Red Flag

Red flag, red flag, red flag.

It feels like my heart is beating faster than my thoughts are racing, but that is an impossibility. My thoughts are swirling at the speed of light, around and around and around like a whirlpool determined to pull me under. They wrap themselves around me, a false friend providing comfort, but they are choking me; they are overwhelming me. I have been at war with my thoughts all my life; their victory is an ever-present threat.

Deep breath! Think it through. What did it mean?!

Have you heard of Relationship Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? I had not, prior to 2017. Washing, checking, counting… I had heard of those; I had lived them. With childhood onset OCD, I assumed there wasn’t much I hadn’t heard of, but r-OCD caught me by surprise with its viciousness. The lies it whispered to me were pernicious. The lies it whispered to me had come to define my every romantic relationship.

Have you heard of love bombing? asked my de-facto agony aunt, r-OCD in disguise, as I smelled the roses from my then-boyfriend. He wants you to go to Ireland with him? You don’t even know him! Google the signs!

r-OCD, like OCD itself, is characterized by doubts. It is a form of OCD that is classed as purely obsessional—the compulsions are not as visible as, say, someone washing their hands until they bleed. Doubt, though, is the ultimate destroyer; r-OCD sufferers can be disabled by the constant questioning of their relationships. Does he love you? Do I love him? Is this right? It goes beyond logic. It looks for proof of something that is impossible to prove; it mimics intuition and tricks you into believing it is the voice of the reason. It makes dating, already a daunting prospect, next to impossible.

No matter who I was with, the thoughts were there. He doesn’t love you, came the whisper. He is a bad man. He is a bad person. Research, research, research! Look for tells!

r-OCD turned each relationship I had into an amateur detective session. I can probably tell you without a second thought the signs of a psychopath, what makes someone a narcissist; what is abuse. For a while, I decided I had commitment issues – I was having so many doubts that it wasn’t the right relationship that it surely couldn’t be. Certainly, I knew it wasn’t normal to spend hours upon hours compulsively Googling thoughts I found troublesome. Certainly, I knew it wasn’t normal to analyse over and over and over every word, every nuance. My power of persuasion was—is—strong. It wasn’t OCD; I had been a washer, I had been a checker, and this did not compute.

r-OCD was in some ways my main relationship. r-OCD gave birth to my biggest lie: I was better off alone, without the stress, without the worry, and without the certain knowledge that both of those things would drive me out of any relationship I entered. The stress of second guessing was simply too much, for me and for those I turned to for reassurance; for those whose soothing voices I turned into my compulsions.

Do you think this is normal? I would ask my friends or my mother. Do you think this is a sign that something is wrong?

I’m ashamed to say I resisted treatment. While I take medicine to this day to manage my OCD, r-OCD still snuck through. It embarrassed—embarrasses—me, and I couldn’t bear the thought of pouring out my deepest darkest secrets to a stranger.

Then I met my current partner. It was November 2019. It seems, in retrospect, to be a totally different world than the world we're in now; a totally different time. And there he was.

He was different than the boyfriends I had before; I knew that right away. I met him at a good time personally and professionally; I wasn’t as stressed out as I had been at the start of my other relationships. r-OCD was quiet, and I let him in.

Without r-OCD, I fell in love with him. I did not doubt it. We spent Christmas with his family in Ontario, shivering beside Niagara Falls. We have a shared love of the paranormal, and cruised around Alberta, visiting abandoned towns and forgotten places. I met his children. Suddenly, it seemed like my world would change. I felt happy; I felt free.

Ahh, but this was 2020! While my partner and I sat on my couch, we watched the pandemic play out on live TV. We watched as worlds closed and shrunk. We watched it all together, until the pandemic squeezed everybody’s existences into tiny little cells, until it was just the two of us, most of the time.

I was not free.

With the spread of the virus, my OCD started to spread again as well. Everything was contaminated. We were encouraged to wear gloves, to wear masks, to Not. Touch. Anything. These were fears I had been riddled with in my teenage years; I had not been a washer in quite some time. It took great effort and a higher dose of my prescription to defeat my original demon a second time. It wasn’t a victory, however; it was, at best, a stalemate.

r-OCD snuck back in as silently as the pandemic passed from person to person. Stripped of my usual defences and supports by restrictions and lockdowns, I was an easy target. I don’t remember now when I first had doubtful thoughts, when I first looked at my partner, whom I loved and love beyond measure, and thought is this right? But the when wasn’t important.

In a matter of months, I was waiting for him to leave the room so I could Google things I had pinpointed as being off about our relationship. I was calling my mom secretly on my drive home the days I was allowed in the office, crying and fretting and losing the battle. I let it put a wedge between he and I. I cried myself to sleep wondering if he loved me, while he snored beside me, unaware. I drove myself nuts wondering what was true, the part of me that wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, or the little voice asking if I loved him? Was I sure?

I could see how it would all play out. I would latch onto one of my fears, most likely ridiculous. I would sit there and mull that fear over and over and over for months until it was fact, and then... the inevitable! I would snap. He would snap. One of us wouldn’t be able to take it anymore, and I would lose him. I would lose his children. I would lose the life we were building, and I would be left alone with all the lies I had told myself, that I would be better off that way.

I was standing in the kitchen, looking at the calendar on our fridge, when the idea occurred to me. We had just fought, and I had demanded that he get help for some of what he was dealing with. My heart was racing; I was, at this point, having a few panic attacks a week, and all because I was in love.

Who was I to demand that of him, that he seek treatment while I remained unwilling? I pondered this as I stared at his therapy date on the calendar, written by me, as OCD neat as I could make it, on the third try. I suppose I had always known OCD made me rigid and perhaps a bit controlling; I organized everything to not upset me. I organized everything so I felt safe. In the kitchen, with the cold tiles beneath my feet, it occurred to me that I needed help too.

Calling my therapist wasn’t easy. She had mentioned r-OCD to me before in the past sessions I had braved for checking and for washing, and she diagnosed me with it now. The thought of going to see her for this filled me with humiliation and dread: how could I say my most embarrassing doubts out loud? What was CBT? What would I have to do? I hate uncertainty. It is part of OCD and part of me. Suddenly, everything felt uncertain. And yet--

And yet not. I haven’t had my first appointment yet; the pandemic has made the OCD clinic in my city very busy. It approaches steadily, but I am less afraid. When I feel r-OCD niggling, I take a deep breath and try to live with doubt, as I have been instructed, even as my breathing increases and I start to sweat.

I don’t have to know everything with stone-cold certainty, no matter what r-OCD whispers in my ear as I watch my partner bury his face in the soft fur of my cats. I can embrace treatment and I know this; I can love him and myself enough to take on r-OCD, my longest standing relationship. I can face 2021 with my partner, and the flag I will be waving at my demons will not be white.