Relationship Anxiety: Why Can’t I Enjoy My Relationship?

You’re dating or in a relationship with someone who’s kind, reassuring, and consistent – but you can’t stop anxious thoughts from spiraling. If you have a pattern of overthinking in relationships, you might be dealing with relationship anxiety.

Relationship anxiety describes persistent doubt, worry, or insecurity even in otherwise healthy relationships. It can cause significant distress and get in the way of genuine connections.

In this article, we’ll explore the cause of relationship anxiety, how it relates to your attachment style, and how to deal with relationship anxiety and overthinking and restore your healthy connection.

Key Points:

Relationship anxiety is not a diagnosis: although it shares things in common with some clinical diagnoses, it’s important to understand the difference.
Links with the anxious attachment style: attachment anxiety has significant crossover with relationship anxiety.
Self-fulfilling prophecy: relationship anxiety undermines the trust in your relationship and can lead to self-sabotaging behaviors, causing relationship fears to come true.
Relationship anxiety can be helped: there are several skills such as mindfulness, uncertainty tolerance, and open communication that can help with relationship anxiety.

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What Is Relationship Anxiety?

Relationship anxiety describes persistent worry about a relationship, even though there’s nothing wrong. This can be especially intense in ambiguous dynamics like situationships. When relationship anxiety is high, it can feel like an “all-consuming unease” or an emotional rollercoaster.

Although the DSM-V-TR¹ (the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders at the time of writing) contains diagnoses related to anxiety, including in the context of relationships, relationship anxiety is not a clinical diagnosis in itself. If relationship anxiety becomes so severe that it causes significant distress and impairment in daily life, it may become part of a clinical diagnosis. Only a qualified mental health clinician can make this distinction.

Relationship Anxiety vs. Separation Anxiety Disorder

Separation Anxiety Disorder is an excessive fear or anxiety about attachment separation that isn’t developmentally appropriate and lasts at least 6 months or longer in adults. In Separation Anxiety Disorder, at least 3 of the following must be present:

Recurring excessive distress during separation or when anticipating it.
Persistent excessive worry about loss of attachment figures through harm.
Persistent excessive worry about an event that causes separation, e.g. getting lost.
Refusing to go places due to fear of separation.
Fear or reluctance about being alone or without attachment figures.
Refusal or reluctance to sleep away from home or without attachment figure.
Repeated nightmares about separation.
Repeated physical symptoms (e.g. headaches, nausea) during or when anticipating separation

Remember, checking off this list isn’t the only qualifier to diagnose Separation Anxiety Disorder – this can only be done by a qualified mental health clinician.

While Separation Anxiety Disorder involves intense fear of separation that can permeate other aspects of daily life, like work or school, relationship anxiety is more likely to be limited to the context of your relationship. Even though it might distract you at work or school, it is less likely to keep you from going out, sleeping, or feeling well.

Relationship Anxiety vs. Relationship OCD (ROCD)

Another diagnosis related to relationship anxiety is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Not all forms of OCD involve anxiety around relationships, but psychologists have distinguished OCD from Relationship-OCD, or ROCD.²^,3

ROCD involves intrusive thoughts about relationships that lead to compulsions in an attempt to check those thoughts. For example, you might have an intrusive thought that your partner is not attractive enough and, instead of letting that thought go, you obsess over their potential flaws and what others might think. You compulsively seek reassurance from others that your partner is attractive.

Although ROCD does involve anxiety about relationships, it’s more complex than general relationship anxiety. OCD is defined by intrusions, obsessions, and compulsions, which cause significant distress and difficulty in daily life. In relationship anxiety, although anxious thoughts may feel out of your control and you may act irrationally due to these feelings, you aren’t stuck in an intense cycle of obsessions and compulsions.

Most Common Signs of Relationship Anxiety

Since relationship anxiety isn’t a diagnosis, there’s no formal checklist of signs and symptoms. However, people with relationship anxiety share a few common anecdotal experiences:

Excessive reassurance-seeking, e.g. asking “Do you still love me?” on repeat
Self-silencing: suppressing needs, people pleasing to ensure acceptance
Over-analyzing partner’s words/actions for signs of trouble
Catastrophizing or assuming the worst case scenario
Looking for reasons to end the relationship
Unable to enjoy the present moment

What Causes Relationship Anxiety?

Attachment Theory and Relationship Anxiety

Relationship anxiety might be closely related to attachment anxiety, which is characterized by a sense of instability and separation fears. When our earliest experiences of attachment relationships involve an unpredictable attachment figure, we don’t gain the ability to trust that the people we rely on will be there for us. At the same time, sometimes they do meet our emotional needs, so we hold onto hope that they’ll show up (rather than turning to self-reliance and attachment avoidance).

If this continues into adulthood, our early attachment wounds can manifest in adult partnerships. We can become overly reliant on our partners for emotional support and hypervigilant to any threats to the relationship. When our partners provide a sense of self-esteem that we can’t provide for ourselves, any separation or relationship threat feels understandably scary.

This can result in relationship anxiety stemming from early attachment wounds.

Past Experiences and Relationship Anxiety

Sometimes, even if our early attachment experiences were positive and secure, later negative experiences can also lead to relationship anxiety.

If we’ve previously experienced betrayal, loss, or abandonment in adult relationships, we might carry that with us into all our new relationships going forward. We might become hypersensitive to the signs that our past experiences could happen again, causing us to read into our partner’s behavior much like attachment-based relationship anxiety.

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How Relationship Anxiety Affects Your Partner

When anxiety creeps its way into your relationship, it affects both the anxious partner and the non-anxious partner. Research has shown that high relationship anxiety in one partner predicts low relationship satisfaction for the other.⁴

Signs of relationship anxiety like reassurance-seeking, looking for conflict, and assuming the worst of your partner ultimately undermine trust and closeness in your relationship. These behaviors place demands on your partner and may make them feel like they’re not good enough or not able to meet your needs. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: you fear the relationship will end, but you behave in ways that diminish your connection.

Overthinking in Relationships: When Analysis Becomes Anxiety

It’s normal to feel a little nervous about your partner’s state of mind sometimes, especially in the early stages of a relationship, but relationship anxiety can tip this over the edge into overthinking.

Reading into your partner’s texts, tone, or micro-expressions, searching for hidden meanings in their words, and running “what if” scenarios can all lead to even more anxiety – and maybe even misaccusations.

You might even try to manage these thoughts by testing your partner; for example, withdrawing from your partner on purpose to see how hard they try to restore the connection. This could be considered a self-sabotaging behavior – if your partner doing it to you would make you feel bad, chances are your partner feels that way too.

Testing behavior can not only be confusing for your partner, but deeply upsetting because of its manipulative nature and implied lack of trust.

How to Deal With Relationship Anxiety

Instead of trying to control your partner’s actions, focus on the one thing you can control: yours. There are a few skills that can help you with relationship anxiety:

Mindfulness: mindfulness helps us to stay grounded in the present, instead of spiraling into worries about the past or future scenarios.

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Challenging negative thoughts: when you have a negative thought about your partner or relationship, what concrete evidence do you have to back it up? What alternative explanations could there be?

Tolerating uncertainty: uncertainty is an unavoidable part of life, and anxiety can both create a sense of uncertainty and feed on it. Learning how to accept and tolerate uncertainty can help to reduce feelings of anxiety.

Open communication: if you’re too anxious to tell your partner what your needs are, how can they meet them? Talking honestly with your partner about how you feel can help both of you to feel seen and understood, and you can learn how to strengthen your relationship together.

What Kind of Therapy Helps Relationship Anxiety?

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a popular choice for anxiety. CBT teaches us how to recognize and challenge negative thoughts, understand how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors influence each other, and choose more helpful behaviors in the future.

Some couples find that couples therapy helps them to better understand both their individual experiences and their relationship dynamic.

Whether you’re considering couples or individual therapy, there are lots of different options for you to explore. It’s normal to shop around until you find a therapy and a therapist that you feel works well for you.

Conclusion

Relationship anxiety is not a diagnosis, but it can still cause distress and distance in relationships. It undermines the trust in your relationship and can lead to self-sabotaging behaviors, ultimately becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you want to work on your relationship anxiety, the good news is that there are lots of skills you can practice and types of therapy you can try.

Your relationship anxiety could be related to an anxious attachment style – to find out your attachment style, take our free attachment quiz.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is relationship anxiety?

Relationship anxiety is a persistent feeling of doubt and insecurity within an otherwise stable relationship.

Q: How does attachment style cause relationship anxiety?

Attachment anxiety causes us to be hypervigilant to relationship threats and afraid of abandonment, contributing to relationship anxiety.

Q: Can relationship anxiety be cured?

You can work on relationship anxiety by working on skills like mindfulness, uncertainty tolerance, and open communication. Therapies like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can be very helpful.

Q: What therapy is best for relationship anxiety?

Different people suit different types of therapy. Nevertheless, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a popular choice for anxiety.

References

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed., text rev. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association Publishing; 2022
Doron G, Derby DS, Szepsenwol O. Relationship obsessive compulsive disorder (ROCD): A conceptual framework. Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders. 2014 Apr 1;3(2):169-80.
Doron G, Derby D, Szepsenwol O, Nahaloni E, Moulding R. Relationship obsessive–compulsive disorder: Interference, symptoms, and maladaptive beliefs. Frontiers in Psychiatry. 2016 Apr 18;7:58.
Jones JT, Cunningham JD. Attachment styles and other predictors of relationship satisfaction in dating couples. Personal relationships. 1996 Dec;3(4):387-99.