What Is Relationship OCD (R-OCD)?

Getting to know someone you really like can be exhilarating but also a bit disorienting — even more so if you’re navigating love and dating for the first time. We can’t ever truly know what a romantic partner is thinking or feeling, and it can be hard to discern, after the flush of first attraction fades, if a relationship is right. Uncertainty can make a relationship difficult for anyone, but for people with something called “relationship obsessive-compulsive disorder,” or R-OCD, it can feel unbearable.

R-OCD is a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder in which a person fixates either on their romantic partner or on the relationship itself. It might look like someone who asks, “Do you really love me?” over and over again. Or a person with R-OCD could worry that they’ll cheat on their partner if they catch themselves thinking someone else is attractive, even if it’s a celebrity they’ve never met. But while R-OCD might manifest a little differently than other types of OCD — the fear of contamination, for example, which can cause people to wash their hands over and over — it follows the same pattern.

“OCD is about having extreme discomfort with uncertainty,” says John Wyetzner, LCSW, a social worker in the Anxiety Disorders Center at the Child Mind Institute. “It’s all about the need to know, the need to have an answer to things.”

People with any type of OCD, Wyetzner says, seek answers to things “in a multitude of ways. Whether it’s tapping something until it feels ‘right’ or asking someone the same question 100 times — people do it to gain some semblance of control over it.”

R-OCD can show up in different kinds of relationships, including parent-child. But for teens, it’s particularly important to understand in the context of romantic relationships because it can be so difficult to spot.

“R-OCD in teens can get missed pretty often,” Wyetzner says. “A lot of teenagers are new to relationships, and they’re kind of learning as they go.” But teens’ romantic missteps and mistakes make it easier for OCD to be overlooked because obsessing over a relationship doesn’t seem that unusual. “It can come off as just being more ignorant or not being sure about certain things,” Wyetzner says, “when in reality it could be this more concerning factor that’s bubbling beneath the surface.”

Meanwhile, Wyetzner says, it’s common for people to write off their own symptoms of R-OCD as personal failings. Over time, people often feel that there is something wrong with them that they can’t identify. They may feel unworthy of their romantic partner or wonder if they are incapable of trusting them — anxieties that can take a serious toll on their relationships and self-esteem.

Clinicians group symptoms of R-OCD in two categories: relationship-focused R-OCD and partner-focused R-OCD.

People with relationship-focused R-OCD might ask questions like, “Is this relationship right?” As in other forms of OCD, where people repeat rituals to achieve a “just right” feeling, Wyetzner explains, “people with R-OCD are searching for a feeling of comfort or certainty, for the ‘just right’ feeling in a relationship sense.” 

Partner-focused R-OCD tends to involve a lot of intrusive thoughts. “They kind of get stuck in a cycle of, ‘Oh, do I really like this person?’ Or they start to think of negative attributes and wonder, ‘What else do I not like about them? Is this person good enough for me?’” Wyetzner says.

For people with R-OCD, the relationship or the partner are the obsession. That obsession gets expressed in compulsions that can include:

Mental compulsions: These are endless loops of negative thinking that occur entirely in the mind — replaying past conversations, for example. Mental compulsions can be debilitating for those who experience it but invisible to everyone else. In the context of R-OCD, Wyetzner calls this compulsion “rumination.” “Rumination is just someone sitting and having a lot of thoughts,” he says, “and trying to find a certain answer or a certain way through all the discomfort of their thoughts by thinking more.”

Reassurance-seeking: Reassurance-seeking can be motivated by rumination. It might look like asking your partner the same questions over and over again: “Are you cheating on me?” “Should we break up?”

Confessing: Confessing, meanwhile, is often a compulsion for those who worry about their own behaviors. Wyetzner gives this as an example: “I have to go and tell my boyfriend right away that I thought someone else was attractive, so I’m not keeping any secrets from him.”

Left unchecked, R-OCD can hurt people you care about — and leave you feeling really bad about yourself.

“It’s such a powerful thing that you cannot imagine a time in which you will not be standing in the shower thinking about these things over and over and over again, and then meeting up with your girlfriend and then talking to her about it over and over and over and over again,” says Travis, a man in his 40s who requested a pseudonym.

Travis first struggled with intrusive thoughts about his partners’ past relationships — sometimes described as retroactive jealousy — when he was a teenager. Experiencing these thoughts was excruciating. “It’s an unease that’s physically painful, mentally anguishing,” he says. “It’s a feeling of being out of control.”

Travis’s constant rumination — about whom his partner had dated, or even kissed, or about what that other person was like — led him to compulsively seek reassurance. He asked his partners questions, not so much for specific answers, but in hopes that any answer would somehow make the pain of thinking about those questions stop.

“What you believe is that by questioning, by getting another detail, it’s going to make it all right and make it make sense, and therefore the thoughts are going to go away. But it is actually the opposite,” Travis explains. “What happens is, you ask the question, you get more information, and it just leads to more questions.”

His compulsion to ask girlfriends prying questions about their past was inevitably painful for them and destroyed several relationships.

One ex described these encounters as stressful and exhausting. But also confusing, she told him later, because no amount of information ever seemed to be enough.

“In many ways, it’s a humiliating thing because, if you see yourself as a confident person and a strong person, then this is the behavior of a weak person. A man who’s insecure,” Travis says.

“But I never identified it as an actual thing with a name, nor knew that name. I saw it as nothing more than a particular personal weakness.”

Travis’s behaviors are common among people with R-OCD, but it’s important to note that R-OCD compulsions can also be more insidious. In an essay for the International OCD Foundation (IOCDF), Michael Rudden writes that while he knew he had OCD, he didn’t recognize how it manifested as an obsession with being “good enough” for his partner. He ruminated on self-improvement and compulsively exercised and scrutinized what he did and said around his partner. “For a while, my relationship OCD escaped even my own notice,” he writes, “because my mental compulsions seamlessly embedded themselves into my everyday behaviors.”

While OCD is a formal diagnosis, R-OCD isn’t. So if you haven’t been diagnosed with OCD, or even if you have, how do you know if what you’re experiencing is R-OCD? Unfortunately, there is no official rubric or standard to be met, Wyetzner says. But he encourages teens and parents to consider one important factor: time.

“How much time are you spending thinking about the relationship? Are you spending hours a day just thinking about the relationship or talking with people about it? Or asking people about it? One of the main metrics we use when determining severity of OCD is the amount of time that’s taken up by the OCD — whether it be obsessions or compulsions,” he says.

Also consider the intensity of your emotions. How distressing are your thoughts? Does this distress interfere with your daily life? Your relationship? Is it hard for you to spend time with your partner because all you do is ask them questions about the relationship, or all you do is worry? If any of this sounds familiar, a mental health professional can help you find the right support.

Travis first sought a therapist to help him deal with his retroactive jealousy — though he didn’t have a term for it at the time — when he was 14 or 15. Therapy has helped Travis in other facets of his life, he says, but it never successfully addressed this particular issue. (Traditional talk therapy can sometimes be counterproductive for people struggling with their OCD because it can lead to further rumination.)

But after entering a new relationship several years ago, Travis was compelled to try again. A Google search revealed the term “retroactive jealousy,” and he was struck by how many people appeared to relate to an anxiety he had assumed no one else shared. The discovery alone was a huge relief — just to have a video to show his partner, “to say, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on,’” he says.

Then, with his partner’s support, he began a more targeted therapy. Like other types of OCD, R-OCD is best treated through exposure with response prevention (ERP), or exposure therapy.

People with R-OCD can spend a lot of time engaging with distressing thoughts, but for them, thinking itself (rumination) is an attempt to resolve their distress. Exposure therapy — something done with the support of a specially trained therapist — asks the patient to sit with small amounts of stress or uncertainty without attempting to think their way through or otherwise resolve it. The goal is to understand that anxiety can gradually dissipate on its own.

Exposure therapy, especially for R-OCD, is tailored to an individual’s needs. If it’s beneficial, partners can be involved. In one session, Wyetzner recalls, his 19-year-old client was able to explain R-OCD to her boyfriend — a helpful discussion for both parties.

As Wyetzner explained, identifying R-OCD in the context of teens can be tricky. But you know yourself best. While Travis has had success with exposure therapy, he says he wishes he had known he wasn’t alone much earlier — a large reason behind his desire to speak with the Child Mind Institute about his experience.

“I would have saved a lot of strife and heartbreak and tears with teenage partners if I had known that.”