Keeping Relationship Anxiety from Causing a Breakup

Everyone experiences anxiety from time to time, and that includes worrying about the future of your relationship with a spouse or romantic partner. But when that anxiety gets out of hand, it can put pressure on the ties that bind you to your significant other. Keeping relationship anxiety from causing a breakup requires you to look inward, and communicate outward, to protect yourself and the person you love the most.

What is Relationship Anxiety?

Relationship anxiety is the phrase for when you feel worry, insecurity, or doubt about your relationship, even when everything is going well. If you are experiencing relationship anxiety, you may find yourself questioning:

• Will the relationship last?
• How do you know this is the right partner for you?
• Do you matter to your partner?
• Is your partner keeping something from you?
• Would your partner miss you if you were gone?
• Will your partner change their mind about you down the road?
• Does your partner really love you?

These kinds of thoughts and feelings are extremely common, especially early in a relationship, or when circumstances of life change (such as post-partum, after a career change, or following a loss). They may not even reflect any realistic challenges to your partnership. But if left unchecked, relationship anxiety can develop into emotional distress, behavioral problems, and even cause a breakup.

Step 1: Understand Where Your Relationship Anxiety Comes From

Relationship anxiety is often a personal problem, rather than a challenging aspect of your partnership dynamic. To overcome the anxiety and worry, you need to first identify where your relationship anxiety comes from. Relationship anxiety can be a reflection of your feelings about yourself, your relationship history (such as if you have been cheated on before or suffered some kind of abuse), your own self-worth, and the way you connect to others (sometimes called your “attachment style”). It often arises when your relationship is going well because it is the result of conscious and unconscious fears that the good times will end and you will get hurt in the process. 

Because of this, if you want to keep your relationship anxiety from causing a breakup, you need to be willing to accept what it is about you and your past that is causing you to feel the way you do. What does your inner critic tell you about yourself or your partner when you worry your relationship will not last? By addressing these feelings of low self-worth and assumptions about your significant other, you can better understand the triggers of relationship anxiety, and create a plan for addressing them. 

Step 2: Communicate With Your Significant Other

Once you have identified that you struggle with relationship anxiety, it is a good idea to communicate that with your significant other in an open, honest, and emotionally neutral way. This isn’t about blaming your spouse for making you distrust them, nor is it about demanding they do more to satisfy your need for assurance. Instead, you should focus on communicating how you feel and when those emotions arise. Invite your partner to explain their own feelings and concerns about your relationship, and ask them how hearing what you have been experiencing makes them feel. Listen to your partner’s responses and commit them to memory. If your spouse tells you they love you and are not going to leave you, take them at their word. 

Step 3: Develop Healthy Strategies to Address Relationship Anxiety

The most important step to keeping relationship anxiety from causing a breakup is working together with your partner to identify and practice healthy strategies for responding to your feelings. It is unrealistic to expect them to simply go away, or that you will be able to ignore or suppress them. Instead, consider setting guidelines for your relationship:

• Set and respect both partners boundaries
• Practice regular check-ins to communicate issues before they build resentment
• Adopt healthy self-care habits
• Dedicate couples’ time to prioritize your connection
• Practice mindfulness to recognize relationship anxiety when it starts
• Allow “check-outs” giving each partner space to manage feelings during conflict
• Use affirmations to support one another’s feelings and connection to the relationship

Different coping mechanisms and strategies work better or worse for different couples and individuals. Remember that you may need to try several – or a combination of many – before you find a balance that works for your relationship. 

Step 4: Use Couples Therapy to Keep Relationship Anxiety from Causing a Breakup

Couples therapy can help reduce the damage caused by relationship anxiety and help your partnership thrive even in the face of severe negative emotions and outside pressures. That is because, unlike individual therapy which focuses on the needs of the patient, couples therapy puts the relationship at the center of the work. Everything you and your partner will do in couples therapy is designed to strengthen the bonds between you, making sure they will last even when challenges arise. Remember that, even though these ideas are organized in “steps” you may need to move back and forth through them, and practice several steps in parallel, to see the best results. 

David Stanislaw is a psychotherapist with over 35 years of experience. He helps individuals and couples learn strategies for minimizing conflict in their relationships. Contact David Stanislaw to get help today.