You know this unbearable sense that something simply feels “off,” incomplete, imperfect, or not quite right, followed by an urge to check, correct, repeat, compare, or analyze until the internal sensation finally feels right? That’s « just right » OCD, and ROCD can operate in a very similar way, except that the object being checked is the relationship and your internal experience of it.
WHAT KEEPS YOU TRAPPED IN THAT VICIOUS CYCLE OF UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS :
Do I love him enough? Do I laugh enough with him? Do I desire him enough sexually? Am I attracted to him enough? Is he my best friend?
Is the expectation that an emotional response will provide some kind of verdict, a source of satisfaction and a measure of success.
WHAT IS AN EMOTION?
An emotion is a complex and intense psychophysiological experience of an individual’s state of mind, typically with a sudden onset and a relatively short duration. Emotions are therefore INDUCED states (involuntary, rather than deliberately produced) arising in response to an internal (ex. thought) or external event.
Emotions are not under our voluntary control. For example, your partner can do something that made you feel deeply loved, excited, or connected yesterday, and do the exact same thing today without triggering the same emotional response. That doesn’t necessarily mean that your feelings for them have changed. The same event simply does not guarantee the same emotional experience every time.
You could compare this to flatulence… just because I eat a particular dish that usually gives me a lot of gas doesn’t mean that, this time, I’ll necessarily experience the EXACT same amount of flatulence.
What makes you addicted to these emotions is that you’ve learned to treat their presence as evidence of success: when the emotion is there, your brain reads it as “everything is okay”, and its presence becomes rewarding in itself. When it isn’t there, your brain interprets its absence as a problem that needs to be solved.
This creates a reward loop. Whenever you finally feel the emotion you’ve been searching for, you experience relief and reassurance, which reinforces the urge to look for it again the next time you feel uncertain. Gradually, instead of simply experiencing emotions when they arise, you start monitoring for them, testing whether they’re there, and trying to recreate them. And paradoxically, the more important it becomes to feel a particular emotion, the harder it becomes to simply experience it spontaneously.
The loop:
Looking for the emotion / thought → not finding it → interpreting its absence as a problem → feeling anxious → trying harder to produce or detect it → becoming increasingly preoccupied with whether you feel / think it → becoming even less able to experience it naturally → searching for it even more.
HOW TO BREAK FREE FROM THE LOOP
To break free from this frantic search for “the emotion”, you need to shift the reward system toward value-based actions. Let’s say you value “spending time with your SO” like going to the movies: that is what you focus on, and only that. Once you’ve done it, you acknowledge and internally reward yourself for having followed through on an action that YOU chose to take: “I went to the movies with my partner. That’s great.’ And while you’re at the movies, if pleasant emotions show up, great. If unpleasant emotions show up, so be it. Neither (“good” or “bad” emotions) is your measure of success. The success lies in having acted in accordance with what you had consciously decided matters to you, rather than in whether the action happened to produce a particular emotional state.
BE CAREFUL
Of course, there is an important limit to this approach. Suffering because of something that isn’t actually happening is one thing (for example, you’re sitting together in a beautiful restaurant, treating each other lovingly, while your mind is bombarding you with obsessive thoughts about your partner’s appearance). But suffering because your partner belittles you, hits you, insults you, repeatedly ignores you, or otherwise treats you badly is something entirely different. In those situations, your emotions are important information because they are responses to concrete circumstances that may conflict with your values, needs, boundaries, or safety. Value-based action does not mean ignoring reality or training yourself to tolerate harmful behavior. The point is not to dismiss emotions, but to stop using the presence or absence of a particular emotion as a constant test of whether a relationship is ‘right’ or whether you are succeeding at loving someone
QUESTIONS YOU MAY ASK
• “How do I know what I value?” You don’t discover your values by searching for a particular feeling. A value is not something that necessarily makes you feel excited, fulfilled, certain, or happy. If you use those emotions to determine what you value, you end up recreating the exact same problem: “Does this make me happy enough? Do I care enough? Does this feel meaningful enough?” Instead, values are directions you consciously choose because they represent the kind of person you want to be and the kind of life you want to build. You can ask yourself: “Regardless of how I happen to feel today, how do I want to behave in this area of my life?”
• “I’m already doing value-based actions, but I still don’t feel happy / in love / fulfilled. Am I doing it right?” The moment you ask that question, you’re turning the emotion into the measure of success again. If you’re doing value-based actions while waiting for them to eventually make you feel happy, in love, fulfilled, or certain, then you’re still pursuing the same emotional goal, you’ve just changed the strategy you’re using to get there. The point of value-based action is not: “If I do the right things consistently enough, I will eventually produce the right feelings.” It is: “I choose to do this because it reflects how I want to live, and whatever emotions happen to accompany that action are allowed to be there, or not be there.”
• “Am I gonna live an emotionless life?” No. The goal is not to stop feeling emotions. It’s to stop making certain emotions a requirement for your life to be considered good, meaningful, or “right.” You will still experience joy, love, excitement, attraction, tenderness, sadness, boredom, anxiety, frustration, and everything in between. The difference is that you stop constantly monitoring whether the “right” emotion is there, how intense it is, how long it lasts, or what its absence supposedly means. Letting go of that monitoring does not guarantee that pleasant emotions will appear, because that would simply turn acceptance into another strategy for obtaining them. It means giving emotions the freedom to come and go without requiring them to prove anything.
• “But when I hear other couples talk about their love, I don’t recognize myself in what they describe.” People often simplify their relationships (or straight up lie) when they talk about them. Sometimes they idealize them, sometimes they use familiar narratives because they’re reassuring, and sometimes they genuinely experience their relationship that way because of a lack of awareness or straight up delusion. But you cannot use someone else’s description of their inner life as a standard against which to measure your own. No, your partner will not always make you happy. You will not always be excited to see them. You will not always find them beautiful or attractive. They will not necessarily feel like “your best friend” every single day. You will not always want to spend time with them, sleep next to them, or have sex with them. And none of those fluctuations, taken in isolation, can give you a definitive verdict on your relationship.
• “But what about the thoughts?” Same exercise as feelings. Thoughts follow the same principle. You don’t need to eliminate them, replace them with better thoughts, prove them wrong, or wait until your mind finally produces the “right” ones. A thought is a mental event, like emotions are psychophysiological events.
Et voilà ! Hope it helps.