So I need advice I constantly have ruminations of cheating on my partner. We barely have been having problems anymore yet a friend of mine (who I was never into) we recently crossed paths over his mom dying of stage four lung cancer, and I knew his mom liked me very very much, way more than my current boyfriends mom could ever. His mother always had problems with me for reasons unknown. I recently dreamt of sleeping with my friend after crying about his mom possibly dying after finding out. I’m wondering if this is me trying to escape pain of my boyfriends mom and sister not loving me that much. I was always looking for love from an older adult since my moms a druggie and my dads a recovering abusive alcoholic. I’m not looking for reassurance. I’m not even sure this is OCD. I’m kinda of just looking for help. My boyfriends a wonderful guy But he comes from a shitty family like mine, very mean spirited

So I have been struggling with the same theme of ocd for 4 months now. My ocd centers around past events/false memories that ocd skews to make seem bad or it twists my thoughts on what my intentions were. this is related to cheating or being weird while I have been in my amazing relationship. I have never cheated on my partner and never will and I believe it is wrong. But my ocd is telling me other wise. I love my partner so very much and I would never want to hurt him but my brain is getting to me. I was getting better. I was trying “maybe I did, maybe I didn’t”, I have been back on meds and in therapy and I stopped confessing random interactions from years/months ago about 1.5 weeks ago and it really helped. But now I woke up this morning and feel the pit in my stomach again. I feel extra critical and like why would you do this? What does this say about you? What was your intention with this? And I’m just stuck mentally reviewing and ruminating on everything you could imagine. I know my personality and I know in the moment maybe I did find them attractive but mainly I was just being nice or funny or even just a good friend, but looking back now I’m like “was it flirting?” “Why did I still snap this person” “why would I even talk to them” and stuff like that. I feel this intense sense of guilt. I have told my partner everything that I keep getting stuck on and he didn’t care, he said he understands or “that’s a little weird but it’s okay” and hasn’t missed a beat. He said eveything I’ve told him is normal and I’ve heard that from my friends too. I just really need help. I don’t know what to do anymore. I am so disappointed because I thought I was gonna be done with this, so why am I still so worried and caught up in this.

Hello! I just needed a place to vent.. Me and my boyfriend are having a hard time right now because of my anxiety and because I have had vestibulodynia for 3 years. If you have a flare up of relationship ocd then this might trigger or something but I don’t know. Anyway, my vestibulodynia has made me afraid of intimacy a lot and my partner also in fear of hurting me has withdrawn a lot too. I still want him, it’s complicated. This year, things have been tougher with finding a cure, and that’s when I’ve started to have the thought ”what if it would be different with someone else?”, but I don’t want anyone else. I have had these urges to stare at attractive men, which I don’t really know why, a lot of fantasies come up in my mind, just popping in. About two times this year, I have been staring at an attractive guy/or just a guy a few times without really knowing why. I take it as a sign together with my withdrawal that I no longer want him, and is cheating. The thing is, I don’t like what I’m doing, and I don’t know why it happens, it’s like I can’t physically look away. I have to control myself to not stare. I know I can’t ask for reassurance here, but I would really like to know if this is ocd. I also had a fantasy of flirting but not leading to anything more, I think I wanted more chemistry with my boyfriend and it manifested into someone random that can’t hurt me. I don’t know what I just said meant but when I had it, I think I was clear with that I knew I only wanted those feelings with him, my boyfriend. The times I can’t stop staring, what usually happens in my mind is that I see that they are attractive, then I kind of take in their features but then I remember not to stare, but it’s weird cause it’s not like a calm ”oh so beautiful” it’s like my head keeps being turned and I physically cannot stop. I have heard of stare ocd but I’m not sure. It’s complicated because yes I feel sad because my vulvodynia messed up for us, because I was in heaven with him, before this relationship anxiety, and that was like one year ago still. When I don’t feel shame and when I allow myself, he makes me so so happy. But right now I feel like I don’t deserve him. He would never do anything like that. It feels like I have cheated, because it feel unloyal what I did. I wouldn’t want him to do that and I don’t know what I would do but I think I wouldn’t want to be with him. I’m so afraid that I have messed up. Sometimes I feel like I need to tell him, but I don’t know. I’m so scared because my dad was a cheater, I NEVER want to be like that. The fact that I’m doubting so much of I should be with him makes me feel like I’m cheating and he deserves better. It’s strange because it came from nowhere it feels like, it started when I started to give up on my vulvodynia for real, and when I felt like he seemed to care less. I never looked at guys like I have this year before, I feel so horrible. I wanted our relationship to be pure and loyal.

I am a woman, my partner is a man. Two nights ago I was at a house party / movie night with my friends while my partner was at work. Many of the people there are also mutual friends of my partner’s. They all know my partner and I talk about him frequently. One of the people there was a (male) mutual friend who came over to my apartment beforehand to pick me up, waited for a few minutes while I finished up some chores around the apartment, and then we went shopping to pick up food and supplies for the party. During the party, this friend got EXTREMELY drunk. He was saying some pretty outlandish/unfiltered stuff the whole night about the movie were watching, laughing uncontrollably on the floor, that kind of stuff. I don’t drink, so I was 100% fully sober the entire time. The party pretty much consisted of everyone sitting on the couch for the whole night, watching movies and eating pizza and drinking. I do remember there being a point where I was kind of sunk back on the couch, the friend was sat next to me, and we made eye contact and he said something (I can’t remember what) and I remember feeling like we was a little too close for comfort. This must have lasted for less than a minute (everyone was kind of squeezed together on the couch since there were lots of us and a pretty small couch). I remember there being another point where his leg/foot grazed my leg, so I recoiled instantly, and then it happened again and I kept moving my leg away so we weren’t touching. I’m fairly certain that this was a complete mistake, as like I said, there were lots of people squeezed together on one couch, and he was very uncoordinated. Finally it was getting too late, so I called my partner and asked him if he could come pick me up since he was on the way back from work. While on the phone, several people at the party were yelling “HI” to my partner over the phone (pretty much everyone there was also friends with him). Then this friend, who like I said was VERY VERY drunk by this point), yelled (to my partner over the phone) something like, “YOU CAN HAVE MY SLOPPY SECONDS.” I was very very very caught off guard and confused. I instantly hung up the phone because I didn’t want my partner to get the wrong idea that there was something going on. After I hung up, the friend said “Oh come on I’m sure he would have found that very funny!” I was very bothered for the rest of the night and then went home shortly after, when my partner picked me up. The entire ride home, I kept replaying those words in my head over and over again, and I kept replaying the whole night over and over in my head, wondering if something had happened between us and I’d somehow forgotten within minutes or hours?? For the entirety of the next day, and the day after that, I keep ruminating on that night and trying to replay all the events that happened, what order they happened in, what exactly I remember, etc. I have absolutely no idea why my friend said that over the phone, especially since neither of us has ever expressed any sort of romantic or sexual interest in one another. When we met, I had already been with my partner for well over a year, and I talk about my partner frequently. My partner is also friends with this friend, and the three of us have had some good times together. This friend is also absolutely NOT the type of person to be sleazy, a womanizer, a homewrecker, etc. Perhaps I’m leaning into stereotypes too much here, but I should note that pretty much everyone at the party (including this friend) has mild to moderate autistic tendencies, and the friend group was brought together because we all met in a heavily anime/DnD/politics based club at a university. I say all this to illustrate that the atmosphere at the “party” was definitely NOT the type of atmosphere where anybody was hooking up, hitting on each other, flirting, etc in any way (of course I’m not saying that people in these demographics can’t hook up, but just that it was a cozy movie night with respectful friends, not some sort of crazy party). It’s the third day after the party now, and I’m still ruminating on this. I still have no idea why he’d say that, and I’ve replayed it so many times in my head that I’m wondering if maybe I just imagined it, or misheard it, or maybe he didn’t know what that phrase meant, or maybe I misinterpreted it or something. I mean, we were showing a mature cartoon movie that night that both me and this friend absolutely love, and both of us were making jokes all night about being attracted to several of the characters in the movie. Some of the jokes this friend was making about the characters were very sexual, so maybe his comment had something to do with that? Maybe he was extrapolating some sort of “sloppy seconds” meaning from the characters to me?? I’m not sure. Either way, I’ve been sitting, replaying and ruminating for days and of course I’ve fabricated lots of false memories. I’ve run through all the possibilities. Did I kiss the friend? Did we cuddle on the couch? Did he have his arm around me? What if, in those few minutes that we were alone in my apartment before we left, what if I took him into the bedroom and did something with him while my partner was gone? I do remember having intrusive thoughts about THAT before he even came over. I’ve been dealing with on-and-off ROCD for the entire 3 years that my partner and I have been together, and it always ends up coming back to an obsession related to cheating and false memories. It’s so hard to know what’s real and what isn’t, especially since it’s so easy for me to picture these things happening in my head. I’ve been absolutely lost in unrealistic obsession-induced delusions before, to the point where there was a time where I was legitimately convinced that I had cheated on my partner with a friend 18 months prior, and even went as far as messaging this friend to ask if anything had happened between us. Of course the answer was no, and things were so awkward after that. I just don’t really know what to do. I keep imagining scenarios where me and this friend were getting handsy or touchy, and I’m starting to come up with so many false memories. It’s stressing me out and I keep compulsively replaying them. What bothers me is that when he made the sloppy seconds comment, I remember feeling some sort of guilt that almost felt like it was already there? Like preexisting guilt? Which leads me to wonder why I already had felt guilty if I hadn’t done anything? I even feel like I almost remember there being a point during that night where I thought something along the lines of “Okay, I’ll allow this.” And I am so confused and trying to figure out what I was allowing. It feels very difficult to enjoy time with my partner when I have this fear in the back of my mind that I’ve cheated. Every time I try to conjure up a memory of me cheating with this person though, I always come up with a different one and none of them make any sense. What was said between us, what was done, etc? I keep making up the details as I go. The other thing is: every single person at that party knows my partner and respects/likes him. Surely if we were doing something inappropriate, someone would have said something? Surely I would have felt worried that someone would tell my partner? Surely I’d feel anxious by now about my partner finding out? I don’t know: deep down, I think I know it’s a false memory. But the situation feels so weird and unsettling that I’m considering either talking to my partner about it or confronting this friend. My next therapy session isn’t for another 2.5 weeks.