The First Time I Broke My Heart: Part 1 of a History With Relationship OCD

In early 2017 I was crying on the floor of my boyfriend’s rented room, where he was living after I kicked him out. We were trying to reconcile, but I’d started to feel that familiar, roiling uncertainty about our relationship. It had me paralyzed, afraid, unsure what to do besides end it again. I told him I didn’t think I could do this, and I was sorry for going back and forth with him so many times. We had been through the wringer over the past few years, thanks to my recurring tendency to question things and pull away, then come back with a silent plea for forgiveness. He said that I seemed like two different people.

But that night, he calmly said, “Stop. Just stop.” Meaning: Stop pulling away. Stop overreacting to every pang of doubt. Be here with me next to the mattress on the floor of this shitty rental house, because we love each other. Just be here, now, and not in your head.

He was not the first romantic partner to have gone through this dance of indecision with me, but he was the first to accept it. And the first to realize, without having a therapeutic vocabulary for it, that it happened because I was getting stuck in a pattern of rumination, obsessively focusing on the same thoughts over and over again. So he tried to snap me out of it. That’s probably why we are still together.

Common Obsessions of Relationship OCDRelationship OCD causes a person to experience crippling doubts about their partner or their love for their partner. The obsessions typical of Relationship OCD often question a person’s thoughts and feelings about their partner and may include questions such as:“Do I really love my partner?”“Are we really meant to be?”“Am I good enough for my partner?”“I noticed someone else was attractive, does that mean I don’t really like my partner?”[…]Common Compulsions of Relationship OCDThe compulsions that a person suffering from rOCD may employ can lead to more doubt, tension, and distress and can cause much heartache for the individual suffering as well as their partner. Some common compulsions associated with Relationship OCD include:Seeking reassurance that their partner truly loves themHaving sex with their partner for the purpose of ensuring that they are still attracted to themAvoidance of deepening their relationship so that they won’t be hurt when their relationship fails[…]
(From The Gateway Institute)

I had no boyfriends in high school. Not even a date. I kept myself protected, focusing on friends and school and quiet, solitary hobbies. I struggled with depression, but didn’t grasp (and neither did my parents) that it was a real, treatable condition. So I finished high school with a superb academic record, no dating experience, and no mental health diagnosis. All those things were to converge after I started college.

Jake and I met in the dorms as freshmen at Humboldt State University. He was as shy and inexperienced as me, so although we clearly liked each other, the path to our acting on it was drawn out. We’d stay up late in his single room, talking or watching funny Flash animations on his computer, sitting achingly close to each other but parting at the end of the night without sharing a touch or admission of affection. Our mutual friends in the coed dorm gave us knowing looks. When the dam finally broke, it was at the end of another evening spent in his room, finding a series of excuses for me to stay (we actually spent a bunch of time popping bubble wrap). As I got up to leave, we exchanged the long-awaited words “I like you.” Then I ran upstairs to squeal to my girlfriends.

We were inseparable the rest of freshman year. It was true puppy love: baring our hearts to each other, making out, holding hands on campus, discovering each other’s soft skin in those narrow dorm beds. There was no room for reality, just riding high on the feeling that we had each found our match. I don’t mean to diminish our connection just because we were young, but … we were young and living on campus in a small, insular town. Of course our love felt as invincible as we did. Some cracks started to appear over the summer. We both went back home, me to Sacramento and Jake to Southern California. I missed him badly, and spent that summer feeling aimless except when I was talking to him on the phone or booking a flight to visit him. I didn’t have a summer job. I hadn’t declared a major yet, so there was no distinct area of interest for me to study or look for internships in.

One day I had a plane ticket to Orange County, but was late to the airport and missed my flight. (It was less than a year after 9/11, so I wasn’t used to the longer security lines.) In the decades since, I have missed a few more flights. It’s always frustrating, but the plane you miss is never the last plane available. But that day when I was nineteen, it may as well have been. I crumbled and cried on the phone to my mom and to Jake, both of whom talked me down from the ledge and were probably silently alarmed at my outsized reaction. They didn’t know that the longer my trip was delayed, the more time I would have to spend alone with my unspoken stirrings of depression. Until I met Jake, I had always spent a good deal of time alone, enjoying writing and books and photography. Now, although I didn’t quite realize it, I was unlearning how to be with myself.

Despite the quiet strength I may have exuded, I had never actually learned how to be confident in myself. That’s not unusual for a still-developing teenager, but I was more scared of life—afraid of growth—than most people I knew. I always tried to protect myself from making mistakes. I turned down a suggestion to take a journalism class from a teacher who recognized my writing talent, rather than put more of my writing under scrutiny. Once in English class, I refused to turn in an essay I’d gotten stuck on, rather than hand over an incomplete and face the teacher’s criticism (and poor grade). When I met the rare boy who had a crush on me, I ignored the glimmer of curiosity I felt at their interest, and turned them down coldly. Nobody was going to get inside my boundaries to push them outward: no inspiring teachers, no pure-hearted boys who thought I was cute, no academically rigorous university. I applied only to the cheaper, less prestigious state schools, although my grades likely would have yielded a scholarship to a higher-end school. I just wanted to avoid the challenge. I was in total control of my life, in the sense that I rarely allowed myself to be uncomfortable.

Of course, going off to college did start pushing me out of my comfort zone intellectually and personally. I resisted where possible, completing my class assignments at a competent but shallow level. But growth was bound to force itself on me. Entering sophomore year, I’d been in a relationship with Jake for around ten months, and I started having feelings I didn’t know how to respond to. The fervor of new love was dwindling, a normal turn of events in hindsight. I was losing the urgent need to be with him at all times, and he occupied my thoughts with less frequency. This didn’t sit well with my brain, its faulty programming becoming evident as I encountered romance that was more real than a formulaic storybook. Jake and I lived in the same dormitory building, again, and his room was directly beneath mine. We had a routine when one of us came home from class: we’d knock on the floor (or ceiling), or log onto AOL Instant Messenger to send the other person a “hi” chat.

One day, I came home and did neither. It was the first of many “tests” I was to give myself. How would my feelings respond to this minor transgression, not letting him know immediately that I was available to hang out? I monitored myself, like an anxious scientist, to see if I felt sad enough to be worthy of this relationship. Let me be clear that Jake was not a controlling boyfriend in any way; he was kind and sensitive. My disordered brain was the thing starting to assert control. It held that I should want to be with, or be thinking about, my boyfriend all the time. That I should never question our relationship or waver in my affection. If I faltered on any of these fronts, it was a sign that the relationship was not right. These were harsh rules, and they confused me, because I did love him and we clearly enjoyed spending time together. My mood destabilized; my down periods became scarier. Jake noticed the times when I seemed far away. I didn’t know how to explain what I was going through except with compulsive honesty—that I wasn’t sure how I felt about him anymore.

We looked for answers. He correctly surmised that I was suffering from depression, and suggested medication and therapy, neither of which I’d had before. The idea of medication made me nervous, but I would have done anything to stop feeling the way I was feeling. Thus began my lifelong usage of SSRIs and my first rotation with psychotherapy. The meds helped even me out a little, but could not break the cycle of overanalyzing my feelings about the relationship—or about the person—and my tendency to crack the moment I detected an emotion or thought that I didn’t like. It could be the most innocuous thing, like daydreaming about a future with Jake and having it interrupted by an idle wondering if we might not be together forever. Or seeing him walking down the hall and not feeling aflutter, like I did when I first developed a crush on him. I could not explain the painful contortions of my mind, and my student counselor (the only kind of therapist I figured I could afford) wasn’t sure what to make of it. Conversations with family and friends helped me realize, logically, that I shouldn’t expect to maintain the same level of infatuation after dating a partner for a while—going on a year now. We figured that I was simply having a hard time adjusting to this new, more mature relationship phase. I hoped that it would pass.

Somehow we made it through sophomore year, although we had come to the precipice of breaking up a few times. Whenever my fears about the relationship snowballed, I was too confused and helpless to reassure Jake that I still loved him. He was worried about me, but I was also hurting him. He remained devoted. We spent part of that next summer road-tripping down the spine of California, spending a few days at his parents’ house in Orange County before heading back to my folks’ place in Sacramento. I had been wavering the whole time. On the drive north, in Jake’s Subaru, I finally decided to break my own heart; I said we should probably end things, and he agreed. Both of us wanted to cry buckets, but someone had to watch the road. When we finally reached my parents’ house, I spilled out of the car and onto their floor, curling up, not understanding why this was happening. Nobody seemed to understand why this was happening. All Jake could say was, “Something in this relationship is causing you pain. So let’s stop the pain.” He drove back to college alone. I’m sure that I felt some relief. The “compulsion” part of an obsessive/compulsive disorder is a thing the sufferer does to relieve some psychic pain. For me, as I was to discover time and time again, my preferred compulsion in a relationship is to break up.

Jake and I both moved off campus, across town from each other, for junior year at Humboldt. We still hung out all the time. For my part, I had no interest in other guys, and I was insanely jealous if I saw Jake potentially interested in another girl. Being platonic best friends was a precarious thing, but it felt safe to me. Obviously I was still in love with him. Since I couldn’t live in the vulnerable place of being in a committed romantic relationship, I was keeping him close but not too close. I was enjoying being his de facto girlfriend without actually being a partner. I’m ashamed to say that I probably wasn’t too concerned with the impact on him, at least until we actually tried to get back together. One night I confessed my lingering feelings, he did the same, and we spent the evening together in bed. It took no time at all for my obsessive doubt to creep back in, and our rekindling attempt was quashed as quickly as it started.

That was the last time he let me hurt him. We remained good friends, but our lives diverged more as he approached his graduation date. I had taken some time away from a full class load because of my mental health, and would be in school for another two years before getting my degree. I made one more attempt to reconcile with Jake, and he turned me down. Still, after he graduated and got ready to move away, we sat on his bare floor and held each other. It was a silent elegy for all that we were to each other and all that we could have been. For a long time I wondered what the hell was wrong with me.