I realized the most dangerous thought of my OCD brain always orbits back to this.
“It isn’t supposed to be this hard.”
Our relationship is hard. There is a lot she says that bothers me. She’s sweet, but often sounds incredibly dumb and socially unaware to me.
Other times she has the most stable wisdom of most people I know, she has a handful of very deep and healthy friendships with very good women, and she seems adept at managing people. She seems to be successfully managing a team of three right now.
And for the longest time I kept telling myself, if she’s doing so well in these categories, I must be wrong about my conclusions about her intelligence and awareness. I thought that was a symptom of my rOCD.
But I don’t obsess about many things very often. I just get disappointed. Which sucks. But the dangerous thought that I seems to go back to every time she says something I think is idiotic and I get disappointed, is “It isn’t supposed to be this hard.”
And you can see why that is dangerous. It is fatalistic. It is continually asking myself the question, is this the right relationship.
The answer to that, of course, is there is not just one “right” relationship. Each relationship has its own struggles. This one may have more than others’. But it is mine, I have married her. So now a better question is, “How can I make it good?”
Relationship-OCD 