Made a post about an hour ago with the gory details of what I’m so anxious about tonight, but just thought I would make another with a more general question. I’m really looking for some support and help so if anyone can chat, I would greatly appreciate it! How can we be okay with BIG what-ifs in our relationship or it’s past? Like a real event that occurred, where you chose to trust someone or chose to forgive or whatever, but every time you think about it (even years later), you get overwhelmed with anxiety all over again? You can’t go back in time to get the answer, or get more evidence. You’ve asked your partner and talked it over a dozen times with them since then. But the WHAT IF doesn’t go away. What if they really betrayed me? What if they really lied? What if what if what if? And you can never really know the truth. Sorry for double posting about the same thing. I’m just feeling stuck and don’t know what to do with these fears/feelings. I want to call him and ask again but I’ve done this so many times in 3 years. I’ve already asked the same questions over and over. So I’m posting here instead 😅

My husband told me recently he was going to hang out with a local friend he often goes to see. It got very late and I heard nothing from him. Tried calling and texting. Stayed up all night thinking maybe he was dead or injured. Logged into our cell phone account to see if I could find any recent location and discovered he had talked to someone on the phone that night but he was like 2 hours away from home at that time. And also saw a phone number he was spending hours on the phone with every day. I had been confronting him about his secrecy prior to that and he kept telling me it was this friend or that friend, or he was just taking the dog on a long walk or having a fire out back. He finally called me back in the morning and I yelled at him. He told me he was randomly with two friends from longer ago and had gotten drunk and passed out, and hadn't told me about these plans because I had a heart surgery a few weeks prior and health concerns and he didn't want to stress me out. He told me the phone number was a girl that he related to on trauma factors and that he views like a little sister. He said he didn't tell me because he was caught up in his trauma spilling of events he didn't share with a single person since they occurred to him 35 years ago, due to feelings of shame and anger, and that he thought I would view it as emotional cheating. I told him it really could be viewed as emotional cheating and in principle, honesty shouldn't be dependent upon the outcome... lying isn't justified because I would be upset by the truth. Since then, he's been more open with me and tells me when that girl is calling, talks to me about their conversations, answers her calls when I'm present. I talked to him about boundaries and things I'm uncomfortable with or bothered by and he changes those things. Especially because I have trauma from an emotionally abusive ex, having him lie to me when I directly questioned him about what I was perceiving or experiencing and telling me those experiences weren't real, when they actually WERE real, has really messed me up. Now when he wants to hang out with a friend, I don't trust it. But I'm handling these feelings in destructive OCD ways. I spend literally the entire time he's gone thinking and thinking and thinking about what if he's lying or what he might be doing instead of what he said. I call and text him intermittently and feel like all of my obsessive thoughts are confirmed if he doesn't answer right away. I'm always checking the phone history. The driving toll history. Scrutinizing everything. I cannot get out of this mindset. It's like this horrible mixture of emotional flashbacks and OCD. I don't want to live like this. I want to work on my relationship in productive ways. I want to be able to use my own time while my husband is gone. Even if he lied to me and is somewhere other than he said, I don't want to lie in bed just thinking and thinking and thinking for entire days and nights. I'm not sure what I'm really asking here. This is just the only place where I feel like I can share this without people thinking "wow she's crazy".

Hello, this is my second post, not too long ago i made my first, talking about a sudden come-back of my intrusive thoughts. This post will talk about another of my issues, mainly regarding ocd (obviously) and relationships. As i had said before, i had been feeling terrible and felt like i didnt deserve love, especially the love of the guy that i love. I would like to add that in prior moments we have promised eachother and he has reassured me he will never leave me, but today he was pretty much gone all day (long distance) and for the most part ive just been overthinking, all night, actually.. thinking that at any moment he will just randomly block me on everything and never talk to me again. Its now 4:03 AM, and i just feel so scared. Im scared of losing him, this is predominantly because in a past relationship things ended suddenly, my ex switched up after we had promises and everything and i am absolutely horrified of things ending the same way for me and him. I’ve been anxious, trying to take my mind off of it, but if i do, my mind tells me that if i look away, when i look back, i’ll miss it and he’ll have already blocked me. and tries to tie in earlier conversations i had throughout the day and somehow ties them back to now. (Like my bestfriend telling me she had some dream where i apologized to my friends for ‘leaving’) For the past few hours ive just been out of it. Im scared of being obsessive, Im scared of losing him, and whenever i check to see, my heart skips a beat because i thinks he’s gone. The thing is, I know this isnt the case, and I know there must be an explanation, but for some reason im still worried. and I know these thoughts arent a reflection of reality, but ive also had the idea that my thoughts can also affect what actually happens. I would also like to add that he lives in the US and is mexican, and with the increasing violent situation, my mind even starts to wander off and ask itself what if something happened to him? It makes it worse. because i can’t control it. and that makes me afraid. Im also worried about being a horrible partner, about everything failing and its all just making me feel worse. Yesterday morning I woke up feeling sort of out of it, and throughout the day i felt as if i were emotionless, which made me wonder what if i had lost emotions for him? this also happens to me sometimes. I, for some reason begin thinking like “you lost your love for him nothings gonna happen ever.” and my mind starts making up reasons why, or simply gives me this feeling of emptiness for that love, as if i have been detached from it. and then i overthink again “what if i actually dont love him but im just obsessed and thats all it is an obsession and none of it is real?” that last part, im feeling it right now. along with everything else. Im exhausted, Im tired, and i just want to be happy with him. Thank you to all those who choose to read this. thank you. ❤️ Edit: I would also like to add that ive been also dealing with the occasional regular intrusive thoughts. which dont form fully in my brain but i can still sort of, “feel” the intrusive thoughts uncomfortable themes.

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.