If you have anxiety, you already know: it sucks.
Anxiety is hard to deal with because it makes you distrust your intuition. Anxiety has you overthink your decisions, your perception, your feelings. Anxiety completely and utterly depletes you. Having anxiety is honestly exhausting.
One of the worst things anxiety does is that it convinces you that you are hard to love. Anxiety tells you you’d be lucky if anyone was even able to “put up” with your overthinking, your worrying, your cluttered mind.
So you seek out those who embody this belief. Anxiety persuades you to date the ones who treat you like an afterthought, a chore, a stop along the way. Anxiety tells you that this is all you deserve and you believe it. And when these types of people leave (as they always do), anxiety tells you it’s your fault. How could they not walk away? You were too much.
But here’s the thing: Anxiety is a fucking liar.
Your anxiety does not make you difficult to love. After all, you are worth more than even your most anxious moments. Anxiety is part of you but it is not all of you. The right person for you will know that anxiety is not your fault and they will want to walk with you through your mind’s storms, not leave you out in the downpour to figure it out on your own. They understand you can’t “just snap out of it” and they’d never ask you to even try and do that.
You deserve care, commitment, and reassurance. You deserve tenderness, kindness, patience, and validation. While your partner can’t take away your anxiety, they shouldn’t be one of the things that make it worse. They shouldn’t judge you or mock you or invalidate what it is you feel.
The right person for you should be able to support you through the tough moments. In fact, they shouldn’t just be able to but they should also want to be there for you, too. Successful love asks you to be vulnerable, to trust. Date someone who makes doing those things easier.
Anxiety sucks. Your relationship doesn’t have to. Date someone who helps your anxiety (not the person who makes it worse).
