Love Styles – Are You a Vacillator

Are you a Vacillator?

A person displaying a Vacillator lovestyle says things like: I don’t feel heard, I don’t feel important to you, you don’t get me, I am done – and as their spouse or partner, you simply feel stuck and frustrated you don’t know what to do. Moreover, many times in your relationship, you keep repeating from time to time, you “feel done” and are you tired of saying it?

Do you feel angry and frustrated in your marriage? Do you put it up with a lot in your marriage and then get angry, complain, and as a result feel alone? Well this blog is for you, keep on reading. My hope is that you would find this blog helpful for your marriage.

I help couples based on the person’s attachment style and I use the How We Love model, which is an effective and practical model of the attachment theory. You could be having problems in your communication and your connection in your relationships because of your attachment style. The Vacillator love style is a common style in both in men and women, which can be a result of their early life experiences. You may read other love styles under the blog link.

What is a Vacillator Love Style?

Vacillator lovestyle displays a man or a woman who really wants connection, however, they idealize new relationships hoping and longing for attention and love. They keep idealizing the relationship and don’t know how to get unstuck. In relationships, initially it’s about the chase. Dating is intense for Vacillators, and as time goes by, the excitement and intensity wears out and the reality sets in. The Vacillator begins to feel disappointed, rejected, and frustrated in certain situations. They tell themselves a story about their partner and their relationships. As a result, they have expectations not being met in their marriage or relationships, which leads to feeling hurt, resulting in many Vacillators responding in anger.

In my Counseling office in Roswell, I practice the How We Love Model with couples and individuals. I invite you to read the book, How We Love, by the Yerkorviches, for a better understanding of this style. Meanwhile, as you continue this series of my blogs on the six love styles as identified by Kay and Milan Yerkovich, we’ll be investigating the characteristics, background, and help for the Vacillator love style. If you haven’t been following the series, or are new to the Counseling Couch, you can find the love styles quiz on the Yerkovich’s site, or catch up by reading the rest of the series from the beginning.

If you keep thinking: “I want out, then I want in the relationship”, this blog post is for you. The following love style is about being a “Vacillator”. This means as much as you want intimacy, you believe that truly having it makes the possibility of getting hurt far more likely. In this blog, I will discuss when you begin feeling close in your relationship, you also don’t trust that it will last, and sometimes you sabotage the connection by pushing the other person away before that person can hurt you. Are you beginning to identify with this love style, with how you function in relationships? Please read on and continue to find out more.

Vacillator Love Style Defined
The Vacillator individual displays many of the following characteristics:

  1. One who approaches each relationship with an ideal in mind, instead of looking at things realistically. This ideal is shaped by things they’ve seen on tv, in movies, or read in books or magazines. Then, when the real world relationship doesn’t match up to their unreal expectations, they become disillusioned and disheartened.
  2. They look to others for the love, comfort, understanding and companionship that they can’t find within themselves.
  3. They often assume people know what they want, or how they are feeling, even when they don’t express themselves.
  4. Vacillator love style individuals often find no middle ground with others – relationships are either all good, or all bad. They vacillate, or swing, back and forth in their contentment within the relationship.

You need not identify with or agree with all of these characteristics. You can actually develop more than one love style, and most of us display some traits of all five. Your dominant love style though, is the one which tends to dominate your life and your relationships. You can, therefore, only have a few characteristics, but still have some difficulties with being a Vacillator. It’s good to take the quiz and find out just who and what you are, so that you can better understand all the love styles, and how they can affect your life and relationships.

The Vacillator Love Style Background & Growing Up Years
The Vacillator love style develops out of an unpredictable home life and childhood. The parent is either unattentive or absent, or vacillates himself with his emotional outreach to the child. This creates a feeling of abandonment, anger, and often resentment towards the parent. The child feels that his or her needs are not being met, and when the parent DOES try to reach out, the child is often too distraught or angry to receive what affection the parent is offering. They look to outside sources – tv, movies, books and magazines – for the type of love and affection they aren’t receiving at home. This results in forming unhealthy, unrealistic ideals for relationships because of this idealization process. As adults, they are looking for the consistent love and attention they didn’t receive, making them vulnerable to feelings of abandonment or rejection when their partner isn’t giving them his or her undivided attention.

The Vacillator Love Style and Therapy
Vacillators are made to crave communication, but they want you to know what they want without telling you. In their own thought process, they believe and tell themselves, that “the spouse or partner should already know or read their mind”! Vacillators are very affectionate, but have a hard time talking about problems. Dating is a fantasy, and the initial attraction is intense. They even fantasize about the love of their lives. Trouble starts when they get married. Vacillates wait for their needs to be met by their partner without properly communicating their expectations, therefore, there is idealism which results in feeling disappointed with their reality. They protest when the idealism is not met. Their moods shift because they are so sensitive. There is a lot of rumination after an event, rehearsing and reviewing it in their own mind, without knowing how to bring and discuss it with their spouse.

There is hope for the Vacillator love style individual. Through therapy, he or she can learn to develop healthy notions of what “good” relationships are, and can learn to find acceptance and comfort internally, as well as externally. The therapy may include these techniques:

  1. Acknowledge that your expectations won’t ever fit into this imperfect, very real world and its very imperfect inhabitants.
  2. Help you understand that each day can’t be as good as you hope, but it won’t be as bad as you can imagine it either.
  3. Ask for things you need, and express your feelings and thoughts, instead of waiting for others to guess at them.
  4. Learn to live in the present, instead of always looking to the past for sources of pain, or to a future that can never be as rosy as you can paint it.

You don’t have to go through life swinging from one emotional extreme to the other. You can hop off the relationship pendulum, and land on your own two healthy feet. If you think that your Vacillator love style may be harming your relationships and hindering your life, contact Jousline Savra today. You can click on the upper right side of this page to schedule an appointment. Ms. Savra’s counseling office is located in Roswell, GA.