In my opinion, love is overly romanticized. Nobody talks enough about the pain that comes along with love, nobody talks about the unrequited love and nobody talks about fairytales gone wrong. Don’t get me wrong, love is a beautiful thing. However, when you add a mental illness, like anxiety, to the stress of falling in love, things can get complicated.
When you fall in love, vulnerability is a big part of it. Opening up to someone is already hard enough but when you have anxiety it can be nearly impossible. Love likes to ebb and flow but anxiety wants to stay in one place.
That’s where the problem hits. Love likes to move fast but anxiety takes it’s time.
When you fall in love and you have anxiety, anxiety has to fall in love to. Anxiety is not something you can put up on a shelf and pick up when you feel like it. It is constant. Anxiety likes to overanalyze every interaction but you, yourself, don’t want to do that. So in turn it’s like this constant war between your anxiety and you. The battles within this war consist of things like, “Am I doing this right?” And “Love is way out of my element” and the ever-famous, “Am I loving them more than they love me?” The most important thing to remember when fighting this war is, anxiety is not the rational one. You are.
Whether the love you feel is requited or unrequited, the most important thing to remember is that what you are feeling is valid. Anxiety will tell you that it’s not and it will yell at you and make you feel like love is just not for you. However, the more you feel, shows how in love you are and even if you’re anxious 100% of the time, love is not just for people who do not suffer from mental illness. The thing is, we don’t choose who we fall in love with and we don’t choose when we fall in love. Love chooses this for us.
Anxiety and love are arch rivals. Maybe they met in a past life and decided to hate eachother or maybe they just don’t get along. Maybe anxiety doesn’t believe in love. Whoever you are, the person reading this who may or may not have anxiety, I hope you believe in love. As long as you believe in love, anxiety has nothing on you.
