Trial and Error: Part 2 of a History With Relationship OCD
I skated through my last two years of college after my first ex-boyfriend left for a job in Hawaii. I had a few good friends and a retail job, and was somehow making good grades in spite of being so depressed that I sometimes slept through classes. I didn’t want to dwell on a long-gone relationship, but my depression and anxiety made it hard not to mull over the events and feel like I’d royally screwed things up. I wasn’t sure exactly how I’d messed up, so I kept analyzing the situation and applying different theories based on some brief work with a student counselor and discussions with many people who had no therapeutic credentials. One option: Things with Jake had gotten too serious too quickly, and I was too young and unready, so I simply couldn’t handle the relationship, as much as I wanted to. Second option, not so different from the first: I let the relationship subsume me, interrupting a phase of life where I was supposed to be “finding myself”, thereby causing depression. Third option: The depression came first, and as Jake became a sounding board for me working through it, he turned into more of a therapist than a boyfriend, and the romance was lost. There probably were valid bits in all of these, but none of them spurred me to make real changes or seek professional help. With a still-fresh wound, I was only interested in magical thinking: If I’d only recognized problem (1) or (2) or (3), I could have corrected the course of our relationship.
Another theory hit when I listened to a song from the newest Coldplay album, A Rush of Blood to the Head. “I missed the good part, then I realized / I started lookin’ and the bubble burst / I started lookin’ for excuses.” Yes! I’d been looking for a warning sign, continuously kicking the tires and looking beneath the hood of my romance to find potential problems. Every minute spent examining the relationship was a minute not spent inside of it. This was the seed of a new understanding that I didn’t yet have the wisdom or maturity to nurture. The mere hint of a rational explanation was like a balm for my anxiety, something to temporarily stop the ruminating. Now I felt like I had hope. Next time I dated someone, I would just try to be present in the moment and not overthink it. Simple advice that may have worked for someone with a more peaceful mind.
I fell in love again at 26, after I’d worked my first post-college job and then left Northern California for Portland, Oregon. In the intervening years I’d gotten over Jake and started dating a bit. There was a disastrous go-round with a male friend, who confessed feelings for me after I’d been firmly single for a while. I really cared for him, but I can’t count the number of times I changed my mind about being his girlfriend until we gave up after about five months. Then I met a guy on MySpace who was beautiful and not right for me. It never got very deep, and curiously, neither did my anxiety; there just wasn’t enough at stake for me to worry about the rightness of it. After that, my Internet dating efforts shifted to Craigslist, and I started flirting via email with a guy in Portland while simultaneously planning my move there. His name was Matt and he became my welcoming committee when I moved. He liked me more than I liked him, so that didn’t last either, and the extent of his adoration made me feel awful about ending it. Of course I jerked him around a few times before breaking up for good; that was becoming my M.O. thanks to constant doubt about my decisions and instincts. After Matt and I broke up, I saw a new personal ad on Craigslist that I could have sworn was written by him. I was irrationally offended that he was moving on so soon, and confronted him with screenshots trying to prove that he was the poster. He denied it, I pushed back, and finally he said, “Look … I adore you, but you’re being crazy about this.” Poor guy. I remember how aflame I was that night, obsessing over a small thing.
The next summer I met Damien at a work event that my colleague had invited him to. He walked straight up to me and asked for my number. We had an instant spark that carried through our first date and beyond, outshining the fact that he was separated from his wife but not yet divorced. I believed it was over, but didn’t consider that he might have some lingering turbulence from it. He just seemed thrilled to have met me, and I reciprocated. We talked on the phone, rode bikes together, played Scrabble, watched movies, and drank wine in the backyard of the house he owned. Being a few years older than me, he was the smart, geeky, artistic, mature guy I’d always wanted.
By now I recognized that I had a bad pattern in relationships, and tried to get ahead of it by finding a new therapist. I told Damien that I was doing it for us, because we had something special and I was scared of fucking it up. I tried to warn him nonchalantly, sharing the general idea that I was prone to overthinking and self-doubt. He seemed to accept that. (What else was he going to do?)
As I recall, it took just a few weeks for the first icy doubts to violate my happiness. The minute my brain wasn’t fully occupied with new infatuation, anxiety rushed to full in the gaps. At first it wasn’t bad enough to flatten me; it would be just a small disruption to my day, a “What if?” idea that I could dismiss and later share with my therapist, who reassured me that these thoughts were dismissible. She likened my brain to a butterfly that flitted from one worry to the next, always hypervigilant for the next thing to land on. She told me about the concept of the Highly Sensitive Person, which resonated and became the next construct by which I tried to understand my behavior in romantic relationships. I realized that I’d always been extra sensitive to my surroundings, even when the stimuli were subtle. Once, as a kid having a sleepover with my two best friends, I became suddenly overwhelmed and stopped wanting to socialize. My parents came to take me home. (To their credit, none of the parents involved made me feel weird; they just recognized that I didn’t want to be there anymore.) I picked up every emotional cue in every room and tended to let it sway me. Same with every thought or feeling that arose in my own body. For a multitude of reasons, that sensitivity was heightened in the context of love. Love brings the potential to be seen, to be challenged, to be hurt by another person; it means possibly having to commit wholeheartedly, to compromise, to let the relationship change parts of you that you’ve worked so hard to protect. There’s a lot at stake for a delicate soul, so it shows a certain logic that I would be on the lookout for danger signs.
In my new relationship I was feeling everything deeply, and overreacting to both the good and the bad. Damien and I said we loved each other after a month or so, and I started to fantasize about moving into his amazing old-Portland house and becoming the next wife. On the flip side, sometimes I would do a gut check on the bus ride to his place, and conclude that I wasn’t experiencing what a person in love should be feeling. Never mind if I was tired that day, or just had other things on my mind; I expected the ooey gooey mushy stuff. If I couldn’t find it, I would ruminate until I got to Damien’s place, and then my heart would sink when he opened the door because I felt like I wasn’t bringing my best. Even worse, I felt like I was being dishonest by continuing to be his girlfriend with doubts. I tried to soothe that internal conflict with compulsive honesty, just like in my first relationship with Jake, saying things like “I am questioning my feelings for you, but please know that I really do want to be in this relationship. I’ll come around.” And I usually did come back around, allowing us stints of happy togetherness before a new incident dragged me back down. Damien knew that I suffered from depression, if nothing else, and said he knew that my doubts were only temporary. He tried to be okay with the times I drew away from him, and the increasing frequency with which I voiced my uncertainty. Sometimes I felt a desire to escape, like that time at the sleepover, but I tried to stay put. At least physically.
Love brings the potential to be seen, to be challenged, to be hurt by another person; it means possibly having to commit wholeheartedly, to compromise, to let the relationship change parts of you that you’ve worked so hard to protect.
My other coping mechanisms were Googling and dumping on my friends. The line of questioning lobbed at both was not the typical lightly-neurotic-girlfriend stuff: Does he love me? Is he thinking about me right now? How do I compare to his exes? I turned everything inward: Am I really in love with my boyfriend? What does it mean if I don’t miss him enough? How do I know when I need to break up with someone? I became obsessed with the meaning of my feelings, and compulsively searched Internet forums for answers. Obviously, nothing there was clear-cut. On the one hand were posters expounding on true love, advising readers on how to know when they’d found it. Many people claimed that their anxieties calmed down when they met the right person, and that doubts were a bad sign. On the other hand, people on various mental health-oriented websites talked about doubts/fears/questions being merely byproducts of an overactive mind. Some of them had managed to have lasting relationships in spite of all that. Theirs were the comments that reassured me, giving me a Band-Aid of hope.
When the temporary fix wore off and I started ruminating again, if I didn’t have a computer at hand to resume my search for answers, I would find a friend to call. Often I would be in a panic, feeling the urge to break up with Damien and looking to be talked out of it, or at least to be sent definitively down one path or the other. My friends tried their best to listen and advise, but the conversations went around and around like so: I feel like maybe I don’t really love him. “Well, maybe he’s not the one. Leave if you’re not happy.” But if I broke up with him, I’d miss him. “Then stay with him!” Well, what do my feelings mean, then? “… I don’t know.” None of us recognized the counterproductive reassurance-seeking behavior that is typical of an OCD sufferer. These spontaneous conversations fed my obsession, rather than teaching me to cope with or look for the underlying causes of my discomfort .
This pattern dragged on through all the months Damien and I dated, disrupting the rest of my life as well. I would endlessly Google relationship advice at work. I was also late to, or absent from, work on the days when my own behavior had me depressed. I remember a lot of tears and confusion during phone calls with friends, and increasingly during conversations with Damien too. I started skipping social events with him, and often turned down sex. We were running short on the raw materials required to actually build or maintain a relationship. What we did have, I was slowly picking apart until there was nothing left.
It was almost (almost!) entirely unrooted in reality, until the day I got a Facebook message from his college friend, whom I’d met earlier that fall. She’d been beset by guilt. She said I should ask Damien what had happened between them when she’d come to visit. I thought back to those days. The three of us had had a fun time together, playing Scrabble and eating dinner at Damien’s house. I had gone back to my apartment, unsuspicious, while she stayed the night in his spare room—or so it seemed. Now, reading this cryptic but unsubtle note from her, I knew there had been more to it. I stepped out my office and called Damien right away. He confessed that they had slept together. I screamed something at him and hung up, feeling utterly crushed.
At least now my anxiety had something to land on. Something inside me was probably gratified, gloating that I’d been right to worry about this relationship. I sank a little deeper into the depression I was already in, the major change being that I could accurately name the things I was feeling this time, and voice them to Damien without shame. He was obviously in the wrong, and he was remorseful. It had been early in our relationship, he was unsure about us and processing a divorce, and this old friend had come along at a vulnerable time. We reconciled and I tried to forgive him, but the betrayal haunted me. I had never been cheated on before. My anxiety and depression continued apace with a new class of intrusive thought: Would he cheat again? And, What’s so wrong with me?
He grew impatient with my inability to let go of the past as well as my general lack of progress on the anxiety front. I was not super fun to be around. He said I reminded him too much of his depressed ex-wife. So he left, and it hit me hard. I was a grown woman and asked my mom to come up from California to comfort me. She watched as I sobbed into my arms, not getting why I was taking it so seriously, not seeing that I burned with self hatred because I kept driving partners away.