Battling ROCD

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.

Hey guys, I’m reaching out in a pretty weak spot of desperation. I feel so insane and so sick of my mind recently, I’m completely drained from my mind. I’ve had such bad spikes of RCOD in my relationship of 1.5 years , which kills me because I truly want nothing more than to just be his peace and for us to work out. I love him more than anything and I would do anything for him. I feel like the pressure I placed on making sure I was “perfect” was so counter productive becuase instead I find myself doing everything wrong. I tell myself not to think of the wrong thing, then I think of the wrong thing, then I feel so guilty, and it plagues my mind for days. I feel so guilty it makes me feel detached and like I’m a bad girlfriend. I feel so bad for always burdening him with my anxieties and my “wrong thoughts” becuase he doesn’t deserve it, he’s so amazing. Recently, I began overthinking if I “love him” which I KNOW is so silly because when I’m calm, I laugh that I even got so worried , but when my anxiety creeps in, it feels so debilitating. I spiral and then try to prove to myself that I do love him , which then makes things in that moment feel “forced” because I’m acting out of intent to win the battle in my head. My RCOD has been a persistent issue, but this particular theme is pretty new and I hate it. I feel like I’ve been placing pressure on myself to overly appreciate him and it’s so counterproductive. I feel so bad because I told him about everything and he now thinks I don’t love him. Which is so wrong. I just want this to be fixed. Sometimes I feel like he’d be better off with a girl that isn’t such a headache and wouldn’t drain him all of the time but at the same time , I could never accept him being with anyone but me. Also, I have seen a psychoglist but it just didn’t feel right and I hated vocalising my thoughts because I felt it gave them more power - it feels like the only person I can truly be raw with about this stuff is my bestfriend. If anyone has any tips , PLEASE help me.

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.