Scrupulosity and Romantic Relationships

Falling in love ought to be one of the sweetest seasons of life. Discovering the person that you’ll spend the rest of your life with, for most people, is a time filled with excitement, warmth, and butterflies in the stomach. But for the person with scrupulosity, romantic relationships can be a minefield of anxious triggers.

Maybe you can resonate with some of these case studies of real people with scrupulosity:

• Anthony* is 19 and part of a ministry project where his crush also volunteers. He really likes this person but hasn’t gotten up the courage to ask her out because he has never gotten the “confirming” feeling that God wants him to be with her. When he prays, he hears a “response” telling him, “She’s not yours, she’s Mine.” He interprets this thought as being the voice of God, and the lack of peace to be another way God is trying to guide him. He is not yet convinced that this could be a way his scrupulosity is beginning to merge with his relationship interests.
• Paige* is a professional copyeditor who is in a serious relationship with a young man she really loves. Her family adores him, and everyone is very encouraging of the relationship, which has all the spiritual and relational markers of success. No one has any “red flags” about him, but Paige feels chronically insecure. She has a constant sense that something is “off” but can’t quite put her finger on it. She takes these unsettled feelings very seriously in case they are legitimate impressions from God. The more “off” she feels, the more she digs to find issues in the relationship that God might be trying to warn her about. Her desire to know God’s will is always a little desperate and frantic, because making a mistake in this area is something her mind is unable to accept. Paige picks at threads in the relationship, which disheartens her boyfriend and makes him feel insecure, too. Finally, she begins to realize that this is another way her OCD is trying to control her and is able to start ignoring the “off” feelings.
• Josh* struggles immensely with his religious OCD. He gets intrusive thoughts telling him to do weird, cringy things “or else” he is agreeing to sell his soul to the devil. He constantly lives in his head, neutralizing these strange thoughts by adding the word “NOT” or “NEVER” to the end of the sentences. To battle the terror of these thoughts (and memories of a childhood under a tyrannical father and abusive priest), Josh becomes sexually active with many partners, smokes weed, and drives cars too fast. When he tries to change his life and draw closer to God, he meets a Christian young woman and they begin dating. But Josh is haunted by his past–both the real sins he committed with other women, and the awful thoughts about selling his soul to the devil. Josh is paralyzed that by marrying his girlfriend, he will be leading her to hell with him, or deceiving her about his actual standing as a Christian. Josh considers breaking up with her to “protect” her from himself.

(*Not their real names)

Do any of these examples resonate with your experience, either past or present? I’d like for this post to become a cornerstone article on scrupulosity and romantic relationships where I hope to include (and gradually add, as necessary) all the major issues that we encounter as people with OCD in our intimate relationships. This will include:

1. Obsessions about something being wrong with the other person
   • Their spiritual status
   • Your compatibility
   • Their characteristics and emotional health
2. Obsessions about something being wrong with you
   • If you believe God wants you to be single or have taken vows of chastity
   • Concerns about not being mentally/emotionally “healthy enough”
   • Spiritual implications of scrupulosity for being “equally yoked”
3. Obsessions about something being wrong with the relationship in general
   • Vague, undefined feelings of insecurity
   • Lack of “confirmation” from God
   • Obsessions about finding “The One” God has prepared for you
   • How to avoid erroneous thinking about this topic

With that outline in place, let’s jump in.

Obsessions About Something Being Wrong With the Other Person

When you’re dating someone, it’s natural to consider their spiritual life, their compatibility with your values, and their emotional health. For most people, these considerations lead to thoughtful discussions, prayer, and mutual growth. However, for someone with scrupulosity, these normal concerns can become paralyzing.

Their Spiritual Status

Obsessions about the spiritual status of the person you’re dating are a common trigger. You might find yourself constantly analyzing their every word, action, or decision to determine if they are truly “spiritual enough.” Perhaps you worry they aren’t reading their Bible as often as you do, or you fixate on whether their prayer life matches your expectations. In your mind, their spiritual status becomes a direct reflection of their worthiness as a partner—and of your ability to follow God’s will by choosing them.

But let’s remember that we are all at different levels of spiritual maturity. Even if spiritual maturity could be quantified in precise and exact mathematical quantities, the life experiences of each person are hardly similar enough to guarantee precise equality. Almost every couple has a mismatch of spiritual maturity to some extent. And for many couples, the “most spiritual person” might be you in this season, but it might be your partner a few years from now. We can’t get too granular in analyzing this. What the Bible specifies is that we ought to be “equally yoked,” not equal in all characteristics.

Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness? And what accord has Christ with Belial? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever?

2 Corinthians 6:14-15

In Biblical times, it was common for an older, more experienced ox to be yoked together with a youngster. The old, stable, reliable one would show the newbie how to respond to the yoke. To be “equally yoked” means to be well suited to one another. Namely, the two oxen, no matter how different in size or age or maturity, must be in agreement to travel in the same direction. If one ox wished to go forward and the other wished to go backwards, no progress could be made. Or if an ox were yoked together with a giraffe, certainly there would be struggles!

This is why the passage speaks explicitly of the dichotomies we are meant to avoid: believers with unbelievers, righteousness with lawlessness, Christ with Belial. It does not reference spiritual maturity or the fruit of the spirit.

With that said, it does make sense to date and marry someone who is not only a believer but also has very similar convictions as you hold in some of the smaller details. But let us remember that spiritual growth is not linear. It often occurs in bursts rather than steady, incremental progress. If you feel yourself to be “more mature” or “less mature” than the person you’re dating (a common fear amongst those with scrupulosity), please give some grace. As long as you both have the same beliefs, the same spiritual goals, and are traveling in the same direction (growth rather than stagnation or regression), don’t stress who’s further ahead in the game. It might be you today but him/her tomorrow, or vice versa. 

And one last point here: please, try to avoid hoisting yourself as the great spiritual standard for Christian living. Just because YOU won’t drive two miles over the speed limit and feel the need to read the terms and conditions of every pop up box before you click “agree” doesn’t meant that this is the actual gold standard of what it means to live like Christ in the 21st century. Be humble and willing to admit that scrupulosity might have gotten ahold of some of your values and could be skewing them. Make sure you are measuring your significant other against the Word of God, not against your scruples.

Compatibility

Compatibility is another area where scrupulosity can wreak havoc. Rather than allowing time to reveal the natural rhythms of your relationship, your OCD might push you to hyperanalyze. Do your personalities match? Are your temperaments aligned in the way they should be? What about life goals and careers? What if there’s some hidden incompatibility that you’ve overlooked? These thoughts can lead to a perpetual state of second-guessing which drains the joy out of your connection.

I once worked with a young woman who had been a missionary abroad for some time. She felt called to ministry but also ended up in a relationship with a good Christian man who had a career that didn’t involve missions. He didn’t feel called to missions, but she did. And yet, somehow, they saw what seemed to be divine orchestration as God led them to be in a relationship together. They got married, despite the woman’s misgivings, and she contacted me after they had been married for a brief while, wondering if she should divorce him and go back overseas.

(Spoiler: I advised her not to.)

People with scrupulosity (myself included) tend to have very rigid mindsets. “If God called me to missions, it MUST mean overseas missions.” But what about inner city missions close to home? What about ministry to the unreached people groups like refugees and immigrants in our own cities who have never heard the gospel? When God called you to missions, did He specify that you “must” work in overseas missions “forever,” without any change till death do you part?

I’ve rarely seen someone with scrupulosity in a romantic relationship fixating on something in the other person that’s truly a deal breaker. It’s much more common to obsess about elements like temperament, career compatibility, hobbies, or minor interests that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

Their Character and Emotional Traits

Finally, concerns about your partner’s emotional health or character can also spiral out of control. While it’s important to be aware of red flags, scrupulosity can make you hyper-focus on small quirks or minor faults, blowing them out of proportion. You might find yourself interpreting normal human imperfections as signs that your partner isn’t good enough, or worse, that God is disapproving of your relationship.

Here is a hallmark feature of relationship OCD: a vague, fuzzy sense that something is “off” in the relationship, but you can’t figure out what.

The obsessive mind is a black and white place, a place where no gray area is tolerated. Something feeling “off” is a gray thing, an unlabeled, undefined element. It must, of necessity, be shuffled either into the white or black spaces of the mind. And since “feeling off” leaves a distinctly uncomfortable sensation, we automatically shuffle it into the black domains of badness.

There is only a small step between making this judgment call and thinking that we must give up the entire relationship.

Why might a person feel “off” in an uncomfortable way with their romantic partner? There are a few possible causes–let’s troubleshoot them together. 

Being with a (True) Narcissist

Talking about “narcissism” has become so common nowadays that I assume you’ve heard about this. One of the signs of being in a relationship with a narcissist is a chronic feeling that something is “off” but you can’t figure out what. This may result from the constant gaslighting and love bombing, which throws you off and makes you doubt yourself rather than the relationship. “Feeling off” often occurs in such toxic relationships. 

I want to validate individuals who have truly experienced life with a narcissistic person. I believe this must be a terribly unrewarding and emotionally damaging place to be. However, I think we should also nuance the discussion by remembering that true narcissists are relatively rare (0.5-1% of the population). Talking about narcissism has become far more popular than the actual occurrence, and it can even become a theme for obsessive rumination (watch out!) 

But, this is one possible cause for you to feel chronically off in a relationship.

Being with a Traumatized Partner (Which Can Mimic Narcissism, but Isn’t the Same)

I have an opinion on the vast pool of people claiming to be victims of narcissistic abuse. It’s most likely an opinion that will be unpopular, but if you’ve really been obsessing about that “off” feeling and are trying to figure out what’s causing it, hear me out. Certainly, it’s possible that your partner is a narcissist and that’s why you feel chronically “off.” But let’s consider the following: it’s also possible that you or your partner have trauma stories that are playing into the way you relate to one another–something that can mimic narcissistic traits.

Seth* was physically battered and sexually abused as a boy. Now he’s a successful adult with a wife and three kids. He has never gone to therapy and instead internalizes all his trauma and pain. It comes out as heightened control, low empathy, difficulty changing his behavioral patterns, insomnia, quickness to blame others, and extreme self-protective measures. Seth’s wife, Jayda*, has OCD. She never feels “at rest” in the relationship and wonders if God was actually leading her to marry Seth or not. She obsesses over his behavior and wonders if he is a narcissist. Jayda isn’t imagining things. She’s seeing and feeling real issues in the relationship—results of trauma that have left a terrible impact on the man she loves. But Seth isn’t a narcissist, he isn’t abusive, he’s trying his best to do better. Jayda learns slowly to give grace and to help him access the resources that will help him truly find healing. She learns to stop obsessing about his glaring imperfections and to be more assertive about what she will and won’t accept in the relationship as he moves forward towards healing. Jayda also learns to separate between the legitimate feelings of “I don’t like when he does XYZ” and the vague feelings of unrest that may be more from her OCD trying to find perfection in everything. 

Being a Doormat and Thinking Your Partner Is the Problem

The third possible non-OCD reason you might feel “off” in the relationship is if you have had issues that leave you unable to assert yourself in a way that helps you feel seen and heard. Chronically stuffing your emotions in a relationship (a shocking reality for many people with scrupulosity) is guaranteed to leave you with a chronically bad taste in your mouth. Add OCD to the mix, and you start ruminating on the bitter feelings that come from…where? You don’t know where they come from because your biggest skill is stuffing emotions, not honoring them with honest confrontation. Before you know it, you’ve convinced yourself that God might have made a mistake in bringing you together with your spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend.

Because of a traumatic upbringing, Lori* suffers from stunted emotional intelligence—the ability to be attuned to her own emotions and identify what she’s feeling. She lacks the ability to be assertive and advocate for her needs. Most of the time, Lori is a people-pleasing doormat. When Lori marries a flawed human being (as we all do), she lacks the skills to work through problems with her husband. Instead, she stuffs everything down. Some years into the marriage, Lori begins to feel resentful and bitter but she doesn’t know why. It just feels like she’s chronically unsatisfied and not at peace. She begins to obsess and fixate on these feelings and wonders if there’s something wrong with her husband that’s making her feel this way. Why, yes—she always feels worse after they have a disagreement. It must be his fault! “Maybe he is emotionally abusive,” says her secular coworker. “He sounds a little narcissistic.” The truth is much muddier and is buried between her OCD, his average flaws as a normal human being, and her weak EQ. Lori is carrying around years worth of repressed emotions that should have been worked through in a normal, healthy, married conversation. But instead of developing the skill of assertiveness (the cure for stuffing), Lori ruminates about her husband, coming up with all kinds of fanciful, imaginary things that are wrong with him. Her OCD turns her repressed emotions (about small but real things) into large, imaginary things, and as you can imagine, it wreaks havoc on the relationship. 

As you can see, obsessively ruminating about “what might be wrong” with your romantic partner is not a harmless behavior. It impacts you and it impacts your loved one. So while I don’t want to belittle the fact that there are real cases of  emotional and psychological abuse, I think our stories can be complex. If you’re reading this as a person with any form of OCD, I would strongly advise you to tread carefully if you have the obsessional theme about something being wrong with your partner. 

Practical Recommendations

Here are a few practical recommendations for the “something is wrong with my partner” obsession when you have scrupulosity about your romantic relationships:

• Do not broadcast your concerns in the public sphere. You might turn around a few weeks later and realize it was just your OCD, but it’s very hard to take back the impressions you’ve already left on other people’s minds about the person you love. 
• If you’re still dating, don’t break up with your boyfriend/girlfriend over compatibility or equal yoking concerns unless your conclusion is corroborated by a spiritual mentor who knows you well and who has a good grasp of religious OCD (see this article for advice to your spiritual mentor on how to relate to your OCD.)
• Before your obsessive patterns convince you that your partner is a horrible, awful, abusive, narcissistic good-for-nothing jerk, ask yourself a few questions: does she honestly never take responsibility for her actions and never try to change for the better, or is it just slow going? (Note that “change” is extremely slow and difficult for traumatized people, whereas “change” and taking personal responsibility is typically non-existent for genuine narcissists.) Ask yourself, do YOU have issues with repressing your feelings or not being assertive enough to solve conflicts in a healthy way? The longer you ruminate on relationship issues rather than confronting them, the worse things become. Bitterness, for the person with OCD, can be a fanciful author.

Scrupulosity and Romantic Relationships: Obsessions About Something Being Wrong with YOU

For those with scrupulosity, it’s common to direct obsessive concerns inward, worrying that you might be the one causing problems in the relationship. These fears can manifest in several ways, leading to doubts about your mental and emotional readiness, spiritual standing, or overall suitability as a partner.

If You Believe God Wants You to Be Single

Some people with scrupulosity feel a deep-seated fear that God is calling them to a life of singleness. This belief may stem from intrusive thoughts or misinterpreted spiritual impressions. For instance, you might hear an internal voice saying, “You’re not meant to marry,” and take it as a divine command rather than recognizing it as an intrusive thought. A number of my clients have taken vows of chastity–not because they genuinely feel that this is a life calling that they want, but they are slaves to the intrusive thoughts and “impressions” that seem to be the voice of God.

Scrupulous impressions wield and iron fist for anything we view as desirous. Enjoyable activities, marriage, parenthood, cherished careers or goals, and even favorite foods. Navigating scrupulosity in your romantic relationships (or lack thereof) absolutely necessitates a new understanding of these impressions. Can you really trust your mind? As a person with clinical OCD, should you trust the thoughts passing through your head to direct your entire life trajectory?

For some, this comes as a dizzying and terrifying question. If those thoughts and impressions weren’t from God, where were they from?

(Your OCD.)

For others, it is a liberating realization, like a breath of fresh air after being held underwater for too long. If those thoughts and impressions weren’t from God, what does that mean?

We don’t have to listen anymore! Hallelujah! Let the wedding bells start a-ringing!

Scripture presents marriage and singleness as equally valid callings. When Paul speaks of singleness as a gift in 1 Corinthians 7, he does not suggest it is a universal mandate. In fact, the context suggests that singleness is preferred in dire cases where the “present situation” makes marriage difficult and impractical (such as for refugees or homeless populations). Most readers of this blog would not fit the context that Paul was even speaking about.

But regardless, I think we have to question our hermeneutical method here. If you’ve taken a vow of singleness or you feel convinced that God doesn’t want you to marry, please think through HOW you came to that conclusion. If you are a person with OCD who frequently has unreliable and nonsensical intrusive thoughts in your head, your situation is already highly suspect. The chances that you were taking orders from your OCD is much more probable than for the general population.

So, think about that. Unshackle yourself from your vain and empty promises to your OCD voice. If you’ve been taking orders from your OCD, stop it. Go ask the girl out. Go text her right now.

For some people, going on the date IS your form of ERP therapy. (And will start to be enjoyable the more you’re able to parse out the difference between your OCD “god voice” and the true voice of your Heavenly Father.)

Concerns About Not Being Mentally or Emotionally “Healthy Enough”

Another common obsession is the fear that your mental health issues disqualify you from being a good partner. This can lead to a cycle of self-doubt and avoidance, as you might feel unworthy of love or incapable of sustaining a relationship. LOTS of people have even told me that their parents or pastor tell them they should be single until they are in a “healthier place.” But for black and white thinkers like people with OCD, there are no comparative terms like “healthier,” only superlatives. Their thinking shifts to “I have to be perfectly healthy in order to date and marry.”

It’s true that mental health challenges can impact relationships, but they don’t make you inherently unfit for partnership. What matters is your willingness to acknowledge your struggles and work toward managing them. Many couples navigate mental health issues together with great success, provided both partners approach the challenges with honesty and commitment.

However, there are some practical considerations for being “healthy enough” for a relationship. I like to phrase this in terms of being “healthy enough” rather than “perfectly healthy.” As a first-time mom of a toddler, I am very much navigating all-the-toddler-stuff right now, and I have appreciated the term “the good enough mother.” The term “the good enough mother,” coined by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, reevaluates perceptions about the “perfect parent” in favor of being the “good enough” parent. That is, there’s a certain necessary threshold of love, attention, caregiving, and emotional investment, and if you make it to at least this threshold, your child will thrive. You may not get all the details right (like, why didn’t anyone tell me that giving my toddler watery apple juice will give her a seemingly permanent aversion to drinking straight water?!) but you won’t make or break your child by failing in the details. Hitting healthy thresholds for “good enough” is what makes the difference between a well-adjusted child and a maladjusted child.

And, not getting the details perfect may actually help children learn resilience, adaptability, and frustration tolerance. Think about it: the parent who responds to every little whimper might actually be a helicopter parent. The parent who never has to apologize never gets a chance to model what a good apology looks like. The parent who always has dinner on the table at 6:00 never gets to bring their child alongside them in last-minute creative solutions to problems like “it’s dinnertime and the fridge is empty.” The perfect parent isn’t the perfect parent. The “mostly good parent who messes up but knows how to show the kid how to navigate through imperfection,” THAT is the best parent. We call that the “good enough” parent.

And I think we can bring that concept to the discussion of scrupulosity and romantic relationships. You don’t need to be perfectly healthy, you need to be healthy enough. You need to be hitting some real basic thresholds of functionality and proficiency for a relationship to thrive, but you don’t need to be totally liability-free. (Some of my clients have spoken of themselves in terms of being a “liability,” but there’s no one alive who is liability-free. Everyone comes with their own potential for inconvenience to the other party.)

So what might those thresholds look like? See if you see any merit in the following list:

• You should be functional enough to engage adequately in basic self-care and environment-care activities such as bathing, dressing, eating, walking the dog, washing the dishes, etc. and engaging in such care most of the time. Meaning, we’ll all have down days or spirals when we just stay in bed all day Sunday in our pajamas. But if you find yourself stranded on the couch in your pajamas all day, every day, not by choice by by the severe power of your OCD, this may not be the best time to jump into a new relationship.
• You should be functional enough to be getting at least a C grade (figuratively speaking) in whatever your main pursuit is (a career, college studies, etc.) You don’t need to be excelling, but if you just got fired from your job because of your OCD and you failed all your GED classes because of your OCD, you probably need to prioritize functionality over relationships during this season of life.
• You should be relationally functional enough to solve conflicts at least moderately well. Every relationship will have conflicts, but if your mental health is such that minor disagreements make you suicidal or violent, it’s probably not the best timing to be in a fresh relationship. It’s normal for people with a history of mental health struggles to be working through weaknesses related to conflict resolution, but I’d be looking for some basic proficiency and a desire to grow.

What do you think of those basic thresholds? Let me know in the comments below if you think that sounds balanced and practical. I don’t think it’s realistic for us to wait until we are “perfectly all better” before starting a relationship, but we also shouldn’t limp into a relationship in a condition where we would need our partner to be a full-time caregiver to us, expecting him/her to “save” us.

And that’s not what most people with scrupulosity are doing. So, I’m not terribly concerned for most of the people I see. I think the “I’ll be a liability” is generally blown way out of proportion.

Also, for what it’s worth: when couple chooses to have a baby, that baby had no say-so about coming into the world. Whether the mom’s mental health was good enough or not, the baby just comes. Contrast that to your potential romantic partner. They aren’t just biologically programmed to show up like a baby. They have a choice. They have insight into how functional you are (or aren’t). They can estimate your level of liability to them, and they can run for the hills if they think you’ll be a ball and chain to them. If you’re in a relationship and this hasn’t happened, it’s probably because you’re ruminating about yourself and catastrophizing about how badly you’ll affect your boyfriend/girlfriend.

It probably sounds simplistic to say it this way, but sometimes the best judge of your liability is the one who has to put up with you till death do you part. So let them decide and stop ruminating about yourself.

Scrupulosity in Romantic Relationships Says: “You Aren’t Good Enough”

The concept of being “equally yoked” often becomes a source of anxiety for those with scrupulosity. You might worry that your struggles with OCD make you spiritually inferior, or that you’re dragging your partner down by not being “perfect.” I spoke earlier about being equally yoked in the context of your obsessions about your partner. Now I want to talk about the flip side of that coin. Instead of obsessing about whether your partner is good enough, you might obsess about whether or not you are good enough for him/her.

Let me give you a sample conversation on how this usually goes. And may I include a TRIGGER WARNING for the following conversation with your OCD? You may not wish to read this unless you’ve already had the full gamut of relationship doubts in your own mind, otherwise you might pick up some new ones here.

Here goes:

You: I really love my boyfriend. He’s just the best. >swoon!<

Your OCD: [speaking for you in first-person voice, of course] He’s so wonderful, I just don’t deserve him. Surely this whole thing is too good to be true.

You: Yeah, maybe it IS too good to be true. That makes me feel anxious. Maybe I should give this some more thought?

Your OCD: [happy that you’re starting to engage, and still speaking in first-person voice] he’s so much more stable and spiritually mature than me. He doesn’t get triggered by sermons, and he always seems to have something uplifting that he learned from Scripture.

You: Yeah, that’s true. He’s really solid. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?

Your OCD: [switching to second-person voice to start accusing you] What if you’re not equally yoked?

You: Wait, what?

Your OCD: You’d be dragging him down if he marries you. You aren’t equally yoked. You’re a mess, look at you. You can hardly read your Bible and pray without getting neurotic about it. All that stuff the Bible says about “be anxious for nothing?” Look at how you’re FAILING at that.

You: Yeah, but I’m growing. I’m making little baby steps. Last year I was worse than now…

Your OCD: But you aren’t growing fast enough. You’ll never be a match for your boyfriend. He is spiritually out of your league.

You: I don’t think that’s what the Bible meant when it talked about being equally yoked…

Your OCD: And what about all those SINS that you haven’t confessed to him? You’re lying if you don’t tell him.

You: You mean my fears about possibly having attraction for other men? Or my fears that I might cheat on him?

Your OCD: Of COURSE. He would exit the relationship without batting an eyelash if you told him about all those doubts.

You: But technically, I haven’t done anything. I’m just afraid that I MIGHT do something. I don’t think that counts as sin.

Your OCD: But why would you even HAVE those thoughts unless there was a grain of truth to them? You ARE what you think about, you adulteress!

You: Look, I’m not going to have this conversation in my head, and I’m NOT going to tell my boyfriend about any of these weird thoughts. I’m going to just go forward and trust Jesus. He is with me. He will help me if I’m making a mistake.

Your OCD: How can you put that weight of responsibility on Jesus? You don’t even know if you’re saved or not.

You: [starting to panic]

Your OCD: What if you aren’t really a Christian? Then none of those promises of God’s presence and leading mean anything for you. And if you’re not really a Christian, it means you’re just deceiving him into thinking you are. You go to church every week, you pray together, you act all “Christian-y,” but look at you, having thoughts about other men, doubting your salvation, and having blasphemous thoughts against God! How dare you even date him? You’re LYING to him!

You: [in a full blown panic, breathing into a paper bag]

Your OCD: You know what? If you love him, the best thing you could do is to break up with him.

You: I don’t want to break up with him. I love him!

Your OCD: Well, staying with him means that you’re lying to him, which is a sin, so if you choose to stay with him it also means that you’re idolizing him over obeying God. And if you’re lying and idolizing you most certainly can’t be saved. Therefore, you have to choose: your boyfriend, or God.

Whew! There you have it. I imagine that head conversation might be triggering for some readers (who haven’t imagined the depths to which OCD can take this topic) and it might be very liberating for those who have been severely tormented by these thoughts, just knowing that this is a super common pattern for the clash between scrupulosity and romantic relationships.

So what do you do with these thoughts? Ideally, the end goal is for you to ignore them based on the truth that no one is perfectly matched, that your OCD thoughts are not the “real you,” that it’s okay for you to have doubts as you seek to follow Jesus, and so on. But of course there’s no way I can make you “feel all better” in a short little blog post (actually this post is getting pretty long). The essence of what I need to say here is that the same principles, coping strategies, and treatment options that will make you do better overall with your OCD will also help you to be less anxious about your romantic relationships. So rather than treating this as a standalone situation, I would advise that you keep doing “all the things” that need to happen for holistic OCD management.

Scrupulosity and Romantic Relationships: Obsessions with the Relationship in General

We come now to our third section. Remember, there are three main categories of relationship doubts:

1. Doubts about your partner
2. Doubts about yourself
3. Doubts about the relationship

Perhaps the most common in this list is the third–doubts about the rightness of the relationship itself. When a person is a strong believer in Jesus, it is natural for us to want every decision (especially major ones) to have the blessing and guidance of our Father in Heaven. We don’t want to make our own decisions, because that feels wrong and unsafe.

Part of this relates to our anxiety disorder. If you haven’t yet read my article about how OCD can make it feel like God is micromanaging us, that might be a good read. It explains how we sometimes over-rely on God’s guidance because we don’t feel safe or confident enough to make our own decisions.

Certainly, having God’s guidance in our romantic relationships is important, but OCD can complicate this experience. I often see clients who are struggling with scrupulosity and romantic relationships and I’ve noticed that many of them are overly attuned to their own emotions and inner sensations. That is, they FEEL these things very intensely and focus hard on them, but I would not equate this with emotional intelligence (EQ) because EQ involves emotional attunement and the ability to manage those emotions. And the latter is often missing. We feel these feelings very deeply but then are at the mercy of them–driven by the wind and tossed, as it were, until the fury of our feelings is spent.

People with this intense emotional attunement who lack emotional management can offload their decisions onto God. Not always, but fairly often, these individuals who are constantly tuned into their own feelings are also tuned in to hear any “impressions” that God might send to them. “Get off the couch right now and go to the kitchen sink” is one innocuous form of such impressions. But “If you love me, break up with your fiancée” is an impression that can have devastating consequences.

I teach that any Christian with a clinical diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder should be very suspicious of any “impressions” passing through our minds. Just pause with me to reflect: we have a disorder that deals largely with something called “intrusive thoughts.” How would you go about differentiating between an intrusive thought and a legitimate impression from God? There are certainly some guidelines that can help us decipher this, but it’s almost impossible to do well “in the heat of the moment.” I believe there are much more dependable ways that God can guide us, especially those of us with a broken ability to discern our thoughts correctly.

This is all my lead up to the big issue plaguing many people with scrupulosity and romantic relationship concerns: the idea that God is “impressing you” to end the relationship.

I’ve heard too many variations of this theme to choose just one case study. Often the impression is capitalizing on doubts from one of the previous two sections. Sometimes there’s no clear reason and it becomes more of a “lay your Isaac down” type of test. Sometimes the person has no clear understanding of the impression but believes obedience is necessary and that they will learn the reasons why God said no at some later date. Sometimes the person is waiting and waiting for God to send “confirmation” on the relationship (common amongst people who obsess about “signs” from God). And sometimes the person is obsessively nitpicky because they’re worried about finding “The One” that God intends for them and can never commit to anyone.

One young lady I’ll call Sierra* told a story in a group coaching session where she described having broken up with her boyfriend because “God told her to.” She didn’t know why but felt a heavy sense of disobedience staying in the relationship. Finally, she couldn’t handle it anymore and she broke up with him. They were both crushed. The young man moved on, though. Years passed and he married another woman. Sierra, still single and broken, learned about scrupulosity. She suddenly began to realize that she’d been building her walk with God on shifting sand. Everything she’d always thought was “the voice of God” turned out to be nothing more than intrusive thoughts. Slowly, she began learning to discern between true conviction and false guilt, between “OCD’s god voice” and the biblical “voice of God.” She realized that God isn’t capricious, popping into our minds to demand we give up random things that aren’t substantiated by Scriptural principles.

And Sierra realized that she had broken up with her boyfriend for no reason at all except that her OCD demanded it.

How heartbreaking!

I’d like to share an overview of how you can avoid erroneous thinking in this area of scrupulosity and romantic relationships. If you have OCD and are dealing with a vague sense that God doesn’t approve of the relationship but just can’t figure out why, you need to work through this list. I have tried to put my best thought into preparing what I hope is a roadmap for crawling out of the maze of scrupulosity and relationship OCD. If you are standing on the brink of killing your Isaac on the altar, please remember that God provided a ram instead. I don’t want you to sacrifice something that God doesn’t want you to sacrifice. What I’m hoping this list can do for you is to bring you back from the brink, help you think more clearly, and then engage correctly (non-compulsively) with God and your significant other.

Nine Steps to Avoiding Scrupulosity in Your Romantic Relationship

1. Learn to discern between “the god voice” of OCD and the actual voice of God. Ignore “impressions.” Do not under any circumstances ask for, or respond to, perceived “signs” from God. This is extremely unhealthy for a person with clinical OCD.
2. Research the cognitive distortion called “emotional reasoning” and give yourself a kick in the pants to not do this in your relationship. Remember the 3 T’s and 3 F’s: Not every thought you think is true, and not every feeling you feel is fact. See also Romans 3:4 and remember that your feelings are liars.
3. Develop an acceptance mindset. Stop trying to prevent everything “bad.” You aren’t perfect, your partner isn’t perfect, your relationship isn’t perfect. Accept that deeply, and ask God to bless your mess. If you have a hard settling for imperfection, you need to dig into what’s causing that mental block.
4. Lean into grace. Yes, you’re imperfect and will carry some liabilities into the relationship. You will fail sometimes. You will succeed at other times. But you are not valued like a beast of burden or a show horse, valuable only according to your performance. The blood of Jesus makes you perfectly accepted just as you are, right now. Take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Grace.

1. Delay analyzing. Yes, you are going to want to analyze all kinds of things in your relationship–about you, about your partner, or about the relationship itself. Always try to push yourself to see how long you can push “pause” before engaging with that thought. Eventually, you’ll start to get to a place where a lot of these OCD thoughts start to disappear on their own. You’ll plan to hash them out when you get off work in the evening, but by evening you’ll have already forgotten what you were worrying about.
2. Build emotional intimacy with your partner. Relationship OCD can cause us to withhold our hearts as we worry through all our doubts. Fears that we may end up breaking off the relationship can make us fearful, guarded, and closed when we should be falling in love and opening like a budding flower. This part isn’t easy, but it’s a choice: choose emotional intimacy (in keeping with the relationship stage that you’re in). Even if it means there’s a chance you’ll get your heart broken later on, do it anyways. At least you’ll be able to say you gave the relationship your very best.
3. Share joy in the present moment. Train yourself to stay present with your partner. Don’t let yourself nod and say “mm-hmm” while you’re actually stuck in your head working on an obsession. Instead of putting your efforts into solving mental obsessions, put your efforts into loving well. God is love, loving is a reflection of the divine. So love joyfully, love freely, love without fear of loss. Do little things for your partner that you know will bring a sparkle of joy. Laugh together. Be silly together. Go on adventures together. Don’t let your OCD steal your joy.
4. Don’t confess OCD stuff to your partner. The temptation is always to confess every little intrusive thought to your partner to let him or her decide how serious it is and whether or not they want to still marry you. There are a few issues with this approach:
   • Intrusive thoughts are always bizarre and outlandish (the shock factor is how OCD gets you obsessing about them, but it’s also what can sometimes get a person misdiagnosed with other weird labels like schizophrenia, bipolar, personality disorders, or psychosis). If your partner isn’t prepared, and if they don’t know what OCD is all about, they might get irreversibly shocked by your intrusive thoughts.
   • Your obsessions can damage your partner’s self-confidence and sense of security in the relationship if they don’t understand OCD. We don’t want to do that to them if we suspect or know that we are dealing in the realm of OCD fiction.
   • Confessing our obsessions can be a form of reassurance-seeking (which is unhealthy for OCD management). Confessing things that we think might have been sinful is also a form of reassurance-seeking, especially when you’re unsure if you actually did something or if you can’t quite remember what you did or didn’t do. Reassurance-seeking feels good for a moment but it is a way of feeding your OCD and keeping it alive. Don’t do it.
5. Don’t break up with your partner unless they break up with you, or unless you are advised to do so by at least two people who A) understand you and your relationship dynamics and B) understand obsessive-compulsive disorder. Never, ever, as a person with OCD, break up with your lover based on any mental impressions or signs.

Conclusion

Navigating romantic relationships while dealing with scrupulosity is challenging, but it’s not insurmountable. The fact that you’re struggling with doubts and obsessions about your relationship means that person is very important to you–because OCD always attaches itself to what you value most. But with the right tools, the right mindset, and reliance on God’s grace, you can disentangle yourself from the web of obsessions and begin to experience the joy, intimacy, and trust that healthy relationships bring.

Remember, God is not calling you to perfection in your relationships; He is calling you to love, to trust, and to lean into His guidance—not through impressions or signs or hyper-analysis of your anxious emotions, but through a calm reliance on His Word and common sense wisdom. As you do this, I promise you’ll begin hearing the noise of OCD begin to quiet. Gradually, you’ll begin tuning into the deeper, steady rhythm of a relationship built on grace and mutual trust.

As you walk forward hand in hand with your beloved one, keep in mind the encouragement from Philippians 1:6: “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” Let this be a reminder that you are not alone—God is with you. He is with your boyfriend/girlfriend/fiancé/fiancée/spouse. And Christ in your heart will be peace with Christ in his/her heart, and slowly but surely you will find rest in this relationship.

Best wishes on the journey,