I spoke to Alegra Kastens, a New York-based therapist and OCD activist who has also been diagnosed with OCD. She shared that one of the biggest misconceptions of ROCD is that experiencing it means the partnership is automatically wrong: “Relationship OCD can be experienced within healthy, loving relationships; it is a myth that it means your partner must be bad for you,” she tells Stylist.

It is also essential to understand ROCD as something distinct from relationship anxiety – even if the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, they are two unique things. Kastens says: “With OCD, there is always the presence of obsessions, compulsions, and obsessional doubt, and you can also have relationship anxiety without OCD.”

In retrospect, I had experienced ROCD for years, and in every relationship I had been in. I had previously concluded that I simply hadn’t found the right ‘one’ – though the myth of the ‘one’ is often a toxic societal belief that can worsen symptoms. With love and attraction being so intangible, no matter how often I tried to rationalise my way out of the thoughts, I ended up at the same place in each relationship, where no amount of reassurance or googling would provide me with the relief I sought. This miserable, repeated pattern of doubt in romantic relationships made me realise it was more than just the average relationship wobbles.

I had tried every method I could consider to help me crawl out of the thought vortexes I consistently found myself in. At its worst, I spent hours on personality tests and Reddit threads, desperately hoping that, eventually, a blog post might confirm if my partner and I were right together. Inevitably, it created serious rifts in our relationship, as he struggled to understand what was happening and how to help.

“Relationship OCD made me spend hours questioning if my partner was right for me”