Life is sweet; life is dangerous. You have to be positive; you have to be careful. Love makes the world go round; people are scary. 

I'm an ambigamist not just about embracing a partner but every aspect of life. I watch myself and everyone I know wrestle with the tension between open and closed, romance and skepticism, faith and reason, confidence and doubt, tenderness and protectiveness, hope and fear, transcendence and realism, generosity and caution, friendship and business. 

I don't see any way out of it.  I think this kind of tension is the truest fundamental, a fundamental that, alas, isn't a groove you can slide and cozy your way into, but a groove that's a rickety rope bridge we weave as we walk it. 

How can it not be? Ours is to enjoy life with death in full view.

The tension plays out in every arena and at every scale or scope, from how we cope with keeping a spring in our step as we stumble over the day's little obstacles to how we enjoy the world we've created even as it becomes clear that it is creating terrifying climate change.  How do you enjoy life when you know the risks? Through a mixture of liberating pleasure and compromising caution.

So no, my column isn't just about romantic partnership. But still, that kind of love is a great and practical place to explore this tension. "To love that well, that thou must leave ere long" as Shakespeare put it.  Courtship is a microcosm in which we experience a particularly vivid version of the open/closed question that all of life addresses. To survive, organisms' bodies have to answer correctly such questions as Should I join this? Should I stay with this?  Should I be open to this?  Can I trust this? Am I safe here? And these too, on a different scale are the questions we deal with in courtship.

The paradox of life is that it consists of independent individuals that, to survive have to be open, sacrificing some of their individuality. From the simplest single cell organism to the most complex society, sustainability depends on having the right semi-permeable membrane, one that lets in what is good and keeps out what is bad, joins the right partnerships and not the wrong ones. That's what all of life seeks, through some combination of trial and error, biological mechanism, instinct, responsiveness, emotion and in us--the very rarest of cases--through conscious cognitive choice.

Lately I've noticed that there are really two types of ambigamists and that I much prefer the company of one of them--the ironic ambigamist--so much so that I'll describe the other as bipolar.

Both ironic and bipolar ambigamists oscillate between open and closed, romance and skepticism. But ironic ambigamists never forget that the tension between those two is the truest fundamental. No matter how open or closed they feel in any moment they know and embrace the opposite condition.  They own both their openness and closed-ness, even while they're feeling more one way than the other. 

For ironic ambigamists, the dream partner is someone with whom they can merge their ambivalence. Their partnership is one in which each partner winkingly recognizes that the other is an appropriately skeptical individual, even while both parties do what they can to keep the romance or, at minimum the appearance of safe, certain, romance strong and alive.  They joke about life on that edge between being one thing and two, a couple and individuals.  They give each other room to breathe and forgive each other the disconnects when one is closed and the other is open.  In other words they respect the inescapable give and take of partnership.

In contrast,  bipolar ambigamists, when feeling open can't remember feeling closed, and when feeling closed, can't remember feeling open. So yes they oscillate like any ambigamist, but no, they don't take responsibility for it. If you're feeling romantic, and they happen to be feeling closed, they assume the disconnect must be your fault. If they're in a romantic mood and you're feeling closed, again it's your problem.

Bipolar ambigamists are conflicted. They just don't know it.  Maybe they don't want to know it.  They haven't yet reconciled themselves to the fact that they might want conflicting things. Yes, they know that other people "flip-flop" but certainly not them.  In order to maintain their own sense of upright consistency, whenever they change their minds they have to turn you and the world upside down.

A bipolar ambigamist tends to couch the feeling of the moment in moral absolutes. If he is feeling romantic enough to want a second date he'll say, "The problem today is that people don't give each other enough of a chance to get to know each other.  People are too quick to judge."  If he's feeling skeptical and doesn't want a second date, he'll say "I don't believe one should ever beat around the bush. When you know you know."  He won't notice the moral double standard.

When a bipolar ambigamist tries to cozy up with her distracted partner she'll say "Why are you so uncaring?" as if there were some moral code that demands that we always be open to love.  But if she's working and he's feeling romantic she'll say "Why are you pestering me?" as if there's a moral code that one should always be accommodating of people who are distracted.

If he says he's not ready to marry she'll say "he is afraid to commit," or is "emotionally unavailable" as though there's something wrong with him.  But when she's weary of a guy's company she calls him "clingy" or "too needy," again, as though there's something wrong with him.

If the bipolar ambigamist wants to partner and she doesn't, he lectures her to "be more open."  But if he doesn't want to partner and she does, he says "no drama please."  No matter what he's feeling in the moment it's in keeping with absolute and universal moral standards, even if he has to keep changing the moral standards to fit whatever he's feeling in the moment.

As I said, partnership is a microcosm.  Back in the wider world of open and closed there are ironic and bipolar ambigamists too.  Anyone who is unconsciously ambivalent and covers it up with moral double standards is a bipolar ambigamist.  Sara Palin is a bipolar ambigamist. I think the extreme bipolar ambigamists have taken over the right wing in the US.

I'd say most of us are born bipolar ambigamists, at least anyone born with conflicting preferences, and who isn't? And who among us is born with the self-awareness necessary to admit to ambivalence?  When a young child or even an old one loses a board game he might kick it over and say "that was unfair, you cheated, this game sucks, the rules are stupid."  He'll claim reason is on his side when he doesn't like the outcome. Children learn concepts like "sore loser" and "rationalization" which help us check our tendency toward moral double standards.

Mounting research* shows that with all of us, not just little kids, preferences guide reason far more than reason guides preference. We know it's wrong to do that, or at least we wouldn't like to be accused of "rationalizing" which is exactly what "preference-first; reason-later" amounts to. So we learn to claim that it's the other way around.  "I'm not rationalizing," we say as we do just that, wrapping reason around our preferences.

I'm left wondering whether bipolar ambigamy is simply what we all have or at least we all do.  If it's a diagnosis, perhaps it fits us all at one time or another. Even for the ironic ambigamist, there are moments when we falsly claim consistency just like bipolar ambigamists.  Maybe therefore they aren't two kinds of people but two kinds of moves that people make.