Checking your feelings: why monitoring love makes it vanish
Turning attention on a feeling to check it is there always dampens it. In relationship OCD, the checking manufactures the very absence it is afraid of.
You are being hugged and you are not really in the hug. You are watching it. Checking. Is the warmth there? Is it as much as it was? Is it what other people feel? And because you are watching rather than feeling, the warmth is faint, and the faintness confirms the fear, and the checking intensifies.
This is the central compulsion in relationship OCD, and it produces the exact thing it is afraid of finding.
What attention does to feeling
Feelings are not objects that sit still to be inspected. They arise in the middle of experience, when attention is on the experience rather than on the feeling. Try to check whether you are enjoying a piece of music while it plays, and you will find the enjoyment has thinned, because you have stopped listening to the music and started listening to yourself. Try to check whether you are relaxed, and you will tense.
Love works the same way. It is present when you are with the person, attending to them, in the conversation or the moment. Turn attention inward to measure it, and it recedes, not because it was not there but because measuring and feeling cannot happen at once. The checking creates the absence for the duration of the check, and then reports the result as evidence.
The imagined standard
Checking needs something to check against, and in ROCD the standard is usually imagined. How much should I feel? What does real love feel like? People carry a picture assembled from films, from other couples seen from the outside, from an early relationship remembered without its ordinary days. The actual feeling, checked against this standard, always falls short, because the standard is a highlight reel and the feeling is a Tuesday.
Nobody's love, examined closely, matches the picture. Most people never examine it, so they never notice. ROCD examines it constantly.
The other checks
Feeling-checking rarely travels alone. There is the attraction check: am I still attracted, and what does it mean that I noticed someone else? There is comparison: is my relationship as good as theirs? There is the replay: that moment when I felt nothing, what did it mean? And there is confession, telling your partner the doubt, which brings relief and hands the checking to them.
Each of these is a compulsion, and each does what compulsions do: relief now, a louder doubt later, because the brain has just been taught that the question mattered.
Stopping the check
In CBT with exposure and response prevention, the work with feeling-checking is to notice the urge and decline it. To be in the hug rather than watching it. To let the question "do I feel enough?" arrive and go unanswered, while you get on with the evening. This is uncomfortable, because the question feels important and declining it feels like negligence. But the question has never been answered by checking, and it never will be, because the checking is what removes the thing it is looking for.
What people find, as the checking stops, is that the feeling comes back, not because they have decided to love their partner more but because attention has returned to the person, and the feeling arises in the experience, where it always did.
What I will not do
I will not tell you that you love them. That would be reassurance, one more compulsion, and it would last an hour. Nor will I tell you whether to stay. Therapy returns the decision to you, freed from the interrogation. Most people find that once the checking stops, the answer is clearer than it has been in years, in whichever direction.
If you have been watching your own hugs from the outside, there is more on how I treat relationship OCD, and feeling-checking is usually where we start.