Now that my wife is pregnant with our first child and we’re looking to purchase a home together, my cheating ocd is creeping back in. Thoughts like “you don’t deserve this if you cheated” and “what if you cheated and don’t remember and it comes to light and your wife and daughter hate you” have been running through my mind like crazy. I don’t remember actually cheating on my wife but my memory is really bad and I’m scared that I may have suppressed a memory.

I have this deep fear I’ll accidentally cheat on my long term partner. This fear was initially triggered a couple years ago after being at a bar with my friends where I enjoyed the attention of being flirted with by a stranger. Because of my enjoyment of receiving verbal attention, I began spiraling about what if I accidentally cheat. Since then I have made multiple confessions to my partner to seek reassurance, replayed events over and over in my head, spent hours googling/looking at reddit threads, and now I dread “bar like” situations where I know my partner won’t be around. Today I was triggered and have wasted about 4-5 hours of my day ruminating. Does anyone else with relationship ocd struggle with this fear and have any tips?

Hello! I have been married for 7 years. I’ve struggled with all kinds of ocd in my life. Cheating ocd is something I struggled with early in my relationship with my wife, but was more geared towards obsessing over her cheating. Thankfully I have conquered that 💪 However, lately it has shifted towards ME cheating on her or crossing some kind of boundary. I always have to confess to her if I think I feel any type of attraction to another female. I’m working on it but struggle still time to time. The other day, I had an incident where I was walking down the hallway at work and noticed a cute girl. Idk how to describe it, but I became conscious of my wedding band and had a thought about this random person seeing my band and seeing I was married and I noticed my other finger was touching my wedding band almost like I was trying to hide I was married? It happened so quick and almost sub consciously. I know this might sound confusing but Now I’m worried I was trying to hide that I was married to this random stranger. Even though I had no intentions of talking to her or anything. I’m not even 100% sure I intended to hide my ring. I just might have had a thought about hiding it. Does anyone have any expertise with this or insight? Thanks so much for your time.

How does everyone try to combat their real event OCD? I keep remembering this certain memory where an old friend of mine from a group years ago who was a guy messaged me on Snapchat last year on Halloween he said something to me. I don’t remember what he said and I responded and I don’t remember what I said, but I do remember that I removed him right after, as well as one other guy, I do remember why I removed them and it was because I had a thought where I was like “I don’t want my fiance seeing these guys that I used to talk to on my snap and think that I’m doing something wrong or anything.” I know I removed them out of respect for our relationship and I remembered because I remembered I had gotten an anxious and nervous because they were still on my snap, but 2 months after I un added that guy off my snap(December 2024) I panicked because I don’t remember what I said or he said and I got worried about what if I flirted and said something wrong. I spoke to my fiancé about it and he pretty much reassured me and he told me that if I had actually done something out of that intent, I wouldn’t have told him about it at all, so that helped me and reassured me for a little bit, and then my OCD moved on to another theme for months. Fast forward to now, I remembered the same thing and my thought was “What if I cheated and I blocked it out of my memory.” And I started freaking out again and I started panicking. I told my fiancé about it again and he reassured me again but recently my OCD has been really bad and every theme I’ve had has caused me to have bad mental breakdowns intensely, it just sucks because I can’t go check if I actually said something flirty and I just didn’t realize it because I added the guy last year right after I talk to him I just wanted to know if anyone has any thing that they do whenever they have a problem with their relevant OCD around the cheating theme. Because my fiancé is a god sent and I’d never ever want to hurt him, I hate that my ocd attaches to him because it makes me feel like I’m a horrible person.