I have relationship anxiety

Anonymous asks....

I’ve been with my boyfriend for about a year and we are pretty happy. We’re both in our early twenties.

However, I have bad anxiety about our relationship. I’m not anxious about cheating or mistrust, rather I’m anxious about our happiness. I know that he is very happy and that he loves me very much. However, I’m anxious about our compatibility - am I feeling truly happy? Should break up with him?

We’ve had very healthy conversations about this, in which he eases my thoughts. He tells me that if I ever want to break up, I shouldn’t feel scared to and that he’d understand. He tells me that we would not have lasted this long if we weren’t fairly compatible, which I agree with. When we’re together, we’re very happy; we laugh a lot. He tells me that he loves me, and then everything is okay with my mind for a while. He tells me that anytime I get anxious, I should talk to him. This fills me with such love and thankfulness to have him in my life. I do not want to leave him. I love him very much. But I’m wondering if my worries are some sort of illness.

I often compare us to other relationships. Do other people have doubts like this? I can get lost in thoughts for hours, until I feel as though I need to vomit and cry. Of course, you never know what goes on behind the seemingly perfect Instagram profiles, but I wonder if I am alone in my anxieties and that my mind is messed up in someway. Is it normal to feel this way and question things? I don’t know how to make these worries stop.

Ammanda says...

So here you are, with a man you love and who loves you. You feel happy and fulfilled with him. You can obviously talk together and he’s able to hear that you get very worried about things and offer you reassurance that it’s OK to talk about difficult stuff. So far so good. Yet you find yourself plagued by doubts about the happiness you feel. It reads as if you can’t actually trust your own feelings in case they might be deluding you. So let’s start there.

It’s natural to be anxious about things sometimes. Being concerned about something is usually a good indicator that we’re thinking things through. That’s good, because that means that we’re less likely to jump headfirst into a situation without proper consideration.

For some people, they tend to take this route over everything. No decision is easy and every last possibility is agonised over. Other people have particular things that are more of a worry than others. Both approaches can arise for all sorts of reasons, like being worried you’ll get the blame if something isn’t quite right. Or that we’ve made a decision that had disastrous consequences and so, quite understandably, we spend aeons trying to ensure that we never make the same mistake again. But unfortunately, this ends up with no decision made. If we make one, it might all go wrong again.

I’m wondering if for you, the issue is that you feel you might be investing in the relationship for the rest of your life. No pressure there then, if that’s what’s at the back of your mind! Perhaps taking a more relaxed approach and enjoying it for what it is, namely two people having a great time together, feels too difficult because surely if it’s all real and ‘meant to be’ you’d just know and wouldn’t worry. Perhaps you come from a family where other people got together early on in their lives and stuck with it. Perhaps they’ve told you that they just knew he or she was ‘The One’. No doubts, no queries, no just ‘going with the flow’ and seeing what happened, just dead certainty. If that’s the case, then no wonder you put yourself under so much pressure to do the same.

But you know what? I think you’re entirely normal. Everything you describe suggests that you’re perhaps someone who is one of life’s natural questioners. That’s a good thing. You’re less likely to find yourself going headfirst into something that perhaps isn’t quite right for you. The only problem is that it’s stopping you from actually enjoying being in love with a nice guy. Every time something comes up you’re on it in a flash– looking for meanings that (to be honest) probably aren’t there. I think the trick for you is to relax into this relationship and try to find a way of being less anxious about everything. A good place to start is to spend a bit less time searching the internet for everyone else’s experience and a bit more time focusing on your own with your partner. Despite what you may find out there in the ether, there are absolutely no such things as ‘perfect’ relationships. Relationships are imperfect because we are imperfect. We each bring our own needs and anxieties to a partner and in a healthy relationship, these are as valuable to our other halves as all the fun, exciting stuff. As you say, you’re both young and maybe this is the first experience of being in love that either of you have had. Or, perhaps there have been other relationships where you felt let down. If that’s the case, it’s natural to want to do all the worrying you describe to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Either way, I reckon that you have to find a way of accepting things for what they are, namely a loving, caring relationship. It may not last forever, but even if that’s the case, nothing should detract from making the sorts of memories that you’ll look back on and treasure. Stop worrying and enjoy yourself.