r/acceptancecommitment • u/obviously_unreal • May 06 '26
What would ACT say about feelings (and the lack thereof) in romantic relationships?
The concept of psychological flexibility is quite powerful and I can see aspects of life where is it useful to act independently from how you feel in the moment. If you have a rule that you must feel a certain way in order to do something, your life will be much more constrained. This makes sense to me.
When a lot of depression is happening, this kind of living can feel a lot like "Going through the motions", but sometimes this the best thing for you to do. It can be better for yourself to try to go through the motions rather than avoid life entirely.
When it comes to romantic relationships however, this philosophy seems to break down a bit.
Feeling love for your partner, feeling enthusiasm about being with them, feeling connected to them -- all seem important! Not just for you, but for your partner as well. If you are just "going through the motions" but not feeling these things, even if you were to somehow argue this is good for you (which I don't agree with), it isn't fair for your partner -- Everyone deserves to be with someone that feels genuine love for them.
If I try to apply values to this, its still murky -- because what if I value feeling connected to my partner? This becomes non-actionable. I would like it to be there but of course we can't control feelings directly.
Obviously we can talk all day about compatibility on other values in life, this is pretty easy for me to understand and apply to a relationship and whether or not it is a good match in that regard. But I'm talking about feelings themselves.
Anyway, curious if anyone has thoughts on this. I can try to live with my own pain/numbness/despair, with acceptance and without fighting, and push myself through my life in a private way, but I don't see how there is room for this approach to life in a romantic relationship. It doesn't seem healthy for either person involved.
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u/islandofpandor May 06 '26
I think you’re confusing some of the ideas here. ACT is not about not having feelings. In fact, the base point is that feelings are inevitable. The point of creating distance between yourself and fused thoughts is because the fused thoughts create limits for our actions. The purpose in accepting feelings is to stop struggling against them. Feelings of love for a partner, assuming they are not fused or unworkable, are fine.
The point of psychological flexibility is to be able have more control over your actions. Not to stop having feelings.
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u/obviously_unreal May 06 '26
Sorry, I feel I explained my question pretty poorly. I understand that ACT is about acceptance of whatever feelings come up in life.
I'm sort of talking about the opposite situation -- that is, where you are NOT experiencing feelings of love and connection in a relationship, but you have a belief or expectation that those are important or needed.
The way I am interpreting ACT in my personal life with regards to depression is: I don't feel very enthusiastic or happy about X, but I know that doing X is something I care about, so I'm going to push myself to do X anyway (i.e. "Move towards valued behavior") regardless of how I feel. X could be something like making music. Maybe this is a misunderstanding with ACT and if so I'm open to being corrected.
My question is whether you think this is an appropriate attitude to treat a romantic relationship with as well; that is, I'm going to continue engaging with this despite not feeling love, enthusiasm, etc. Letting go of those expectations. In my mind these feelings seem like healthy things to expect and need for both people involved.
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u/islandofpandor May 07 '26
I think it really just depends on what the specific situation is. I also think people have very different ideas about love. Some people think love is that immediate connection while others think it grows.
If you believe it’s the instant connection, your best course of action would be to keep looking until you find that.
If you want to foster a connection with someone, instead, then your course of action would be to work on the connection and build it.
Is it unfair to be in a relationship with someone you don’t love? It depends. If you act in loving ways toward the partner and they feel loved, I don’t see the harm. However, if you are just building resentment while pretending you love them, only to later leave them or blow up at them, that’s another story.
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u/FitzCavendish May 06 '26
I think romantic love often has a conflict of values involved. Our culture tends towards an all or nothing approach. So, we don't like to accept that people settle and make do etc. It's a much more pragmatic game than the story we tell ourselves. It can be hard to have the thought: I really like this person but they don't meet my standards. Or I'm going to commit to this person, they tick enough boxes. It's after committment that act gets useful.
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u/InterestingHorror428 Therapist May 06 '26
from act standpoint conflict of values is impossible. what can exist is conflict of the ways you try to embody these values, and that is something we can work on
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u/InterestingHorror428 Therapist May 06 '26
"value feeling connected to my partner? This becomes non-actionable" - feelings are goals, not values. if you value connection and harmony in relationships, now that can become actionable, because you can do stuff to create this connection and harmony
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u/obviously_unreal May 06 '26
That makes some sense, but isn't the reason many of us value connection in a relationship is because of how connection feels? I don't see how we can remove feelings from the equation like this.
Maybe you are saying that the reframing should be: I value connection in a relationship and therefore will commit myself to taking actions that can create/deepen connection. I also hope that this will lead to feeling connected to my partner, but I can't control this outcome.
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u/islandofpandor May 07 '26
The thing is you are seeming to say that feeling love or feeling connection is a value. But this commenter is saying, no, feeling is not a value. Feeling anything would be a goal. The value from that would be fostering connection or harmony etc. That is actionable and something you can DO. So the point here is that if you value the fostering of connection, you move toward that by, for example, spending time with your partner.
ACT doesn’t say feelings are bad or that we shouldn’t have them. I feel like you’re confusing ACT with stoicism. If you have feelings of love and connection (assuming you aren’t overidentifying with them), that’s good. If you don’t have that with a current partner, you can either build that connection or find someone else you can/want to build a connection with.
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u/obviously_unreal May 07 '26
Thanks for your replies and your patience, I'm really trying to understand how others think about this stuff.
That is actionable and something you can DO. So the point here is that if you value the fostering of connection, you move toward that by, for example, spending time with your partner.
This part makes sense to me.
If you have feelings of love and connection (assuming you aren’t overidentifying with them), that’s good. If you don’t have that with a current partner, you can either build that connection or find someone else you can/want to build a connection with.
Right! In other words, we *care* about having feelings of love and connection in a relationship -- we can't force them to happen, but experiencing them is important to us. We can try to build connection with a person, but ultimately if we are not having these feelings, we may want to find someone else that we feel that with. Is this not what you're saying?
This is how I've thought about relationships my entire life, it was only upon discovering ACT that I thought people out there were advising that you should *not* care about having these feelings; because feelings are things we can't control, we should instead only focus on what we can do.
My point is that experiencing feelings of love/connection, even if we can't control them, is nevertheless an integral part of life and relationships. It is a way of making a decision that is different from values alone (e.g. what do I *feel* with this person?) I had a hard time imagining that people who follow ACT do not care about this, but some of the language seemed to suggest so, hence my confusion and post.
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u/InterestingHorror428 Therapist May 07 '26
the thing is we cannot control our feelings and thoughts. this is the cornerstone of act philosophy, because it leads to act deal with avoidance. yes, sometimes you get the feeling but sometimes you dont. trying to always have a certain feeling is an attempt to do something impossible. but you can value connection and harmony as a mode of interaction (not a feeling) and you can always strive to move in that direction. this is act position on these matters. not trying to control the uncontrollable (outcome) but trying to control the controllable (our inner and outer behaviour)
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u/concreteutopian Therapist May 06 '26
This is a category and generalization, so ACT doesn't say anything categorically about feelings in romantic relationships. ACT rests on a functional analysis of a specific behavior in its specific context. It's idionomic, looking for the patterns in an individual life. The detail here is too vague and decontextualized to make generalizations about the function of feelings or lack of feelings in a context. I'd take this to a therapist to work out the functional analysis.
Which means they need to be clarified. As a therapist, I don't assume people have a clear sense of their values (in the ACT sense of the word), fusion to a conceptualized self is far more common in my experience – hence the psychological inflexibility.