There is such stigma around “players” and people who “fear intimacy” that it borders on a sexual prejudice.  Ambigamists are intelligent responsible people who are quite understandably and appropriately of two minds about sex, love and romance.

Are you an ambigamist? Here are some ways to tell:

  • You prefer your own company to incompatible company
  • You vacillate between wondering whether you’re even capable of committing in relationship and wondering whether it’s even smart to commit. Yes, you value commitment but it’s got to be with the right person.
  • Unlike simpler romantics you’ve been in and out of love often. You’ve shopped around. You wonder if you’re a pathological love shopper but for the most part you’re glad you didn’t commit in those past relationships you’ve left.
  • You’ve played all roles–the one who leaves the one who is left. You know the drill, not that it feels like a drill when you’re in it. Still, because you’ve been around the block a few times, even in a relationship’s deepest mergings, it’s no longer inconceivable to you that the relationship might end.
  • You’re not simply casual about sex and love. You’ve proven capable of intense commitment. You can be loyal and constant. You have mourned the loss of love and romance intensely.
  • You miss the simplicity of pure magical romance where it just clicks. You still want that but over the years by trial and error you’ve also accumulated a list of pretty clear specs about what would and wouldn’t work for you in relationship. During moments of pure romance the list doesn’t loom, but the moments of pure romance are no longer so sustainable that you can ever simply ignore the list.
  • Ultimately you’re a pragmatist and love is a negotiation toward compatibility, not a magic fusion between soul mates. To some that makes you seem crass and unsafe, but you actually think it’s safer to date people who realize this than ones who will use soul mate idealizations to bully you into surrendering to them.
  • You’ve gotten pretty good at living alone. You’re accustomed to the flexibility. You’re aware of your preferences.
  • A lot of your relationships don’t settle into the second phase when the high emotions settle down. As a result, you’ve ended up harvesting the front-end richness off of various relationships, which increases your expectation of relationship being about that initial thrilling buzz.
  • If you’re older, you do wonder about the sustainability of this. The game of musical chairs is winding down. You don’t want to be left alone when you lose your allure. Then again you don’t want to be strapped with an incompatible but dependent partner in your later life.
  • If you’re a woman you vacillate between wanting to protect yourself from casual or incompatible boys by not committing too soon. At the same time you worry about being too loose.
  • If you’re a man, you vacillate between bravado about how you don’t need the grief of long-term relationship and feeling shallow for not more readily committing.
  • In moments of vulnerability you feel the social pressure to be non-ambigamous. Many of your married or more romantic friends think that ambigamy is your problem and that you need a major attitude adjustment. In social settings you sometimes end up being the odd cog for not having settled down. Sometimes you feel like you’re a member of some shameful sex/love subculture. Ambigamist can be as shunned as gays in the ‘50s.
  • You’re a romanticynic, half of you is profoundly romantic. Half of you is skeptical to the point of wanting to keep your sober distance from romance’s powerful effects.
  • You’ve got a life. You have many things you like or need to do and so you don’t want to compromise just for compromise’s sake.
  • You know a few seasoned ambigamists, people who never did settle down, aren’t bitter about it, still date, but with a calmed appetite and a clear head. They have active social life and hobbies. They seem contented and well-adjusted.
  • You recognize that in all partnerships there aren’t just two loves. There are at minimum four: I love you. You love me. I love me. You love you. Managing and coordinating those four is much harder than managing the more commonly held two (I love you; you love me) but you can no longer pretend there are only two so you resign yourself to managing them.
  • You experience sex two different ways: You have proven capable in some contexts of treating it casually, like a sweet dance, a good meal. In other contexts it becomes intensely symbolic, an indication of a deep bond or trust.
  • You’re ambivalent about commitment. Sometimes you wonder you commit too easily sometimes if you’re too slow to commit.
  • Yes, you don’t commit out of fear but you don’t consider fear an unreasonable emotion. You know that partnership is about the most intense form of influence ever. You tend to care a lot about not disappointing your partner and so, in relationship you are sure to be shaped by your partner’s values. That’s a great thing when your partner brings out the best in you. It’s a terrible thing when your partner brings out the worst in you, especially if the partner who brings out the worst in you is attractive, because attraction has extraordinary sway and influence over you.
  • You’re intensely ambivalent about attraction. On the one hand, it moves you strongly; it works upon you powerfully. On the other hand you don’t trust it. You have noticed that attraction is not highly correlated with compatibility and that sex is not tightly correlated with the likelihood of a fine partnership.
  • You may end up single. You don’t want to, but you don’t want to end up coupled inappropriately either.
  • You sometimes feel like it’s generous to not try to partner too quickly. Partnering is largely faith in expectations that the other person will be a certain way. You don’t want to come at someone with a cookie-cutter. You appreciate the value of finding appropriate psychic distance in relationship and can’t make partnership the ultimate moral value.
  • Recognizing that partnership is a choice between freely consenting adults and that you have opted out of traditional or formal approaches to relationship, you relinquish the option to use moralist bullying to coerce those who disappoint you. When you find the partner of your dreams and they don’t feel the same about you, you recognize that there is no more of a moral issue here, than when in business interactions someone seeks a better deal elsewhere. You may be upset. You may feel and even act a little on some selectively moral claim for justice but you get over it quickly because claiming the moral high ground in such situations is unjustified.
  • Ambigamist policy
  • Platonic until proven ambigamous: You don’t kiss non-ambigamists-people who are looking for their soul mates or by temperament or appetite or more casual about falling into intense romantic bond. You would rather go without romance than set them up for disappointment and frustration. You’re not a player or a user of potential partners. You’ll flirt a little but you hold the default value as friendship.
  • Ambigamous until proven compatible: Even when you do kiss you try to remember that you’re both ambigamists and that a kiss is not a contract. In relationship your default value is ambigamy, not couple. You don’t ask “why not marry?” you ask “Why?