tw: anxiety and sexual assault
Stop turning the music up… What did you say? I didn’t hear you because the thoughts in my mind are too loud… Don’t ask me our weekend plans, I’ll overstudy and overstudy some more…. Please don’t squeeze my hand, I will think you are mad at me…
Dating while having anxiety is not easy. It is especially not easy when the people that you are dating have no idea what anxiety looks like. I’ve had four boyfriends in my life and all of them reacted in their own unique ways.
W: I was 14; I didn’t even know I had anxiety. He constantly texted my best friend and when I gained the confidence to tell him it made me uncomfortable, they put me in a group chat with them. I had my first anxiety attack that night. Their messages mixed with the thoughts in my head wouldn’t stop, and I couldn’t make them stop. When I told him about this, he thought I was kidding and jealous. When I realized it was anxiety, he refused to break up with me because he was scared it would set me off.
Q: Our relationship started with a lot of fun. We joked constantly, played video games, and always hung out with his friends. It was fun until I said no, and he kept going. It was fun until I said no and couldn’t make him feel the way his hand did. He broke up with me two weeks later because my grandmother was in the hospital and I had an anxiety attack. He broke up with me because I shut down, I stopped being fun, I stopped being able to joke.
Z: I never thought someone could love me after what happened with Q. I didn’t think anyone could understand that I really did say no, even if he was my boyfriend. Z and I started dating as we were graduating high school. College came with overstudying, canceling plans, and hyper-focusing. His manipulative behaviors came shortly after. If I didn’t text back or call immediately, he would come to my house. He thought he could buy my affection with food. I rejected his hands each time he tried anything because of flashbacks from Q and slut-shaming from high school. I eventually broke up with him because I was too tired of working, doing both of our homework, filling out transfer applications, and participating in extracurricular clubs. He was obsessed, wouldn’t leave my house or my family alone until he found a new fixation in the form of a “hotter chick.”
M: The firm believer that depression wasn’t that bad, and anxiety wasn’t real. When we first started dating, M held my hand when I was anxious and said everything will be fine. Now, he looks into my eyes and knows when I’m about to break, he turns the music down because he knows I am overstimulated, he takes away my books because I’ve been working too long, he tells me everything might not be fine, but at least we’ll get through it together.
Photo Cited:
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), 2020, http://www.helpguide.org/articles/anxiety/generalized-anxiety-disorder-gad.htm.
Unruly Bodies 
I have also hard a hard time navigating dating with anxiety. I’m really sorry that Z did that stuff, and I’m glad you were able to find a way out of it. For me, it was hard to navigate what’s a healthy relationship when anxiety made me cling to a person. I had such intense social anxiety in high school that if I wasn’t talking to someone that wasn’t my boyfriend or my brother, it felt like I was giving a presentation to the entire class.
It’s especially difficult dating someone with no experience or even knowledge of those kinds of mental conditions. You have to spend so much energy teaching them how it works. I’m grateful social media has kind of spread awareness on how common some of these mental conditions are, because now there’s less teaching to do.
Thank you for sharing this. Exes are usually not something easily talked about and with what you had to experience as a result of dating these people, I’m sure this wasn’t easy to write or post. I’m so sorry you had to go through these experiences relatively alone. I had a similar experience in the past, both with Q and Z, except I did not know it was anxiety and I didn’t tell my partner until the very end. And I definitely suffered for a long time because of that. I’m glad you have M right now, someone who can hold your hand and be there with you. It is so good to hear that he can recognize when you are getting close to what you called breaking. And that he also knows that sometime things aren’t fine but you are together in this. :’)