Jason Wasser, LMFT 🎗️Founder, Shevet Collective · Therapy & Coaching for Entrepreneurs, Family Businesses 🖥 Certified Neuro Emotional Technique Practitioner Founder Shevet Collective 🎧Host:You Winning Life Podcast 🎤

Stop Being Ambiguous In Your Communication

9 Jan 2021 · 2 min

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2:12

In this self‑help monologue, Jason Wasser, LMFT, explains why many romantic relationships are plagued by ambiguity. He identifies two primary drivers. The first is pragmatic: people deliberately avoid clear commitment because they plan to marry later or prefer to keep options open, using vagueness as a protective strategy. The second is emotional: a cultural legacy of the “divorce revolution” (late‑60s through the 80s) has created a deep fear of being explicit. Individuals worry that clear communication will invite rejection, and the pain of a direct “no” feels worse than the uncertainty of an undefined relationship. By unpacking these causes, Wasser argues that recognizing and confronting both pragmatic avoidance and fear‑based ambiguity is essential for healthier, more transparent communication in dating and long‑term partnerships.

Chapters

It's interesting to think about the different causes of ambiguity because for some people it's just pragmatic. I think everybody finds it fairly easy to believe, especially if they're in the dating and mating scene, that ambiguity is everywhere. It's just like people are swimming in a sea of ambiguity. So the question's worthwhile to ask, and you hooked on part of it. As people marry— and many people are just not marrying, but a lot of people still are marrying. But they're marrying later and later and later and later in life. And that means there's this— just because of that alone, there's this extended period of time where maybe people don't want to get real committed. They don't want to be real specific. They don't want to settle down. My big point there was it's interesting to think about the different causes of ambiguity because for some people, it's just pragmatic. I have decided— they may have even decided, I'm not settling down until I'm 30. I'm 24. I don't want to be clear with anybody because clarity is going to end a lot of relationships if I know that I'm not planning to, like, really commit to anybody until— there's— so there's people like that. The other group that I thought the most about, though, and this comes partly from being of a certain age to have, you know, grown and lived through sort of the divorce revolution in the late '60s, '70s, and through the '80s, where divorce was nothing in the '60s and just exploded. So my initial theory was that— and this is still a big part of it— is that a lot of ambiguity is fed by a fear of being clear, that I'm really afraid that it's not going to work out. So I'm afraid to commit, but I'm also afraid to be really so clear that you could say no. You could reject me. And if you reject me when I've been really clear, that's going to hurt more than if you reject me when I've just sort of not even admitted to myself how badly I want this.