Every week I am inundated with questions from people asking how they know for sure that their partner is the one. I write an advice column every Wednesday—and while I welcome all topics, there is always one that reigns supreme: relationships. Or situationships. Or one-night stands, or first dates, or third dates, or marriage, or divorce, or infidelity, or hair-pulling crushes on the co-worker you’ve only talked to three times in three years.
The truth is we’re obsessed with love. Culturally obsessed. Love or lack thereof is so many things—a goal, a hobby, social currency, fodder for a book or song or show, an answer, a fantasy, a prophecy, a purpose. The pursuit of it keeps us busy, keeps us hungry, keeps us relevant. The loss of it makes us relatable, forgivable, unforgivable, excusable, inexcusable, and sometimes even gives us a runway for a glow-up so shiny that our next date—maybe even soulmate—will flock to our light.
In the western world there is nowhere you can turn where love isn’t being pitched or sung or peddled at you. And when an obsession with love is so deeply societally encouraged, those of us with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are set up to royally f***ing fail.
I was diagnosed with Relationship OCD (ROCD) five years ago, at the height of the pandemic, when I was sequestered in my apartment with my partner of only a year. For so many of us with OCD, our brains kicked into overdrive trying to find certainty in the most uncertain time. Mine decided it would be a really good idea to make questioning my relationship a full-time job.
OCD latches on to what we most value, but also what society most values, and tries to control or gain certainty around the value in question. It does this through compulsive behavior, sometimes mental and sometimes physical—rituals that your mind convinces you will keep you in control, but in actuality only make the obsession worse. One of the ways that OCD tries to gain control is by making us believe we have, or will have, the thing we most fear. For example: Someone who dreams of becoming a parent, or values the children in their life, may become paralyzed with the fear that they’re actually a pedophile (Pedophilia OCD, or POCD). Or, someone who loves and cherishes their family and friends may be wrought with intrusive images of enacting harm on them (Harm OCD). OCD loves drama, and wants to produce a good soap opera, so it goes for the strange and taboo: sex and sexuality, and death and violence, and racism, and homophobia, and incurable illness, and assault, and on and on and on and on. If it can warrant a headline or obituary, you better believe OCD is ready to strike.
And love. OCD goes for love. Because not being sure your partner is your soulmate is a taboo thing in our society. As a ‘90s baby raised on romcoms and romance quizzes in magazines, I’d doused myself in this romantic brainwash since birth. OCD went right for the jugular. For months on end I was at the whim of the warzone of my mind. My compulsions were constant: nonstop thought loops and ruminations, googling late into the night and reading endless reddit threads, my partner asleep beside me. I’d look for reassurance anywhere I could get it—accosting family and friends with constant questions about love and relationships, even messaging strangers when I’d exhausted a long list of people who actually knew me. I was scouring my body and brain for the right feelings and right thoughts, ones that would prove my partner and I were meant to be. Reductive platitudes above love played endlessly in my head: love at first sight, when you know you know, if you can’t imagine being old together they aren’t your person. While OCD and I were locked in a toxic relationship, I was a ghost in my actual one—barely there though we were living together.
My obsessions kept me awake at night and then found me in my dreams, waking me up in a cold sweat with my heart beating out of my chest. I was so wracked with guilt and shame, punishing myself for being so ungrateful for the love I had. I was a magnet for anything that had to do with love and breakups, my brain so overly attuned to divorce scandals and engagement announcements that my nervous system was on fire. Everything was a sign, an omen, God’s intervention, a compass I had no choice but to follow. My obsession tornadoed into an incessant torture I’d stop at no cost to end. It had to end in a breakup, right? That’s what my gut was telling me, right?
And right when it got to that tipping point, right when I was going to pull the f***ing plug and end the best relationship I’d ever had, a random YouTube video popped up somewhere between hour three and five of a compulsive googling bender. A video about relationship OCD. Poorly made, kind of cringe, and the biggest “aha” moment of my entire life. Within weeks, I was in therapy for OCD.
Exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy is the most effective treatment for OCD. In ERP you establish a hierarchy of your obsessions, from most tolerable to least, and you slowly work your way up this ladder by exposing yourself to your fears, safely with your therapist. It is grueling, and it is life-saving. As hard as it is, nothing—nothing—is harder than living with undiagnosed OCD. The combination of ERP, OCD specific medication, and a weekly OCD support group gave me my life back and more. Five years later, I am no longer imprisoned by my mind. I have an abundance of tools and resources that help me live alongside my OCD. And though it will never be gone, it doesn’t dictate my life anymore.
ERP gives you no answers, but teaches you instead to tolerate uncertainty. It has fundamentally changed the way I walk through the world, made me so grounded and (nearly) unshakeable, deepened my capacity for empathy and understanding, brought so much humor and levity into my life, and taught me that the only certainty in life is uncertainty—and it’s given me the freedom to pause obsessing over being sure about things in my life long enough to actually f***ing live it.
Five years ago seeing so many questions about love in my inbox would have sent me into a debilitating spiral so profoundly awful I’d have booked a flight to the Arctic and never looked back. But I don’t feel that way anymore. Sometimes these queries shake me a little, but mostly I read them and I understand. I understand love as both an obsession and as a value. I can hold both truths, because I’ve experienced them existing within myself. And I do my best to answer.
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Haley Jakobson (she/her) is an author and playwright living in Brooklyn, NY. In her work, she explores queerness, girlhood, brains, and bodies. Haley’s debut novel OLD ENOUGH is a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a Lambda Literary Award finalist for best bisexual fiction, and is described by Vogue as being “full of winsome bisexual chaos.” Her sophomore novel, CAVEGIRL—about a bisexual twenty-something living with undiagnosed OCD—is forthcoming from Penguin Random House x Dutton Books. She’s a killer follow on Instagram.
