you cannot choose wrongly.

What this partner needs most in therapy is not persuasion. They need a space where they can say out loud that they do not know — without being attacked, begged or reassured in the same breath.

The partner leaning in

The partner leaning in is in a different kind of distress. For them, “I don’t know if I love you any more” is an earthquake. The ground they stood on shakes, and the response is often natural but clumsy: more effort, more talks, more pleading, more suggestions. Books on the bedside table, links to articles, sudden attentiveness and care.

Anyone familiar with attachment theory will recognise a familiar pattern here: the more one pursues, the more the other withdraws — I have written about this in The anxious and the avoidant partner. All the effort of the partner leaning in can feel to the other like extra pressure, a confirmation that there is no room for them in this relationship.

So the partner leaning in needs something that sounds almost unfair: a look at what they themselves have contributed to the relationship arriving where it is. Not because they are to blame, but because it is the only thing in their hands. They cannot change their partner’s feelings. But they can change themselves — and sometimes that is what surprises the other enough to look back.

Why ordinary couples therapy often stalls here

Conventional couples therapy assumes something we cannot take for granted with ambivalent couples: that both are willing to work on the relationship. When one arrives thinking “I don’t know if I still want this” and the other thinking “let’s fix this as quickly as possible”, it soon becomes clear how differently invested they are.

The partner leaning in expects the two of them to learn to talk better, as I describe in From blame to needs: how a couple learns a new language. The partner leaning out, faced with such exercises, feels pulled in a direction they have not yet chosen. They may take part politely, but from a distance. Or they start missing sessions. A therapist who does not notice this can unwittingly become an ally of one of the two — usually the one who is trying.

Doherty observed that many couples in this position separate after a few sessions of unsuccessful therapy, feeling that “not even therapy helped”. But the problem was not the therapy; it was that therapy had started before it was clear whether both were even on the same road.

Discernment counselling: sessions for clarity

This is why Doherty and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota developed an approach they called discernment counseling. It is not therapy that repairs the relationship. It is a short, bounded process — one to five sessions — with a single aim: to help the couple gain clarity and confidence about the direction they take.

At the end of the process the couple chooses one of three paths. The first is to keep things as they are and put the decision off. The second is separation. The third is six months of committed work in couples therapy, during which divorce is set aside — not erased, but taken off the table so that both can genuinely try.

I should be honest: discernment counselling is not a method I am formally trained in. I am a therapist in training under supervision in marriage and family therapy, and I am training in relational family therapy. But the way of thinking Doherty describes seems to me valuable for anyone who finds themselves in such a couple — and for any therapist who sits opposite them.

How such a conversation unfolds

A distinctive feature of the approach is that the therapist spends most of the time talking not to the couple together but to each partner separately, while the other waits outside. With the partner leaning out, they explore what happened, what would have to be different for them to stay, and whether there is still an opening anywhere. They do not persuade them to stay, nor push them to leave. With the partner leaning in, they explore what that partner has contributed to the difficulties — and help them stop the behaviour that pushes the other away and replace it with a calmer presence.

A short example of how such a moment with the partner leaning in might look (a composite, not a real person):

“I’ve tried everything. I cook his favourite meals, suggest trips, read books about relationships.”
“And what happens when you do that?”
“He withdraws even more. As if it makes him angry.”
“How do you think it looks from his side?”
A long silence. “Probably like pressure. Like I don’t let him breathe.”
“What would happen if you stopped trying to fix things for a few weeks?”
“I’m afraid he’d leave.”
“Or he might notice, for the first time in a long while, that there’s room next to you.”

There is no miracle in this short exchange. But there is a shift: from the question “how do I convince him” to the question “what can I do differently myself”. That is what the partner leaning in holds in their own hands.

At the end of each session the therapist invites both to say whether they would like to come back. No one is forced to continue. And when they are ready, they choose one of the three paths — often for the first time with both of them knowing why.

What you can do if you recognise yourself

If you are the partner leaning out: your uncertainty is not a sin. But it is a responsibility. Silence that lasts for months is not neutral for your partner — it is a waiting room without a clock. You do not need to know the answer to say where you are. Even the sentence “I don’t know, but I want to find out, and I’m not leaving this week” can give your partner back some ground under their feet.

If you are the partner leaning in: your fear is understandable and your pain is real. But most of what you do out of panic works in reverse. Stop trying to prove yourself. Notice what you yourself bring into this relationship — criticism, control, endless talks about the relationship, or perhaps the very opposite, years of withdrawal that you are only noticing now. If you recognise any of the patterns I describe in The Four Horsemen in relationships, that is a good place to start.

And for both of you: decisions of this weight are not something to be made in a single evening. It helps to have questions you can go through on your own, for example those in the Questions before a big decision tool in the knowledge base.

Exercise: two letters you don’t send

You can do this exercise on your own, whichever side you are on. It takes about half an hour.

1. Write a letter: “why I would stay”. Not a list of pros and cons, but a letter to yourself. What is still precious to you in this relationship? What would you miss?
2. Write a letter: “why I would leave”. Just as honestly. What wears you out, what can you no longer do, what do you fear if things stay as they are?
3. Read both aloud, just to yourself. At which sentences does your voice waver? Where does it feel as if you are lying? Underline them.
4. Write one sentence about your own part. What have you contributed to the relationship being the way it is now? This is not about guilt, but about the part of the story that is in your hands.
5. Write down one thing you can do differently this week — not to save the relationship, but to see more clearly where you stand.

Do not show the letters to your partner, at least not straight away. Their job is not to convince anyone, but to show you that both sides in you are real. Only once you admit that can you choose.

When this is not the right frame

I want to be clear here: ambivalence is not always what it seems, and thinking about how to keep a relationship is not always appropriate.

When there is violence in the relationship. If one partner is afraid of the other, if there is control, threats, humiliation or physical violence, sessions for clarity — like couples therapy — are not carried out. Doherty explicitly rules this out. The first task then is safety. You can read more about the signs in the knowledge base under violence in a relationship; in Slovenia, help is available on the SOS helpline for women and children affected by violence at 080 11 55, and in an emergency on 113.

When the decision has already been made. Sometimes the partner leaning out is not really ambivalent — they have decided and simply do not yet know how to say it. In that case sessions for clarity do not open a door back, but help the separation happen more respectfully. That is a legitimate outcome too. More on this in When you decide to separate.

When something else lies behind the distance. Depression, burnout, addiction or a hidden affair can change how a person experiences their relationship. If the partner leaning out feels emptiness everywhere, not only with their partner, it makes sense first to seek help for themselves — from their GP or a psychotherapist.

When neither of you needs clarity. If you are both sure you want to stay and are only arguing about how, there is no path to choose. Then couples therapy is the right place. I have described when it is time for it in When to start couples therapy.

A decision you choose, not one that happens to you

One of the things I find most valuable in Doherty’s approach is that it does not promise the relationship will be saved. It promises something more modest and at the same time more important: that the decision, whatever it turns out to be, will be made consciously. Couples who separate after both have seen their own part often separate with less resentment — which matters especially if they have children and will be parents together for many years to come. Couples who stay know why they stayed, and enter further therapy as two people who have decided, not as one who pulls and another who resists.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we often say that a relationship is not something that happens to us but something we create together. That is true even in the moments when a relationship hangs by a thread. Uncertainty, too, is created together — and it is possible to come out of it together, even if each goes their own way.

What to remember

• Couples in which one partner is ready to work on the relationship while the other no longer knows whether they want it are common — and conventional couples therapy often does not suit them straight away.
• Ambivalence is not laziness or coldness. It is experiencing two real opposites at once.
• The partner leaning out needs room for the truth; the partner leaning in needs a look at their own part and less pressure.
• William Doherty’s discernment counselling helps a couple, in one to five sessions, to choose between three paths: staying as things are, separating, or six months of committed therapy.
• When there is violence in the relationship, the first task is safety — not the search for clarity.