Sometimes I find myself with little feeling toward a certain situation or idea. Dating, or at least an attempt at dating, can leave me drained. Sometimes I realize the girl just isn't interested, or doesn't appear to be. I think sometimes the girl doesn't know what she wants, and that leaves me nowhere. Sometimes I just get tired of how dating seems to be a card game of betting and bluff. At that point, I'll take a cold beer and an evening on the back patio over the frustration of dating. I have found myself using the term ambivalent to describe this feeling. 

I looked up the word ambivalent and found this definition: continual fluctuation (as between one thing and its opposite), simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings (as attraction and repulsion) toward an object, person, or action.

 When it comes to dating, sometimes I just don't care. Ambivalent isn't the word for it. At the point where I am out with a beer on the patio, I am in a state of indifference: absence of compulsion to or toward one thing or another. 

 But most of the time I do care when it comes to dating. Especially when the girl is smart, funny, and hot. After twenty years of dating, I do find I am ambivalent: I have equal and contradictory feelings.  I want to date, but I just don't want to deal the potential rejection. I don't want the headache, but I do want the girl. 

Dating is a frustrating and uneven process. But I know from experience it can have a fulfilling result, due to that fact that occasionally things go well.    

I just need to realize internally that I am caught between the nuance of indifference and ambivalence.