Odd Article: Relationship Anxiety

You’ve just got into a relationship. And it’s gone as far as a person could dream of or the movies would picture. Perfect.

Then, the first trauma comes - because relationships can be awesome and painful. Or a pattern is formed. A person whose first boyfriend worked with computers saw herself then dating mostly geeks with computer skills. Patterns.

If you’ve ever engaged in the art of falling in love you have probably experienced its wonders and pains. This article is not to tell you what to do. It is to say I have found myself in a situation that may be common to others or not. This imagined company of mine, very likely to be a reader, will now know that I have found a way of describing that situation as

Anxiety is that which eats up time with worries. In Portuguese we will say “preocupar”, or pre-occupy, that is, to occupy oneself before, or beforehand. A relationship sometimes conforms to theories from an anxious mind, succumbing to a series of forecasts, some of them based on past experiences. Then the overwhelming part of it arises. Everything is over- (over as is, with a symbolic dash). There is overcriticism, overlove, over-butterfly effect - please, go away, I can’t breath. It’s all very mawkish.

            I'm in no way being so nosy as to tell you what to do, not me, but a good way to start if I were to do that myself, would be by asking myself, every time the overload of feelings came – and if you ever heard of the word “empath” and identifies with its meaning or have been tested positive for it, I am sorry, but the overload is regular itself without anxiety, gaining new colors and tones with it -: should I have spinach now? It’s not really the solution, I know – and don’t get it by any other interpretation rather than that that bananas, spinach and black beans are known for their valuable nutrients against anxiety, as is chocolate for depression.

Seriously, though. Have you ever found yourself in this kind of anxiety as I have? This can be very hard to deal with when you are the person on the other side, the one who has to deal with the other’s anxiety. In the end, I just demonized the poor sufferers. Well, I guess it’s time to have a name for it. I have been to both sides, actually. I am not entitled to name somebody else’s feeling, but in secret I would keep the thought, I have been there, I know what it is like.

Maybe a cure lies in the arms of the first stage of first love, when everything was pure and there was no constraint, controls, pushback and blocking memories eating up time. Can one remember purity, especially in days when the dead are frequently counted, as in this pandemic?

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This is only one perspective on intimate relationships. There are others, such as the gender perspective, which will commonly guide notions on domestic violence, among others. For now I choose to speak about this part of a relationship in which it may get unbearable. Not only because it may, but because there’s forgiveness and there is still this thing called love that can be true; one thing is true only if you believe it is. I think I heard that somewhere.