I constantly feel let down and disappointed by my boyfriend. I feel like he has legit reasons for what’s happening but I don’t believe him anymore and have so much doubt. I guess it is OCD. This is so difficult cuz my feelings feel real but logically I know what he’s saying makes sense. I’m going in circles.
Yeah I relate. When something small happens like he forgets to call me because he got busy, find myself flooded with reasons that he doesnt care about me and then I just end up angry about it. I also feel like my feelings are easily hurt and its uncomfortable. With other OCD thoughts I understand how to combat him but with these ones I have no idea- I just try to resist the compulsion of asking if he cares about me or still loves me
@hiitsemmy Yeah that’s exactly it. He forgets to call cuz he’s busy then I spiral and ruminate. My feelings get hurt easily too. Thanks for sharing. I’m not sure how to deal with these either.
@hiitsemmy Do you also find yourself not trusting when he’ll say he’s going to do something?
@Honeyshark Yes all the time and I grew up with a mom who nagged a lot about getting things done so sometimes I feel like I’m doing that to him. I find myself waiting feeling anxious until he does the thing he says he’s going to do. But I know its OCD because my thoughts are very convincing- I have a reaction to them- and then I have a compulsion. That compulsion could be getting angry, asking him questions (I feel like interrogate him sometimes when my OCD is bad), or avoiding him. I know this all sounds really bad but its the nature of OCD and thankfully both my partner and I understand OCD. I do still try my best to not take things out on him but I still constantly feel the emotions- whether I act on them or not
@hiitsemmy But basically what I feel happen is I’ll have a small thought and I tell myself that its ok and then I can literally feel it swallowing me until I want to burst and I have to do a compulsion. I hate that anger is my reaction- I feel like I see a lot of other people with ROCD that mostly deal with sadness. I just feel like anger has the potential to be really destructive in a relationship
@hiitsemmy This helps me a lot to hear. I get angry and confrontational (I interrogate as well) too because my ocd is telling me I’m being mistreated or ignored or [insert something else bad]. I thought I was alone as well. How’d you explain OCD to your partner? I feel like explaining this to my boyfriend is hard to get across how crazy OCD can make me feel and how it’ll latch onto even small stuff.
@Honeyshark Literally! I feel that same way. I feel like I make up certain details about how I feel too because my ocd is telling me- I feel myself like really scraping for any detail that could prove that I deserve better. Thankfully my boyfriend is a social worker and a big mental health advocate so that helps in understanding OCD. I also communicate to him how the ocd makes me feel: like I’m going to burst, like I’m crazy, like I feel frozen in space and can’t move, like I need to find an answer immediately and I’ll even be ruthlessly mean to find that answer. I tell him that when I’m interrogating him its just as painful for me as it is for him because I absolutely hate the feeling- i’m just trying to get rid of the thought. I tell him that I know what I’m feeling is irrational but it feels more than real in my head. I started small with communicating it to him by just mentioning that ocd is bothering me and then I started explaining how it makes me feel. I spare him the details about what the obsession is about though because a lot of them attack his character and I dont want to hurt his feelings.
@hiitsemmy Oh wow! This is super helpful! When my boyfriend asks me what’s bothering me I tell him the ocd thing and then we have an argument and his feelings get hurt. I’m going to do just ocd + what it wants me to do going forward. Thanks! Yeah! Same about “deserving better” and then scrutinizing every single detail. I also feel like ocd makes me less empathetic to my boyfriend. He’s working so much and my ocd ignores that and uses that stupid saying “if he wanted to he would”
@hiitsemmy And I get angry when I think he’s “holding back” or “not treating me well” but it’s all ocd.
@hiitsemmy And then when it passes I’m happy he’s my boyfriend again and then try to compensate for my horrible feelings before.
@Honeyshark I am definitely less empathetic towards me boyfriend too but I’m not an overly empathetic person with other people anyways. Sometimes I feel like such an asshole because I feel myself ridiculing him that he isnt doing enough or “he isnt this” or “he isnt that.” For whatever reason I feel anxiety over almost anything he does and I use it to judge his character. I also experience being super happy with him when it passes but its so overwhelming when its all ocd anxiety- its hard to differentiate what is actually an undesirable trait and what I’m just making up.
@hiitsemmy Yeah it’s so tough. I feel so much anxiety about his actions and character.
I don’t understand how my boyfriend can love me so much after everything I put him through. He constantly shows me how much he loves me, yet I feel like I can’t fully appreciate it. I can’t explain how badly I behave towards him when these thoughts take over, how often I lash out because of them, and how many times I’ve told him exactly what’s on my mind. He tries to use logic to help me, but it never seems to work. And now, even as I’m writing this, I feel like crying—yet at the same time, my mind tells me that I don’t care. This horrible feeling inside me won’t go away. I keep thinking, “What if I don’t like him?” That thought is always there. I wonder if I had unrealistic expectations about this relationship from the beginning, since he is my first boyfriend. What if I convinced myself I liked him just because I wanted my first relationship to be perfect? And now, I just can’t accept the truth? It scares me even more knowing that he moved to my city for me. I feel like I’m constantly upset, constantly sad. And despite everything, he’s always there for me. That makes me feel even worse because I don’t know what to do to feel okay again. Every time I talk to him, I get this strange feeling inside me, and I’m terrified that it means my thoughts are actually true. He tells me that my happiness shouldn’t depend only on him, that I should focus on more than just this relationship—because for over a year now, my mind has been stuck in an endless loop of questioning whether I love him or not. He asks me, “Who are you fighting? Why do you care so much? You’ve been asking yourself the same question for over a year—shouldn’t you know the answer by now?” And my response is always, “Because I want to be with you.” But then, when I try to answer whether I like him or not, more doubts take over. I start thinking, “Maybe I just can’t accept that I don’t love him. Maybe I just want to keep this relationship perfect.” The worst part is that he has never done anything wrong. He has always been patient, kind, and loving, yet I feel so lost. I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t understand what I feel. And I don’t understand why I can’t understand what I feel. He also tells me that ever since I started reading so much about relationships and OCD online, I have gotten worse. And he’s right. I have become much worse than I was before. The problem is that before, I thought I was at my worst, but looking back, I was still able to feel happiness at times. Now, I feel completely stuck. I don’t know if I’m crying because I hate this feeling, or because I don’t want to think this way about him. It feels like I don’t even know what’s happening to me anymore.
Hi everyone! I have been having a rough time. So my boyfriend talks to his ex still as friends and I’ve been struggling with it lately and I can’t tell if it’s OCD or not but it does feel so distressing. She wasn’t texting him for about 2-3 months as she got into a relationship with this guy and they broke up. She had messaged him saying that she has no one else to talk to and needed to vent to someone. At first I felt okay, but my intrusive thoughts took over and it seemed like she was trying to get with him after the fact. It’s probably just my intrusive thoughts talking but he looks on Discord (the app where the message) constantly now and my intrusive thoughts convince me that he’s still in love with her. Then yesterday I saw one of his BeReals (a little photo app that shows a photo of the day) and I saw that he was watching one of her streams as she is a streamer. I struggled to talk about it because it made my worst thought feel like it came true where he is still in love with her. When we talked he gets a lil mad that I don’t tell him right away like straight up what I’m feeling but it’s hard to process because my thoughts flood in of all the worst things and I don’t want to come off as toxic at all and I know relationships are built on trust and I want to trust because this is literally the only thing that makes me nervous about him. It also doesn’t help that I’ve been cheated on before so I’m trying to protect myself but I’m lost. I get so depressed and so anxious because I feel like I have to grieve the relationship and it’s just so dramatic. I’ve never loved anyone like this before and I don’t wanna lose him by bringing this stuff up constantly when something occurs with his ex. I don’t know why I get triggered so easily and I just wanna heal from it and be the good girlfriend I’m supposed to be 😭
Lately my ROCD has been flaring up, making it difficult to even be around my partner. I’m having so many troubling thoughts with the one that bugs me most being, “maybe this isn’t my OCD, maybe I’m just in a bad relationship and I’m trying to cover it up and blame it on OCD”. This thought really scares me because there are valid doubts in my relationship but my boyfriend and I have openly talked about them and are trying to work through. My OCD won’t take that as an option tho. It makes me feel like I need to be 100% certain that these things can NEVER happen again or else we need to break up immediately. So anything he says in that moment about trying to do better, my OCD will not trust anything he says and just wait until the next “bad thing” happens. When I continuously bring these things up to my boyfriend even tho nothing has happened between these conversations, it exhausts him making it feel like he can never do enough. I feel so bad because I know it’s just my OCD getting in the way. But then that thought creeps in saying I can’t trust him because I need to protect myself. It’s just an ongoing cycle that is so tiring. I don’t even know what I want anymore. We are very opposite when it comes to emotions. I am very in tune and very emotionally intelligent, and he is not. He is the opposite. I do recognize that my anxious attachment style may be hard for him too but I can’t stop thinking about all of his flaws and all of the things he needs to do to make our relationship better. It makes me feel like I’m the only one putting in effort when in reality that is not true. But my OCD does make me feel like he doesn’t really love me or want to be with me and that he feels forced to be with me or do things for me. It makes me feel like him being with me is like a chore. Can anyone relate? My OCD just makes me feel like I can’t trust anything he says to make our relationship better.
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