hi, I'm new to this forum too. Here are some thoughts from someone who has been in a recent relationship with a woman with ocd
We broke up recently for reasons which are complicated, but can be summarized as me asking her to take things to the next level and then wanting to slow down when I realized that we needed to work on some fundamentals. I have a tendency to adapt to try and make people around me happy and she has a tendency to find flaws and criticisms in me which are sometime non-existent, or more often, amplified unfairly. As you can imagine I found myself trying to adapt to her criticisms thinking that if I learned not to do the trigger thing, the relationship would be able to work. Unfortunately, the trigger changes all the time and sometimes it is not based on anything I really did - more the perception that I did or said something. The OCD was not the problem so much as the pattern of noting a flaw or potential flaw in me and becoming convinced that it was representative of a widespread pattern of flaws. For example, I sometimes stay at basic budget hotels when I travel for work. During one of her bad moments, she used this and a few other instances to weave together a belief (a certainty really) that I was cheap and money focussed. This ignored the fact that I almost always try to pay for our dates and have never thought twice about spending money on things that matter - liker her.
Obviously I still love her. Just thought I would share the fact that if someone has relationship ocd, it can be hard to deal with the intermittent black-and-white criticism.
She really, really did believe some of the things that she thought when a wave of negative thoughts would come. The hard thing was having someone you love think so harshly with you. In my case, the other
problem was that I would internalized the criticism and try to do better. That kind of vicious cycle must not happen.
