Is Break-Up OCD a thing? I was with my ex-girlfriend/fiancée for eight years, though we knew each other for ten. She was my first and only *real* relationship, and I thought she was my soulmate. This woman wrote me legit love letters. She admired me so much that she once said that she’d “ride into Heaven on my coattails.” She said she couldn’t wait to have me beside her when she gave birth one day. We even had a little running gag of proposing to each other at special spots...I used to joke that we held the record for how many proposals were accepted in a row. But after a few years, she faded out of the relationship. It’s hard to be 100% certain, because in the last few years she stopped sharing her inner world with me, but I’m pretty sure she suffers from pathological workaholism (like, a legit addiction to working on which she hinges her sense of self-worth, not just a lot of overtime) and PTSD (her mother was abusive, her father neglectful, she Saw Some Shit while in the foster care system, and she admitted once to being sexually abused, though she never gave details) that she either never had a true handle on, or that she lost her handle on. We had always been long distance to some degree, and in the last couple years of the relationship she would stonewall me when I tried to arrange visits (not respond to my attempts to make plans), not pick up my calls, take anywhere from three days to two weeks to answer texts, decline sex...everything that basically says she’s just not that into me. But when I finally forced myself to call it quits, she told me that she loved me and always would. Though in the intervening time, she hasn’t changed her communication (well. really, her lack thereof) at all. The last time I saw her in person was 2016, and the last time she communicated with me at all was Christmas 2019 (I’ve reached out to her since, to either plead for her to talk to me, or to arrange for me to send her some of her things that I have in my possession, but she never responds). I used to get heavy OCD episodes in regards to my behavior during the relationship, fearing that I had unwittingly sexually abused her. Since going on Prozac and getting a better handle on my thoughts, I’ve come to terms with the behaviors I feared were abusive (namely that if I DID in fact ever hurt her, it was due to my inexperience, inability to mind-read, and neurodivergent cognition, and that punishing myself for honest mistakes was an inappropriate response). I’ve gotten a better handle on ALL of my OCD, actually..the POCD, the Contamination OCD, the Real Event OCD, the Responsibility OCD. I’m still working on it all, but I haven’t lost myself in obsessions or experienced the soul-crushing agony I used to live with 24/7 in a long time. Which is why the fact that, after all this time, I still shed tears over her and pray that she’ll be like she was when we first met and come back to me, is so troubling to me. Is this inability to let her go a manifestation of OCD? If so, why am I recovering from literally every other manifestation, and not this one? And if it’s not OCD, what IS wrong with me, that we haven’t even been in the same time zone for four years, but I still want to cry when a song she put on a mixtape for me once comes on the radio at work? Is this enduring grief, yearning for closure, and feeling of sickness when I consider dating someone else normal or pathological? Is Break-Up OCD even a thing? Should I be applying ERP?