Dear hope:

I will retell your story in a chronological order, placing what happened first before what happens second, etc., best I can, approximating dates:

March 2020: last time you spoke to your ex, following a bad breakup (“That relationship ended bad“).

January 2021: you met your current boyfriend and started a relationship.

October 2021: you were away from your boyfriend in college and had “very bad separation issues from being away from him… felt homesick being away from him“, and you found out that he was sexting with another woman or women. First, you were “in shock“, saying nothing, but eventually, in his house, the two of you talked a lot, he cried a lot, you were angry and later:  “I began to really overthink about it. meanwhile I’ve always been an overthinker“.

November 2021- February 2022: you moved back home, switching to community college, spending a lot more time with your boyfriend. You wrote this about your current, 1 year and 4 months relationship:  “He is my longest relationship, and this relationship means the world to me. I am very comfortable around him. I act my true self around him, and we always talk about our problems“.

February 2022: you went to a basketball game, saw your ex and talked with him for the first time in almost two years.

February 2022-now (2 months): “My mind went into a spiral about my current relationship. Thoughts like do I love him? It made me feel so wrong and guilty… not feeling those ‘in love’ feelings and it’s really taking a toll on me, I feel so wrong for it but I’m trying to accept that it’s normal to not always feel them… Pretty much crying every day because I don’t understand why I’m not experiencing those feelings even though I know I love my partner and never wanna lose him“.

My thoughts as to why you no longer feel in-love with your boyfriend: feeling in-love is about feeling hope and imagining/ fantasizing about good things happening (the classic “and they lived happily ever after”, comes to mind). It takes a level of calm to feel hopeful and to imagine good things. When a person gets too fearful, too anxious, and/ or too angry, a person is no longer calm enough to hope and imagine good things, therefore, it is impossible to feel in-love.

In other words, the mental/ emotional state of being in-love does not go together with heightened anxiety and anger.

As to my understanding of what happened: you’ve been anxious for the longest time and that’s why you’ve been an overthinker for the longest time (for so long that it feels like always: “I’ve always been an overthinker“, since you were a child, I am guessing). Anxiety and Overthinking go together. In some real-life circumstances your anxiety goes up (ex., being in college away from your boyfriend), at other circumstances, your anxiety goes down (ex., being back home, close to your boyfriend).

But it is not only real-life circumstances that affect the extent of your anxiety; thoughts also affect anxiety. Every time you think about your boyfriend sexting while you were away in college, your anxiety (and sometimes anger) goes up.

When you met your ex in February, your anxiety went up probably because feelings associated with that relationship and bad breakup surfaced, triggering your anger in regard to your boyfriend past sexting, and your fear of losing him.

Because when Fear is Up=> Overthinking is Up, you started thinking a lot: “Thoughts like do I love him?”, “why I’m not experiencing these feelings“? I am “so wrong and guilty… so wrong for it“, and I “never wanna lose him“. All these thoughts increase your anxiety, and increased anxiety makes feeling in-love impossible.

Clearly, there is nothing wrong about any thought or feeling a person has, because our thoughts and feelings just happen, we don’t choose them; it is only our chosen actions that point to guilt or innocence. But you feel guilty for not feeling in-love, as if you chose to lose that feeling. Thing is, you didn’t choose to lose the in-love feelings any more than you chose to feel homesick for him back in October.

Notice that you wrote I feel so wrong and guilty, and I changed it to you thinking I am so wrong and guilty: there is a belief in you that you are wrong and guilty, and that’s why you feel wrong and guilty. A belief is something you think that has a strong emotion attached to it; it is a combination of thought and emotion. I am guessing that this belief started early for you, when you were a child, something was wrong at home, and you felt that it was your fault?

I am asking because this kind of core-belief keeps generating anxiety, like wood that keeps fueling a fire. Of course, this very question that I asked you is likely to increase your anxiety, therefore it is important that you answer it- if you choose to answer it- when you are as calm as you can be.

anita