Here are some signs that may indicate you’re struggling with relationship anxiety:
1. Repeatedly interrogating your thoughts and feelings about your relationship.
2. Noticing that whilst you don’t really want to leave the relationship, you find yourself thinking about leaving a lot (for reasons other than red flags or a long held wish to leave).
3. You’re checking out of the relationship and instead spending a lot of time ruminating in your head.
4. Starting to question previous feelings, or whether your feelings are intense enough.
5. Having thoughts you find distressing like: “I don’t find my partner attractive”; “I’m just staying because it’s safe”; “I’m kidding myself that this relationship is the one”. The key here is that there is something distressing and unwelcome about these thoughts.
This can all be absolutely confusing, maddening and overwhelming.
Whilst there’s deep attachment and care towards your partner there’s also fear and confusion about some of your thoughts and feelings. This makes you worry that you’re not really ‘in love’. This may be because some of the inner experiences you’re having around your relationship are inconsistent with your concept of love or relationships.
Some of the ways we can help relationship anxiety is by :
1. Understanding what messages you have received about love, sex & relationships from your family.
I’ll give you one example. Your dad saying to you: “it was love at first sight, and I knew that your mum was the woman that I was going to marry after our first date”. In your mind this can become: “I should know straight away, and I will not have any doubts”. We might then think about…do you have the same temperament as your dad? Are you as confident, or decisive as dad was? Are you as instinctive, or are you perhaps more of a slow and deep thinker? And is there perhaps a more nuanced way of understanding your parent’s dating history? The aim is to dissect these beliefs and understand them more fully, and in doing so, you may come to revise some of these beliefs having seen the shaky ground they have been built.
2. Exploring your concept of love, sex and relationships from your culture (or cultures).
So now we’re looking at where you grew up, the place or places you were born and raised, the language(s) you learnt and the unique ideas that were transmitted through them, the films and books you consumed, the peers you’ve been surrounded by, and religious or non religious belief systems you hold as well as much more.
If we keep with the previous example..we could also think about how social media has influenced dating culture, so unlike the dad in the above option, you may have been dating multiple people and you may have more relationship experience, all of which shape you in a different way to a previous generations.
In films relationships are often shown as a uniformly smooth, yet intense experience; as well as an exclusively positive journey where there is an absence of doubt, fear, change or any internal conflict.
You may also be stuck between the expectations of two cultures. For example your parents may have grown up in a culture where the choice of partner was based on vocation or religion and now you’re living in a culture that in many ways has more of an open door policy. This can lead to a lot of confusion and internal conflict.
3. Listening more carefully and deeply as to what is going on beneath your relationship anxiety.
Sometimes your anxiety about your relationship points to something deeper. When you’re reading through the different scenarios below you may find some that resonate with you, and some may not at all.
You may be so vigilant about finding the perfect partner because you don’t want to have the hellish relationship your parents had; this can mean that no one stands a chance of reassuring you enough.
Sometimes it is the case that the relationship becomes the focal point for all of life’s dissatisfactions. This may be in part, particularly in western culture, due to a belief that a relationship ought to fulfil all of your needs and desires. So sometimes relationship anxiety is a signal to turn inwards and to seek to understand those long lost earlier desires.
These are some suggestions, and there are many more reasons; often it is due to a combination of reasons.
One of the key messages I’d like to leave you with is to take a deeper view of your thoughts or feelings. If you don’t do this you can easily get in deep water. You can end up thinking along the lines of: “If I think this, it is the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Instead it can be more helpful to consider that there is an aspect of you that feels like this, as well as another aspect of you that feels something else. In essence, that as a complicated being, it is normal that you can feel a multitude of feelings; often contradictory.
I’ll be posting more ideas about how to manage this anxiety next week.
In the meantime, I welcome questions or comments!
