Healing: Part 4 of a History with Relationship OCD
There was no light-bulb moment when I realized that casual relationships were not for me. Some of those relationships lingered, and were there for me in moments of need when I’d broken up with yet another boyfriend. As I’ve written this series I’ve been remembering all the boyfriends and wondering how I fit them all in to a period of roughly six years. I guess the answer is that none of them lasted very long, although the endings tended to drag on longer than is healthy. I’m not sure if it was rougher on me or on the guys. The more mature of them recognized that I had serious issues to work out and wished me well. Once I ran into an ex in downtown Portland. After a minute of chitchat, he asked if I was seeing anybody new, and I made some bitter comment about never being able to find love. He said, “Well that’s a shitty attitude.” That stopped me cold in the moment. I believe it came from a place of caring, despite the way it stung, but I needed more than just an attitude change.
I needed an intervention. I needed someone to stop me from ruminating on the quality of my feelings and my microscopic analysis of every twist and turn in a relationship. I needed someone to blacklist certain websites and search terms on my browser, so that I couldn’t keep asking the Internet to tell me how I felt. I had discovered the r/relationships subreddit, where many neurotic people looked for strangers to interpret their romantic situations. I lurked, scouring the posts for questions that echoed mine, and tried to twist the respondents’ advice into something I could use. These were mostly questions of “Should I stay or should I go?” Posters would describe the wishy-washy feelings they got around their partners, wondering if they were bad signs, much like I did. Some comments directed these folks to another sub called r/ROCD. Finding that sub was a revelation. Here was a community of people who understood exactly what I was going through. We were all trying to make relationships work, but unable to see them clearly because our minds were trapped by obsessive thoughts that we didn’t know how to cope with.
I’ll stop here to say that nobody should diagnose themselves with a mental illness based on what they read online. I have been diagnosed with depression and generalized anxiety disorder, but not with any form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’m not even sure if relationship-oriented OCD has been formally accepted as a thing. The only certainty I can share is that everything I’ve read about this affliction describes me to a T. It has subtly, gradually, changed the way I manage myself. At the very least, it’s helped me recognize that I can place less importance and urgency on intrusive thoughts that turn into obsessions. This happens to dovetail with some anxiety therapy I’ve received, particularly sensory therapy that tries to bring awareness back to my body when my mind starts to spiral. Obsessive thinking sure seems like a form of anxiety, and dwelling too long in that space triggers depressive symptoms. I believe you can’t draw a hard line around some mental disorders. My brain works the way it works, and it’s not entirely healthy, and it can be overlaid by multiple diagnoses.
For a while, I hung onto the r/ROCD community like it was a life raft. When my feelings about a relationship started swirling, I reached out and grabbed for reassurances. The anonymous Reddit people said it was just my brain playing tricks on me, that whatever guy I was seeing at the time was probably perfectly fine for me and I needed to relax. But when that sense of relief wore off, I didn’t know what do besides go back for more, trying to find a new angle on the same repetitive discussion. I came to find out that some people on that message board actually warned participants against spending too much time there. Anyone observing the posting activity with a clear head could see that most of us were engaging compulsively, and getting blind reassurances (however well-intentioned) to make ourselves feel better without pursuing professional help. I wanted to believe that I was different, somehow, but I knew I wasn’t. Querying Internet strangers was getting me nowhere. Eventually I weaned myself off of Redditing and Googling about my relationships.
There was no light-bulb moment when I realized my now-husband was the one, which actually made me feel insecure for a while. I met people who spoke with great romantic verve about how they fell for their significant others, whereas my love story was a little more … quiet. It was under wraps at first because he and I worked together (and wanted to avoid gossip), and after that changed, it still took a while to figure out what we were. We had both been hurt a lot and were nervous in different ways. But we obviously connected on a deep level and wanted to spend lots of time together. That eventually came out in kind of a shy “I love you” in the car on the way to lunch one day.
We’ve now been together for ten years, minus the short break I mentioned back in Part 1. It hasn’t always been smooth, either before or after the break. With the first few bumps, and the initial uncertainty between us, I continued to seek reassurance on the Internet. I also obsessively compared us to other couples, both fictional and real. (If he was grumpy one day, I could be consoled by the idea that we were like Luke and Lorelai on “Gilmore Girls”—opposites on the outside but made for each other on the inside.) My partner learned early on that there are periods when I get distant as I work through doubts. While he hasn’t been unworried by them, he has stayed patiently. And I learned not to explicitly share with him every change in my feelings, knowing that it caused unnecessary heartache. I realized it was better to stay focused on the big picture: what we mean to each other and what we want from our shared life, rather than the “meaning” of any given good or bad day.
As years went on, my mood toward our relationship stabilized. Who knows why, exactly? Maybe my brain gave up trying to analyze it after running the same dataset through the same algorithm over and over. Maybe the increasing chaos of real life (moving, pregnancy, child-rearing, job changes, finances) pushed out the chaos my mind was trying to create. Maybe we’ve just grown closer through the years and tribulations, reinforcing our commitment to each other and removing almost all cause for doubt. I’ve also had plenty of therapy, both with my partner and individually, and adjustments to my SSRI meds. Somehow, from that cocktail of life, healing emerged.