Commitment has instrumental and affective components.123 Choosers in the marriage market clearly are trying to combine the rational and emotional dimensions of choice-making. However, research suggests that the affective dimension of commitment ultimately is the strongest because commitment cannot be a rational choice. The process in which the architecture of romantic choice is faced with ever-larger numbers of potential partners diminishes the capacity to make a strong affective commitment because it mobilizes cognitive processes that increasingly interfere with and undermine emotionality and intuition.

The features of choice described above are the cognitive and sociological conditions that set up the psychological state known as ambivalence. While ambiguity refers to a property of cognition (uncertainty about whether an object is this or that), ambivalence refers to emotions. For Freud, ambivalence was a universal property of the psyche and consisted of a mixture of love and hate. The philosopher David Pugmire defines ambivalence more generally as the simultaneous existence of two conflicting affects toward the same object.124 However, I would argue that contemporary romantic ambivalence is different again: it refers to dampened feelings. “Cool ambivalence” might better describe this state, since it implies one of the main emotional tonalities referred to earlier, namely aboulia. Modern ambivalence takes a number of forms: not knowing what one feels for someone else (Is it true love? Do I really want to spend my life with him?); feeling conflicting emotions (the desire to explore new relationships while continuing in the current relationship); saying something but not feeling the emotions that should accompany the words (I love being with you, but I cannot bring myself to commit completely). Ambivalence is not intrinsic to the psyche but is a property of the institutions that organize our lives. Institutional arrangements are often responsible for people wanting conflicting goods: love and autonomy, and care and self-reliance, as expressed in the different institutions of family and market. Also, culture does not provide a clear sense of hierarchy among competing goods. [...]