Mad love in a digital age.
Posted February 12, One of the group activities at the McLean Hospital OCD Institute was writing romantic personal ads for ourselves, and then sharing them with others. The idea was that, after spending months in the OCD program, listing our best qualities would help us to rebuild a positive self-imageand sharing with our fellow patients could reinforce that.
Enjoys exposure-response prevention therapySSRIslong walks on the beach. But even if I treated the whole thing as a big farce, the activity still taught me one of the countless critical life lessons I learned at the OCDI although this may not have been exactly the invaluable lesson my therapists lesbian up app :.
With nowhere else to turn, I held my nose, lay down my dignity and my personally-identifiable information at the door, and stepped into the preferred digital meat market of underemployed millennials - OK Cupid. One would assume that, for someone with anxiety problems, online dating would be a godsend. Dating that this has ever happened to me. It happens all the time … always.
Finding the One: Dating with OCD
But all of that stuff that seemed wonderful in theory turned out to be disastrous in practice. The problem is that, whether you want to blame the anxiety disorder or the depressive tendencies or any of the other undiagnosed psychological peculiarities permeating my grey matter, I have a bad habit of overthinking things.
It is scientifically conclusive! There are numbers! This match is quantifiable! Brainstorming, outlining, composing, "dating," proofreading — agonizing over word choice, sentence structure, how little adjustments change the tone of the piece. See, online dating requires a shotgun approach - lots of tries and lots of failures, which will maybe pay off if you ocd get lucky.
But the real world does give you the opportunity to hang out with mutual friends, or explore new interests, or meet people who even if they prove unsuitable for a relationship could enrich your life in other ways.
If you still decide to give it a shot ignoring my warnings, like Odysseus in his hubris, tying himself to the mast of his ship to hear the fatal song of the sirensI wish you only the best. If, despite this warning, you choose to participate in online dating, you may also be interested in my column: Dating with Anxiety.
Read my Psychology Today blog: Triggered. A diagnosis often brings relief, but it can also come with as many questions as answers.
What to know about OCD when you’re trying to date
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