A form of anxiety
Anxiety in relationships
When being close to someone sets off an alarm instead of settling one.
I check whether he has read the message, and if he doesn't reply straight away I start thinking it is all about to end.
What anxiety in relationships is
It is anxiety that activates inside attachments: with a partner, but also with a friend, a family member, sometimes a colleague. The subject is not the relationship itself — it is whether the relationship will hold. How long it will last, what the other person really thinks, whether something has cracked.
What separates it from ordinary concern is proportion: the alarm goes off on minimal signals, and the calm lasts only until the next one.
The forms it takes
Rereading a message to work out its tone. Checking when it was read. Asking whether everything is all right, and asking again shortly afterwards. Anticipating the end of a relationship that is going well. Or the reverse: withdrawing first, so as not to be the one left.
These are different behaviours with the same function — lowering uncertainty. Which is why they work for a few hours and then have to be done again.
The mechanism: reassurance that is never enough
Asking for reassurance brings immediate relief, and so it repeats. But it answers a different question from the one you are asking: the other person's answer is about this moment, while the question is about certainty.
What consolidates, each time, is the sense that without that check you cannot be at ease. That is the mechanism, not a side effect of it.
It is not the same as a difficult relationship
A relationship can genuinely be a problem, and the unease can be an accurate reading of what is happening. Telling the two apart is part of the initial assessment, and it is not always immediate.
The practical test: if the same alarm goes off across different relationships, with different people, the theme probably travels with you. If it concerns one relationship only, it may well be about that relationship — and then the work has a different object.
What happens for the other person
Repeated requests for reassurance are tiring, and tiredness produces shorter answers. Shorter answers get read as confirmation of the fear, and the fear increases the requests.
It is a loop in which both people are right from where they stand, and neither built it alone. Seeing it as a loop rather than as someone's fault is usually the first useful step.
How the work goes
We start from concrete situations: an unanswered message, an evening that went wrong, the precise moment the alarm went off. The diary is for exactly this, because days later the impression survives and the details are gone.
Then we work on reducing the checking gradually, by agreement rather than in one decision. The work is individual even when the subject is a relationship: it concerns your own way of being in one, which is also the only part you have real leverage over.
Frequently asked questions
Not necessarily. Jealousy involves a third person; here the fear is that the bond will break, and there may be no third person at all. The two sometimes overlap, but the mechanism being worked on — seeking certainty through checking — is the same either way.
No. The work is individual and concerns your own way of being in a relationship. In some cases, where the difficulty has organised itself around the couple, working as a pair makes sense — but that is a separate assessment, and couples therapy is a different kind of work.
No. The same mechanism appears in friendships, in family relationships and sometimes at work: rereading a colleague's message, looking for confirmation of your place in a group. The attachment changes; the structure of the alarm does not.
Dr. Giuseppe Iannone — Psychotherapist
FIRST STEP