What is relationship anxiety?

I define "relationship anxiety" as pervasive doubts about a healthy, loving relationship. It usually begins with a thought like, "Do I love my partner enough?" or "What if I'm not in love or attracted enough?" and spirals from there into a level of anxiety that interferes with your ability to be present in your relationship, and often in your life.

Relationship anxiety generally manifests in two ways, either of which can occur at any point in the relationship, from early on or years into marriage. The first type of relationship anxiety occurs in a defining moment when the thought, "Do I love my partner enough or at all" enters the mind. Prior to this thought, the person describes their relationship as: "Wonderful, loving. Everything I've ever wanted. We have an amazing love between us, and it's pretty much perfect." The couple often had a long honeymoon period and a very healthy relationship. The early stages of this type of relationship anxiety are characterised by the desperate need to "get back the feelings," as the loss of in-loveness feels like their hearts have been cut out of their chests.

The second type of relationship anxiety occurs more gradually and may have even been present in the very early stages of the relationship. This type of anxiety is characterised by a pervasive feeling of doubt, lack of attraction, the sense that you're really "just friends," and you're only staying in the relationship because you're too scared to be alone. Statements like, "We don't have enough chemistry" and "I'm settling" tend to dominate this type of relationship anxiety.

This can be particularly disconcerting because, in a culture that exalts the in-love feelings as the sole indicator that you're with the "right" partner, the lack of those feelings in the beginning stages can easily spell doubt and doom.

What is healthy love?

In order to leave where we are, we need to know where we're going, and since our culture leaves us bereft of the principles, definitions, and actions that define healthy love, we must start here. Anxiety is fuelled by unrealistic expectations and faulty beliefs, and nowhere does that show up more than in the area of romantic love. It's time to update our cultural operating system and download new principles of healthy love so that we can attend to the realm of thoughts by replacing faulty beliefs with the truth.

The best place to start our updating process is with Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, who says, quite simply, that good love is like a bowl of oatmeal. A bowl of oatmeal? How unromantic, you may say. How prosaic, you think. Love should be a decadent Italian dessert. Oatmeal? How depressing. In our romance-addicted culture, this concept rubs many people the wrong way and often elicits questions like: "Where's the passion, the drama, the excitement? Isn't love supposed to make me feel alive? Isn't it supposed to fulfil my every need, even needs I didn't know I had?"

What Johnson means is that love is not the cure-all that we set people up to believe it is. When love is true and real, it feels warm and sweet in your soul, the way oatmeal feels warm and nourishing in your belly. It feels good. It's not over-the-top, heart-stopping romance. It just works. It's nice. It's comforting. And it might not work all the time, but for the most part, the two of you connect and click in a special way. And, because this doesn't happen every day, this is something to appreciate and celebrate.

Many people encounter problems in their relationships because the reality falls terribly short of their expectations. Many people expect love to look and feel a certain way and are painfully plagued by a mental list of shoulds:

• I should feel in love all the time
• I should want sex all the time
• I should look as happy as all my friends look on Facebook
• I should always want to see my partner
• I should always feel attracted
• I should never feel irritated