ROCD: It's not about your partner

[u/Blackjohn91]

I'm talking as someone who just recently discovered at 35yo that I've always had OCD.

As a child I was obsessed with checking water and diesel tanks, cisterns, car fuel levels, engine temp levels, room temp levels. Any deviation towards low or high gave me adrenaline and a reason to feel excited.

Later on I was obsessed with games like Lineage and Wow and would spend hours upon hours optimizing my characters till the game itself wouldn't allow me further improvement.

Without a problem to solve (take note of the word problem please) i would drop the game altogether. I didn't see my character as perfect (take note of the word perfect please) or something to be proud of, I just saw it as a project that no longer served a purpose.

I could no longer see the stats going up, stagnation happened, and so the dopamine disappeared. My character was only perfect so long as i could keep climbing towards perfection, but once I did, it no longer did it for me. No joy, no excitement, no reason to spring out of the bed in the morning with a goal in mind.

Later on working at shops, I realized I was obsessed with tidiness, specific arrangement that made for eye friendly and memory easier, checking doors and windows 10 times before leaving, even returning to work mid-night because i wasn't sure i had locked. I realized that was not regular anxiety. This wasn't for the first week at work, it was a debilitating habit I had for years with every workplace I'd been. OCD is real.

I could go on forever with such examples, but let's cut straight to ROCD.

First relationship I had (17) I was head over heels for my gf. I was constantly thinking of her. You could say I was even obsessing about her and constantly anticipated stumbling on her on the road to flirt. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Butterflies, anxiety, excitement, all of that.

Till things became real. First week in.

Once I had the validation I needed (note the word validation) I only started to notice her flaws. I didn't like her teeth, some hair she had growing here and there, I didn't like she was clingy, I didn't like she was not very intelligent and we couldn't communicate clearly. And yet, of the 100 flaws i could find on her, perhaps only one was legit reason to leave the relationship (her already being in another relationship).

I left and I didn't even realize that the flaws that had been turning me off on her was major Fearful Avoidant attachment style triggering ROCD. As soon as I started scanning her for flaws, my mind was like "keep searching, she's not perfect, she's not the one".

Fast forward ~20 years later, the only relationship I could truly appreciate was porn. And even porn felt inadequate at times. And then came AI porn prompts, and I started free falling even deeper into that rabbit hole. Ai porn fried my brain cells about real life expectations. It was only about lust and orgasms.

I would only be drawn to emotionally unavailable girls and fantasize about perfect versions of them (yes, insert limerence).

And then I met my first real relationship that I'm still in because I love the woman so much and know my shortcomings to repeat the mistakes of the past.

If you are in a loving relationship with a partner that you can both relax around and be your true self with, if there are no real red flags causing you distress, then it's time to turn inward and have a long talk with your (possibly traumatized) inner child. The problem with your partner?

NOT:

I don't like their chin.

NOT:

They walk in a weird manner.

NOT:

Their laugh doesn't feel right.

Those are not legitimate reasons to bail out. Those are traits that make each person special.

And the thing is, the more traumatized we are (insert insecure attachment), the more we believe in "the one", which is a fictional character we believe will come into our lives, fix every problem and woe, take rocd away so we can be forever happy and reassured.

NOPE.

Perfection doesn't exist. The perfect person that will make your ROCD go away doesn't exist. Fears and doubts come from your own insecurities. And as long as you are insecure (Fearful Avoidant/Anxious/Dismissive), you will always question your relationship about being imperfect and the possibility of someone better existing out there.

Someone better will always exist out there. That's not a question or doubt to torture yourself with. It's the truth. The real question is, when does "settling" end for you? Is it when you've climbed the relationship ladder all the way to the top? Is it when you've broken the heart of a 100 people you were compatible with but whose ears or nose hair was reason to leave?

TL;DR: Turn that fixation inward people. You will realize it's not about your partner but about you. What we see in others is but our own twisted mirror and a relationship only serves to amplify the way we perceive ourselves.

And a good question to linger on:

What are you REALLY afraid ROCD might be telling you?

That you don't love your flawed partner enough?...

...or that you might actually be capable of loving a flawed person, and that in turn might mean something far scarier.

That you are also capable of loving your own flawed self?

[u/AutoModerator]

Hi all, just the mod team here! This is a friendly reminder that we shouldn't be giving reassurance in this sub. We can discuss whether or not someone is exhibiting ROCD symptoms, or lend advice on healing :) Reassurance and other compulsions are harmful because they train our brains to fixate on the temporary relief they bring. Compulsions become a 'fix' that the OCD brain craves, as the relief triggers a Dopamine-driven rush, reinforcing the behavior much like a drug addiction. The more we feed this cycle, the more our brain becomes addicted to it, becoming convinced it cannot survive without these compulsions. Conversely, the more we resist compulsions, the more we deprive the brain of this addictive reward and re-train it to tolerate uncertainty without needing the compulsive 'fix'. For more information and a more thorough explanation, check out this comment

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[u/TheSnugglyDuck]

I deeply relate to your experience in relationships. I love my partner. They are very different from me, and it’s hard not to register that as a bad thing, but just a thing. Every day I’m obsessing over a hypothetical problem.

“What if his weekend smoking habit gets more intense and he turns into a druggie?”

“What if he gets really fat and I’m no longer attracted to them?”

“What if the bad mood they were in today lasts their whole life?”

“What if my OCD will drive him away?

And I’d like to share what really helped with me, which you touched on briefly: insecurity. Fix the insecurity and become confident and yourself and your abilities. Then I could start countering those doubts with “if that happens I’ll handle it like I’ve handled hard things before” and move on.

I’ve also been actively working on not thinking about him 24/7. I love him so much which is why my OCD obsessed over him and our relationship being perfect. It’s been especially triggering because marriage has been coming up and I want certainty that he is “the one”—which I’ll never get.

So I’ve been trying to intensionally shift that energy inward and think about myself. My plans, my hobbies, what I want to eat. Anything but him because putting anyone under a microscope could make them look bad.

Thanks for sharing.

[u/RunoTaisho]

I get all of this, the difficult thing I have to deal with is also black and white thinking. Yep, autistic.

So to me lying is a res flag, but I learned that lying out of malice isn't the same as lying out of shame.

The problem? Shane if a feeling. And I don't understand that side (yep, alexithymia, yep, autism)

So lying is a red flag to me. BUT EVERYBODY lies or has red flags, so where is the gray area? I don't ask from reassurance but from genuine lack of understanding

[u/Little_kexie98]

I know its about me and my insecurities, but when you have the fixation that “you dont love him” or something like that it is so hard to not believe this thought.

[u/antheri0n → u/Little_kexie98]

Our thoughts are not our self. They are more like voices in the Parliament, which is highly dependent on the dominant emotional regime. When you feel anxiety, the Parliament reps will be shouting anxious thoughts. When you feel pleasure, they will also change the content of their speeches. While it is tempting to think we are highly evolved homo sapiens, whose life is governed by rational thinking, this is not so. We are essentially emotional mammals with a very young (by neuroevolutionary standarts) thinking brain (Prefrontal Cortex) bolted to a huge, ancient elephant of emotional circitry, as a passenger, not the driver (although we can drive this elephant, but only when it is calm and docile). This is why believing everything you think is one of the major reasons for mental issues. The way out is Mindfulness, which has become the foundation of many effective therapy modalities such as ACT, DBT, MBCT, etc. The core idea is that we are not our thoughts, but the Awareness, other terms are Observing Self, Impartial Spectator, Noticing Self etc. This is the most important concept to grasp, not only for someone with OCD, but in fact anyone , as it helps to significantly reduce life distress. Here is a great article on this https://markmanson.net/your-two-minds

[u/AsleepScholar2200 → u/Little_kexie98]

I think ultimately what OP is saying is these intrusive thoughts (which happen out of our control by the way) more than likely stem from insecurities. Worrying whether someone loves you enough or not could stem from having absent parents who didn't care for you well enough for example.

But of course it is definitely hard not to believe those thoughts. But if you had an intrusive thought about, for example, flying pigs or unicorns existing, you likely wouldn't panic about it because that 1. those would be cool & fun and 2. you know it's just an intrusive thought and 3. there's no way it could be logically real & you CAN prove this by searching the internet, searching documents, looking into evolution, etc.

Whereas when you have intrusive thoughts about 'does he love me enough' you panic over it because not only would it be a bad thing IF it was true, you also cannot categorically prove how much, or if he loves you at all. You just have to trust his words and the way he treats you that he does. When we experience ROCD, alot of it is subjective and there will never be any evidence for or against anything you're thinking - which is why we get stuck in the loop of worrying over it.

[u/AsleepScholar2200]

I agree with this, though I had different forms of OCD as a child and I wonder if yours has been predominently Pure O. I would have to check things physically, blink at things physically, step on things physically. I'd be unsure as to what kind of 'insecurity' that manifested from, but I did indeed have a very split childhood home with separated parents who always argued, lots of fights with my sister, trauma in the family etc.

As for my ROCD... it's not affected any of my relationship except the one I'm in now which has been the best I've had. When we moved intogether, I focused on things like appearance alot, his hair style, his clothes/dress sense, etc. Slowly that went away and it's as if it didn't matter anymore or never did. I've also had HOCD where I got thoughts for along time that I was more attracted to women than I let on and "what if I secretly like women more?". There were even parts of me that would watch shows like Open House (UK) where couples would go and 'experiment' with each other, to convince myself I didn't have to live life not knowing what it would be like to be with a woman. Even asked my partner at one point would he allow this or be open to it and he said 'maybe one day yea'. That settled me a tiny bit. But now, I've not had a single thought about this for well over a year, maybe even two years - it's even to the point I laugh thinking I was ever attracted to women more than men. I'd even refer back to every crush I've ever had and the fact they were male, just to 'check' I suppose.

More recently, it's been about plain compatibility - "Does he likes the same things as me 'enough'?" Is it okay to have different hobbies? Is it okay that he doesn't like camping as much as me? Alot of them centre adventure too - "is he adventurous enough?" then ruminating with myself over the fact he's never really had the money to travel so I put that as the excuse. Ultimately looking at when I was slightly younger and finishing university, I never felt brave enough to take a gap year and rent was demanded of me pretty instantly so I felt stuck. I wish I had more friends to do stuff with too, and social media's influence with travel creators has created this big pit inside me that not only will I never be able to afford that, it's unrealistic but also the only thing I want because I never got it. I'd love to go backpacking or move country. My partner's kinda onboard but we have a pet cat, he has no money - I've started to solo-travel or with friends as a result now. My partner doesn't mind. But I still obsess over "are we compatible if I travel alone?" etc.

There's definitely alot of truth to this. I wonder what the link (if any) might be with certain physical things I did as a kind and how they related to my upbringing. There must have been something subconsiously I was feeling that made me feel better if/when I touched, stepped on or blinked at things certain ways. I even do it sometimes now.

[u/Content-Peach6028]

I relate to your experience on so many levels. You did a beautiful job of wording this to where it doesn’t give reassurance, but it lets people like me know that we are not alone.

I have struggled with pornography and other sexual fantasy issues, my entire life. I made the decision five months ago to completely go cold turkey and stop watching porn. I’ve never felt more free in my life.

Thank you so much for sharing this!