As a girl who has struggled with anxiety for a large portion of my life, I have always been terrified of being in a relationship. While my inner teenage girl was always longing to be with any prince charming that life might throw my way, I was constantly held back by the fear that my anxiety could ruin a good relationship. When freshman year hit in high school, naturally, my 15-year-old self-decided that battling anxiety and still not having my license wouldn't stop me going out on a date with my high school crush. The more nervous I became about the thought of having a relationship with someone the more I reassured myself that there isn't a problem in this world that google couldn’t fix, With a little googling, I'm sure I’d find my how-to on young dating or maybe even a little chicken noodle soup for the anxious soul.
Well despite the fact that our moms had to take turns dropping us off and picking us up from our dates, having a cool new high school boyfriend seemed like a pretty sweet deal. Unfortunately, it wasn't too long before I discovered that I was grossly underprepared and more importantly, was mislead about the do’s and dont’s of dating. Amidst all the articles I read online about how to handle your anxiety in a relationship, I still to this day have never read an article that wasn't about “what your boyfriend should be doing to help your anxiety” instead of “what you both should be doing.”
Four years later I am still that same anxious freshman, but now I'm in college living on my own, driving myself to my dates, and in a happy and healthy relationship in which together we are learning to overcome anxiety and only let it make our relationship stronger. So in order to help balance out the plethora of articles one can find that will tell you how your significant other should be helping you with your anxiety, I’ve decided to share a few things that I have learned someone with anxiety definitely needs to know and understand before they start dating someone without it.
1. Stop reading about what they are supposed to do and start telling them what makes you most comfortable
Before I started dating my boyfriend, I read an article about what dating someone when you have anxiety should be like. In this article, a woman shared about how her boyfriend never told her to calm down or that her panicking was “just because of her anxiety.” She stated that this was the most important part of a relationship when you have anxiety, “He would just get me a glass of water and sit with me until I calmed down, don't let your boyfriend tell you that it’s just your anxiety,” she said. It seemed to make perfect sense to me! So naturally, I was ready to stand my ground and defend myself the second my boyfriend tried to calm me down in any other way than handing me a glass of water and staying silent.
After a couple times of him refusing to stay silent and stop trying his best to calm me down, I realized that him reminding me that my panicking was “only my anxiety” and talking to me to help me put my worries into perspective, the more it helped me calm down! Now I’m not saying that your partner telling you that you're only panicking for “this reason or that” will help you calm down, but I am telling you to not enter a relationship with an expectation of how things should be. Instead, try different methods of staying calm when you're anxious and communicate with your boyfriend/ girlfriend what works best for you!
2. They want to see you succeed, but don't be afraid to disappoint
To this day I struggle to get myself to pick up the phone and call my boyfriend when I'm panicking or anxious as well as also having to admit to occasionally leaving “a panic attack” off the list during our “so what did you do today” conversation. As guilty as I am of these things, I can't stress enough the importance of honest communication. As scary as being vulnerable may be, the bottom line is that you are in a relationship because the two of you deeply care about each other. So don't shy away from letting them know when you're really struggling with something. Although they may be praying and hoping for you to heal and progress in whatever aspect of health you are struggling in, this doesn't mean that they are going to be harshly disappointed if you're not currently succeeding.
3. They won't have the answer, so let them know you don't expect them to
As important as it is to have honest communication with your partner and not be afraid to let them know when you're having a difficult time, it is also important to know and understand that they probably won't have the answer to you problems, or even any good suggestions for that matter (Sorry Boyfriend). Sometimes we have experienced anxiety or other mental disorders for so long that we see ways of coping with it as common sense. When you are sharing a struggle with someone who loves you, their first response is going to be to try to help you in any way possible. Often their first response to seeing you struggle is to start throwing out ideas of how to fix it that may cause you to bite your tongue in attempts to refrain from saying “wow no way in all my years of having anxiety I haven't thought of trying that before.” The reality is this.
You can’t expect people who have never struggled with something you have to magically have the answer or know the exact amount of attention, chocolate, and glasses of water you may need. It is an immense amount of pressure for your partner to feel like they need to be the hero and the solution to all your problems when they know you're having a hard time with something, so be sure to take the pressure off their shoulders by letting them know that they don't have to. Reassure them that you’re not expecting a solution from them, but simply someone to confide in. Hey, who knows, maybe your prince charming will save the day — not saying it can’t happen!
4. Be ever-aware of the fact that this is hard on them too.
Although mental disorders can feel like a never ending battle and an exhausting one at that- know that it is tough on your partner too. When you enter a relationship, you commit to taking on life together, sharing the happiness of life, and fighting through the lows. Just as you might feel sick when you discover that your boyfriend/ girlfriend is deeply upset or having a tough day, you have to constantly remind yourself that they feel the same way when you are struggling with something.
During my experience dating I've realized that it is easy to forget that any battle either of us is going through is being fought together, and while I may be fighting off a panic attack by taking deep breaths, he is helping me fight it off in prayer and constant reassurance that I can get through it despite the fact that he is just as worried for me in the moment as I am worried about myself. Just as you may need some extra TLC on your most stressful days, don't forget that your boyfriend/ girlfriend may need some extra encouragement too!
5. Learn to see love in a new way, they may express that they love you differently from how media prompts you to expect.
The most important thing in a relationship is to learn to see love in a new light. The first few months of dating my boyfriend, if someone were to ask me about our relationship, I wouldn't necessarily label my boyfriend as a romantic. I’d actually probably say that we were sort of an anti-romantic couple.
The more I opened my eyes to the fact that everyone shows and receives love differently, the more I realized how incredibly wrong I would have been. Media had taught me that if a boy loves me I would be surprised with songs that he wrote about me and an occasional spontaneous bouquet of flowers. Well, due to the fact that my boyfriend wasn't much of a musician and he was better at picking out cool knives he thought I’d like more so than flowers, I found myself subconsciously labeling him of more of the “adventure-buddy boyfriend” and less of the “lovey-dovey boyfriend" which quite frankly, I wasn't too upset about. Although I couldn't be more grateful for my adventure loving boyfriend, I couldn't have been more wrong about his ability to spend every second that we are together showing me that he loves me.
So how does all this link to anxiety and dating you may ask? Well, I’ve learned that so often I was expecting a big bouquet of flowers or to be romantically swept off my feet to be taken on a spontaneously cute adventure anytime I would panic or have an anxiety attack that I missed the other ways he was showing me that he loves and cares for me. I found myself expecting an immense amount of “media-prompted love” in his attempts to make me feel better and do to my wildly unrealistic expectations, it took me a little bit to realize that he was giving me that spontaneous act of love and attention, just in the way that he knew I wanted it, not the way media told him it should be.
Just a few nights ago I found myself tearing up before leaving his place due to how nervous I was about a doctors appointment the next morning. After he saw the tears on my face, he immediately pulled out a giant box of chocolate he had hidden behind his back for me… just kidding, he actually ran to his trashcan and started frantically digging through the piles of trash. After a minute of digging, he pulled out a Ziplock Bag from which he pulled a king size pack of M&M’s. He placed the brand new pack of candy into my jacket pocket, gave me a kiss on the forehead, and said: “for the car ride home.”
On the outside that might seem kind of cheap and gross I guess but the truth is he knew that one, I like chocolate, two, he couldn't make my worry disappear, and three, he did have the ability to find something that would make me happy in the meantime and show me that he loves me and believes everything is going to be okay.
So besides letting the world know that yeah sure I’ll eat candy out of a trashcan, what I’m trying to say is this: Ditch every stereotypical “act of love” that you have ever been taught and open your eyes to the little ways in which your significant other is showing you that they care for you so incredibly much. Mental disorders can so often cause you to feel unworthy or incapable of being loved, but you have to know and be confident in the fact that there is someone out there who will love you so much and so well. So take a deep breath and know that when worked through together, anxiety can be overcome in a relationship and be a builder of strength instead of a creator of weakness.
