Is Your Anxiety Ruining Your Relationship?

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Julie's husband, David, is fed up with her. Whenever she gets anxious about a weird health-related symptom or an ambiguous social situation, Julie constantly asks David for reassurance that everything is OK. Often, when they have social plans with others and if Julie feels anxious about it, she will bail out at the last minute and come up with an excuse why she can't go. Also, Julie has a lot of anxiety about making the "wrong" decisions. For example, she struggles with decisions like where they go to dinner, what furniture to buy for their home, or where they go on vacation. David is highly frustrated with these behaviors and finds himself staying at work later so that he can avoid dealing with Julie's anxiety.

Does any of this sound familiar? Here are two of the most common ways anxiety interferes with relationships and what you can do about it.

1. Excessive Reassurance Seeking

The problem: People with all types of anxiety issues have a challenging time dealing with uncertainty. Often, people ask for a lot of reassurance from their partner to attempt to bring about certainty. Some examples of common types of questions around uncertainty are these:

• Do you think everything will be OK?
• Do you think [insert health symptom] is anything serious?
• Are you mad at me?
• Does this outfit look OK on me?
• Do you think I will get fired based on what I said in the meeting this morning?
• Did I lock the door when I left the house?

When the anxious person gets reassurance, they might feel better temporarily. However, in the long term, it sets them up to ask for more reassurance the next time they experience uncertainty. It does not teach them how to manage uncertainty and tolerate the anxiety associated with it effectively.

The solution: If you are struggling with intolerance of uncertainty and do a lot of reassurance seeking, here are some steps you can take:

1. It is essential to first acknowledge that excessive reassurance-seeking is a problem.
2. Try to be aware of all the times you seek reassurance. In addition to asking your partner for reassurance, you might do other things, like immediately going online to look up body symptoms or checking the locks or the stove multiple times.
3. Work on resisting the urge to seek reassurance, even if it's for a very short time initially. If you were going to run a 10K race but hadn't run a day in your life, you would need a lot of short runs to build up your stamina.
4. Involve your partner by coming up with some responses they can say when you slip up and ask for reassurance. You can check out this post for some examples.
5. Work on changing your relationship with uncertainty. If you automatically view uncertainty as bad, think of other times when you encountered uncertainty. Was the outcome always as catastrophic as you thought it would be? Most likely not.

2. Avoidance

The problem: Nobody likes to feel anxious, so when a situation arises that will cause anxiety, there might be a tendency to avoid it. Unfortunately, this avoidance can be a problem in relationships. Consider the following examples:

• Eric and his husband Juan were going to go to Juan's sister's wedding across the country. However, because Eric has a fear of flying, he worried for months about the trip and decided the night before that he couldn't go.
• Katie was so anxious about going to her boyfriend's prom because she didn't know other people at his school that a few hours before he was going to pick her up, she lied and said she had a severe migraine.
• Aidan and Lexi planned for months to go to the Taylor Swift concert. However, as the show got closer, Aidan worried more and more that he would have a panic attack in the crowded arena and that he wouldn't be able to get help. He told her he couldn't go with her after all. Luckily, Lexi quickly found a friend to go with her to the concert. Still, she resented Aidan, as she had looked forward to sharing the experience with him.

Although the avoidance can be of significant situations like those listed above, it can involve more minor situations that evoke anxiety, like deciding not to go to a restaurant or avoiding a low-stakes social get-together. However, the more and more one person in a relationship avoids, the more resentful their partner might become.

The solution: The good news is that avoidance doesn't have to rule your life. It might seem obvious, but the way to reduce avoidance is to work on confronting situations and tolerating the anxiety that goes with it. Consider doing the following things:

• Be honest with your partner about your issues with anxiety and enlist their help navigating certain situations. In the case of Katie avoiding going to her boyfriend's prom, she could have spoken with him in advance about her anxiety, and together, they could have come up with a plan of how to handle it.
• Set up small goals for yourself. For example, if you are inclined to avoid a social situation altogether, consider creating a plan with your partner in which you can leave earlier than they do.
• Treat the underlying issue. Suppose symptoms of problems like obsessive-compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety, health anxiety, or a phobia are leading to your avoidance behavior. It might be time to enlist the help of a therapist who specializes in anxiety. Therapists trained in treatments like cognitive behavior therapy can help treat the conditions that lead to avoidance (as well as excessive reassurance-seeking). In the end, your partner might thank you for addressing these issues.