When Love Becomes a Question You Can’t Stop Asking
Learning to tolerate love's uncertainties.
Updated April 16, 2026 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
A client recently told me about the large Reddit community that has grown around ROCD: Relationship Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. While ROCD is not a formal diagnosis, the size and activity of the threads on Reddit point to high degrees of anxiety around relationships and attachment in general.
This is borne out in practice, as relationship issues dominate much of my focus in therapy —partner doubts, commitment phobia , jealousy , clinginess, over-control, fear of vulnerability, or attention -starved lovers. In practice, it is likely much easier to live alone than it is with another person. When another person enters the picture, vulnerability, risk, uncertainty, and frustration are inevitable. As psychotherapist and essayist Adam Phillips argues, anyone who can satisfy or please us can also invariably frustrate us.
This frustration originates in childhood with the first people to cause us uncertainty: our parents. Even if we were fortunate enough to grow up with “good enough” parents, our folks inevitably disappointed us in some way. Freudians suggest that the core fact that we have to leave our parents and forge our own lives is in itself a profound frustration and sadness, since there is always a part of us that would like to stay with our parents forever.
In the Freudian story, we may then choose a partner who secretly fulfills the lack missed by our parents or, conversely, reproduces the strong attachment or security we experienced as children. This can be problematic whether we fix the lack or not. If we find the security that we sought, we likely may lose the friction necessary for romantic desire. Security and safety are important, but they can often come at the cost of stimulating romantic feelings, leading to sibling or roommate syndrome.
On the other hand, if we find a partner who excites and enlivens us, there is a risk that perhaps that these intense feelings may not be forever returned or may wander elsewhere. This can also lead to doubts if there is a discontinuity in our feelings, or if our excitement inevitably wanes or transforms. This can create rumination like “Is this the one?” or “Is there someone out there who would not cause my desire to wane?”
The Modern Demand for Certainty
Love inevitably involves a degree of uncertainty. All attachments, in other words, come with the risk of loss. Even the most secure relationship cannot escape the fate of death, illness, or sudden changes. Feelings change, people change: What may have been a perfect match at 23 can be “outgrown” at 46.
Perhaps the advances in other health fields and their practice, optimized language, or predictive models have crept into relational fields as well. Certainly, it would be advantageous in many ways to be predictive in our choices—to know that we will be compatible 30 years into the future. This would help with family and financial planning and help us avoid perceived backtracking “mistakes” at midlife .
Attachment knowledge may help us in this regard: Are we avoidant or anxious? A good sense of our values and priorities is also a boon, as shared values can be a strong predictor of long-term success. Unfortunately, knowledge and wisdom are things that only appear truly in hindsight, after having been lived. In other words, it may take 10 years to realize that you made a compromised choice, or a third marriage to recognize that you were falling for a negative pattern learned in your family of origin.
The Online Factor: Endless Rumination
Deep reflection about uncertainty in love and partner choice may previously have been restricted strictly to the arts—novels, poems, songs, movies. Now we may follow any number of relationship influencers or scroll endlessly on ROCD Reddit channels. This can be reassuring to some, knowing that they are not alone in this anxiety. On the other hand, pages and pages of text can amplify, normalize, and indeed pathologize what could be seen as a normal and inherent aspect of relational life.
What we may call “normal doubt” can here transform into something collectively rehearsed and reinforced, creating an infinite checklist and new angles on viewing love as a problem in need of being solved. Like mortality itself, love can be worked on and improved but cannot be “resolved” in a finite manner. In couple therapy, we often speak and think dialectically—an interpersonal resolution inevitably dissolves into the next source of conflict.
This isn’t to say that we should accept and resist improving our relationships, but it does mean erasing some of our rigid absolutes that are sometimes embedded in the culture: that there is only one person for us; that love should be natural and easy; that we shouldn’t ever doubt that we selected the right person.
Maybe the goal here should not be to finally know whether we are in the right relationship. Perhaps the goal is to tolerate the fact that love—like all things of value—does not come with certainty. Love falters not because we have doubt, but when doubt becomes a problem we must eliminate.
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Nicholas Balaisis is a Registered Psychotherapist in Ontario. He works with both individuals and couples and has specializations in CBT/ DBT, EFT couples therapy, trauma, CBT-I (insomnia), sex therapy, and existential psychotherapy.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.