ambivalence is a feminist feeling
why must we always know what we want? why must we always be sure?
I used to think empowerment meant certainty. That being a woman with conviction—a woman worth quoting—meant knowing what I wanted, naming it confidently, and never flinching. Certainty was a kind of shield, and I wanted to be armored. I wanted to be unmessy. I wanted to be “clear.”
But lately, I find myself making a quiet case for ambivalence.
Not indecision. Not passivity. Not a flailing shrug. I mean real ambivalence: the presence of multiple truths at once. Mixed feelings. Sometimes contradictory feelings. Wanting and resisting. Hoping and doubting. Feeling affection laced with irritation, or freedom tinged with loneliness. Ambivalence is not confusion. It’s complexity. And it’s everywhere, once you start naming it.
I feel it when I block a number I still hope will call. I feel it in the mirror before a date, trying to look like I didn’t try. I feel it when I say I love being single—and do—but still flinch when someone calls it “selfish” or “hopeless” or “sad”. I feel it when I explain a boundary and immediately want to apologize for how it sounds. I feel it in the tension between how I want to be seen and what it costs to be seen at all.
We are conditioned to resolve ourselves for other people. To explain. To make sense. To take a feeling with jagged edges and sand it down until it’s palatable, professional, polite. Even feminism has its productivity metrics: Are you healing efficiently? Are your boundaries crisp? Is your self-love legible, well-lit, ideally monetized?
We’re told liberation looks like decisiveness. That to be taken seriously, we must be assertive, unwavering, sure. But the rush to be certain—especially for women—is often just another performance. Another way to make ourselves easier to understand, easier to consume. And so we package up our desires in clear language. We narrate our wants before they’ve fully formed. We pick lanes. We pledge allegiance to clarity.
But what if that, too, is a trap? What if certainty isn’t the point?
Ambivalence—messy, inconvenient, emotional—is often framed as a failure of character. Especially in women. Especially in public. It’s seen as flaky. Childish. Weak. Men are allowed to be “complicated.” Women are expected to be communicable.
But the truth is, ambivalence is often a sign of care. Of intelligence. Of noticing things deeply. It is a refusal to flatten ourselves into one tidy version. It says: I can want two things at once. I can change my mind. I can not know, and still matter.
Sometimes I say I’m fine—and I am—but I’m also furious. I want to be left alone, but I hope someone checks in anyway. I believe everything I’ve written about not needing a partner, and then see a couple holding hands at a crosswalk and feel something raw and wordless in my throat.
That doesn’t make me hypocritical. It makes me human. And being human, requires its own grace.
Ambivalence is not a detour from certainty. It is an act of resistance against oversimplification. It is a form of emotional integrity in a world that rewards women for being consistent, legible, and useful. It says: I’m not here to perform clarity. I’m here to live in truth, even if that truth is sometimes contradictory or unclear.
So no, I don’t always know what I want. And I’m learning not to apologize for that.
xo,
liv
P.S. Where are you holding tension right now? What decisions are you tired of forcing clarity on? What would happen if you let yourself want two things at once? You can tell me. You don’t have to pick a side.
I recently read, "Experienced together, opposing feelings can tame each other" and that has helped me a lot, feel more calm in my contradictions but also remember that everyone around me is full of them too. We're all full of mixed feelings & that's hard to forget when we're all asking each other to be polarized.
I love this ambivalence plea!
In many ways, I think women are ahead of us men — navigating a sea of uncertainty and ambiguity is far more difficult and complex than making certain decisions, and demands a kind of intelligence and sensitivity that's often overlooked. I can name very few male friends with whom I could have this kind of deep conversation.
Indeed, not flinching might be not a strength, but rather a façade — and in many times it may lead into a sort of trap. People crave simplicity, but the world is complex — by nature.
Sometimes I wonder if our Western societies are shaped too much by military logic — where problems are stripped down to their core and decisions dumbed down, reduced to binaries.
Works for survival but that's an awful way of living. If we want richer, more thoughtful societies, we have to stop fearing complexity, and start embracing it.