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What Is Relationship Anxiety? Understanding the Hidden Rules That May Be Running Your Love Life
But What Is Relationship Anxiety: Los Angeles CA
Have you ever had a perfect evening with your partner—laughing over dinner, feeling close and content—only to lie awake at 2 a.m., replaying every moment and wondering if something’s wrong? Maybe you’ve found yourself overanalyzing texts, refreshing social media, or starting small fights after moments of connection.
If that sounds familiar, you might be experiencing relationship anxiety—a common but often misunderstood form of anxiety that quietly disrupts even healthy relationships.
Relationship anxiety affects millions of people. It quietly harms healthy relationships and damages mental health. Good anxiety therapy should do more than grounding exercises, self-care, and mindfulness. These techniques have their time and place. I tend to find that those are bandaids, and effective treatment needs to blend cognitive-behavioral strategies, relationship support, and a more strategic approach to anxiety therapy.
But What Is Relationship Anxiety?
Relationship anxiety is the persistent worry, fear, or doubt that something is wrong in your romantic relationship—even when there’s no real evidence. It’s not an official diagnosis, but it behaves like other anxiety disorders: it’s patterned, predictable, and self-reinforcing.
People with relationship anxiety often:
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Worry their partner doesn’t really love them.
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Constantly seek reassurance or check their partner’s behavior.
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Feel uneasy during calm or happy moments.
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Experience intrusive thoughts about breaking up or being left.
While attachment styles and past trauma can play a role, relationship anxiety is more than an insecure attachment. It’s an anxious system running a set of mental “rules” that tell you to protect yourself—even when you’re safe.
About Me: Oliver Drakeford, LMFT
I’m Oliver Drakeford, a licensed couples therapist in Los Angeles. For over a decade, I’ve worked with individuals and couples struggling with anxiety, trust issues, and communication breakdowns.
Through years of clinical work, I’ve identified that relationship anxiety follows ten specific “rules”—predictable mental scripts that keep people and couples stuck. When you learn to spot and break these rules, anxiety loses its grip—and relationships start to heal.What Is Relationship Anxiety and Its Symptoms
Relationship anxiety is not an official anxiety disorder, but it follows a similar pattern of persistent worry, doubt, and fear centered on your romantic relationship. Generalized anxiety disorder might focus on work or health. Relationship anxiety targets your partnership.
It makes you question your partner's feelings and your own. It can look like trust issues or snooping on social media. It can look like separation anxiety and make you think about attachment issues. It can also come as intrusive thoughts or 'what-if' questions like relationship OCD.
Why Relationship Anxiety Happens
From an evolutionary lens, anxiety evolved to protect us. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors survived by scanning for danger—predators, rival tribes, or loss of safety. Today, that same wiring scans for emotional threats instead of physical ones.
When your brain perceives emotional risk—like rejection or abandonment—it triggers anxiety to “protect” you. The result? Overthinking, withdrawal, or control behaviors that actually create the very disconnection you fear.
As a therapist, I often say anxiety’s goal is to keep you small, safe, and separate. But the cost of safety is intimacy.Here's the crucial insight: anxiety is persistent, patterned, and predictable.
Which means we can figure out how it works, when it's going to show up, and what its game plan is. And once we know the rules anxiety plays by, we have a much better chance of winning the game.
The Five Types of Relationship Anxiety
Relationship anxiety doesn’t look the same for everyone. As a couples therapist, I see distinct patterns that show how it shapes behavior and communication in relationships. Here are the five most common types I encounter in therapy—and how they tend to show up.
Before we dive deeper, it’s important to know that relationship anxiety doesn’t show up the same way for everyone. In my couples therapy practice I specialize in anxiety disorders, I’ve noticed that people express their fears and doubts through different behavioral patterns. Over time, these patterns become predictable “anxiety blueprints” — ways your mind tries to keep you safe from emotional pain.
In therapy, I’ve identified five main types of relationship anxiety, each with its own triggers, emotional logic, and protective strategies. Recognizing your type isn’t about labeling yourself with an anxiety disorder, or just about knowing attachment styles, — it’s about understanding the rules it makes you follow, so you can begin to break them.
These five types — The Threat Detective, The Seeker, The Thinker, The Defender, and The Fortress — describe how anxiety operates in relationships and what healing might look like for each pattern.
Type 1: The Threat Detective
Definition: The Threat Detective constantly scans for signs of danger in the relationship—even when none exist.
They overanalyze tone, facial expressions, and text messages, convinced something bad is about to happen. A small smile at a text during dinner can spiral into panic, suspicion, or imagined betrayal.
Therapist Insight: This pattern is driven by hypervigilance—a nervous system trained to anticipate pain. Therapy helps retrain the mind to interpret cues realistically instead of catastrophically.
Type 3: The Thinker
Definition: The Thinker lives in their head, analyzing every interaction and feeling.
A single intrusive thought—“Do I really love them?”—can send them into hours of mental debate. They often keep their worries hidden, fearing judgment or rejection. Over time, overthinking creates emotional distance and communication breakdowns.
Therapist Insight: Cognitive-behavioral strategies and mindfulness can help interrupt analysis loops and reconnect thought with emotion.
Type 5: The Fortress
Definition: The Fortress fears vulnerability and protects themselves through emotional distance.
They appear calm and in control, but their shields go up whenever intimacy deepens. They may withdraw during conflict or avoid discussing emotions, believing openness equals danger.
Therapist Insight: The key for the Fortress is gradual emotional exposure—learning to trust connection without feeling engulfed or unsafe.
Type 2: The Seeker
Definition: The Seeker needs constant reassurance and emotional contact to feel secure.
If their partner doesn’t text back quickly, anxiety floods in. They may mistake closeness for connection, leaning heavily on their partner for emotional regulation. Ironically, this pressure can create distance—the opposite of what they crave.
Therapist Insight: The Seeker benefits from learning self-soothing skills and building tolerance for uncertainty—both key goals in anxiety therapy and attachment repair.
Type 4: The Defender
Definition: The Defender battles constant self-doubt and a harsh inner critic.
They believe they’re unworthy of love or doomed to fail in relationships. Even when their partner shows care, anxiety whispers: “This won’t last.” The Defender’s instinct is to stay silent about their fears to avoid being “too much.”
Therapist Insight: Healing begins when the Defender learns self-compassion and practices sharing vulnerable thoughts safely—reducing shame and strengthening attachment security.
Seeing Yourself in These Patterns
You might recognize yourself in more than one of these types—and that’s normal. These patterns aren’t personality flaws; they’re learned survival strategies. Once you can identify which “rules” it makes you follow, you can start breaking them—and experience real, secure intimacy.
Relationship Anxiety Symptoms:
The 10 Rules Of Relationship Anxiety
Relationship anxiety manifests through ten specific "rules" that it tricks you into obeying. Here are the clear symptoms. They combine ideas from cognitive behavioral therapy, knowledge about anxiety disorders, and my ten years of anxiety therapy experience in mental health settings.
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The Five Types of Relationship Anxiety
Relationship anxiety doesn’t look the same for everyone. As a couples therapist, I see distinct patterns that show how it shapes behavior and communication in relationships. Here are the five most common types I encounter in therapy—and how they tend to show up.
Before we dive deeper, it’s important to know that relationship anxiety doesn’t show up the same way for everyone. In my couples therapy practice I specialize in anxiety disorders, I’ve noticed that people express their fears and doubts through different behavioral patterns. Over time, these patterns become predictable “anxiety blueprints” — ways your mind tries to keep you safe from emotional pain.
In therapy, I’ve identified five main types of relationship anxiety, each with its own triggers, emotional logic, and protective strategies. Recognizing your type isn’t about labeling yourself with an anxiety disorder, or just about knowing attachment styles, — it’s about understanding the rules it makes you follow, so you can begin to break them.
These five types — The Threat Detective, The Seeker, The Thinker, The Defender, and The Fortress — describe how anxiety operates in relationships and what healing might look like for each pattern.
The Ghost Of Relationships Past
Your partner smiles at their phone, and suddenly you're not in your current apartment—you're back in that other relationship, reading that text you weren't supposed to see.
You make your current partner pay for past wrongs they did not commit. It recognizes patterns well but does not always interpret them wisely. This causes trust issues, stress, and insecurity. It crosses boundaries and harms intimacy.
Symptoms:
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Intense reactions to situations that vaguely remind you of past betrayals
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Checking phones or demanding proof of loyalty
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Seeing your partner through "dirty lenses" that distort your view
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Triggering when there's no clear reason why
The Doubt Dilemma
A harmless "what if" thought slips in about your relationship—"What if they don't really love me?" or "What if I don't love them?"—and before you know it, you're unraveling the whole relationship in your head.
This is anxiety gaslighting you: gut feelings of unexpressed marital distress that create endless patterns of overthinking, robbing you of sleep and creating mountains of emotional distress.
Symptoms:
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Obsessive questioning about your gut feelings or that starts with "what if"
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Inability to trust your own feelings or perceptions
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Overthinking and replaying the same relationship worries without resolution
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Physical symptoms and discomfort like nausea or loss of appetite from the stress
The Law of Constant Contact
When your partner doesn't text back right away, it feels like abandonment. Your chest tightens, your brain races, and you're already drafting your eighth message.
Relationship anxiety convinces you that your wellbeing equals constant check-ins—an IV drip of reassurance that ultimately causes the marital distress you're dreading.
Symptoms:
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Panic when you can't reach your partner and gut feelings something's off.
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Needing to know their whereabouts at all times, compulsions to ask.
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The relief from contact lasting only minutes before you need another "hit"
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Partners feeling suffocated by the constant need for reassurance
The Sabotage of Serenity
Your worst arguments happen right after your best moments. That Sunday morning feels perfect. Suddenly, you feel the need to start a fight about something from three weeks ago.
This self-sabotage makes peace feel unsafe. You create chaos to feel secure again.
Symptoms:
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Creating conflict during calm moments
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Inability to trust happiness or stability in a relationship.
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Feeling that "this is too good to be true"
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Treating serenity itself as dangerous
The Conflict is Catastrophe Rule
Every disagreement feels like the beginning of the end. A raised voice or simple difference of opinion is instantly escalated into proof that love is crumbling.
Instead of repairing, you shut down, lash out, or avoid—which widens the very distance you fear most.
Symptoms:
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Avoiding all disagreements
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Treating minor conflicts as relationship-ending events
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Shutting down or withdrawing during arguments
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Accepting unhealthy situations rather than risk conflict
The Mind Reading Mandate
They don't respond right away to your comment about coffee, and you JUST KNOW they're irritated with you.
Anxiety convinces you that you're fully qualified to decode every micro-expression, every pause, every shift in breathing—and to treat your assumptions like facts and your fears like prophecies.
Symptoms:
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Building entire stories from a single unreturned smile
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Constant surveillance of your partner's mood and reactions
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Exhausting yourself looking for threats that may not exist
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Partners feeling perpetually misunderstood
The Unworthiness Clause
You're furniture shopping at IKEA, and in two minutes of silence, you go from debating which sectional to buy to wondering why your partner bothers being with you.
Everything good becomes tiny and distant, while that awkward thing you said three months ago becomes massive and inescapable.
Symptoms:
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Constant self-doubt and insecurity about deserving love
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Comparing yourself unfavorably to others
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Seeking constant reassurance of your worth while self-silencing concerns.
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Testing your partner's love through manufactured dramas
The Regulate Me Requirement
You can't feel calm until your partner comes home. You can't make decisions without their input.
Your emotional stability depends entirely on another person's presence, reassurance, or mood. Your partner becomes less of a companion and more of a walking anxiety medication.
Symptoms:
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Waiting for your partner to feel okay and reassurance-seeking to find out.
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Handing over emotional responsibility to your partner
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Becoming helpless without their presence
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Partners feeling exhausted playing the role of caretaker
The Lockdown Law
You need to know where they are, who they're with, what they're doing, it's the ultimate in reassurance-seeking aimed at lowering insecurity.
"Text me when you land" offers a moment of calm—until the relief fades and you need another promise, another check-in. Safety comes from control, but love kept under lock and key becomes a prison.
Symptoms:
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Monitoring your partner's activities as a form of reassurance-seeking.
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Setting rigid rules about communication and schedules to compensate for insecurity.
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Resistance to any change in routines
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Partners feeling surveilled rather than loved
The Vulnerability Ban
Every time you get close to being vulnerable, something inside you pulls the emergency brake.
The words get stuck, the feelings get locked away. It warns that opening up is dangerous, so you become an expert at being there but not really there.
Symptoms:
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Withholding true feelings to avoid rejection
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Surface-level conversations that never go deeper
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Partners feeling like they don't really know you
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Emotional distance even in physical proximity
Relationship Anxiety Test: Discover Which Rules Are Running Your Relationship
Understanding which of the ten rules you're following is the first step toward breaking free from relationship distress and anxiety disorders in general. It goes above and beyond knowing your attachment style, to give you an overview of the patterns in thinking, self-silencing, compulsions, and more.
You probably saw yourself in more than one archetype. That's because what really defines your pattern are the specific rules it makes you follow—and the Seeker and the Defender can both be trapped by the Doubt Dilemma, but it plays out in very different ways.
Take the Free Relationship Anxiety Quiz →
When you complete the quiz, you'll discover:
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Which of the 10 Rules of Relationship Anxiety you're following
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Your primary relationship archetype
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Personalized tools to start breaking the rules that are holding you back
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Access to additional resources and insights from my private practice
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This isn't just another personality quiz. It's a roadmap to understanding your specific patterns so you can start making real changes. Because it's not enough to know the rules—you need the tools to break them.
Take the quiz now and get your personalized anxiety-breaking toolkit sent straight to your inbox.
The Path Forward To Intimacy
Here's what I've learned after ten years of working with relationship anxiety: The more desperately we grasp for certainty, the more it slips through our fingers. If a butterfly lands on your hand, you have to let it be—there isn't much of a butterfly left if you grab it tightly and put it in your pocket.
Our partners need to feel free to come closer because they're choosing to, not because they're obligated to ease our worries. Time apart becomes an opportunity for missing each other rather than a trigger for panic.
The aim isn't to banish anxiety entirely or to never feel worried again. The aim is to live alongside these feelings without letting them run the show. The opposite of anxiety isn't calmness—it's presence. Being in the moment, not the past or the future.
Relationship anxiety or attachment styles don't have to define your love life. Once you understand the rules it forces you to play by, you can start breaking them, one courageous choice at a time. And that's when something remarkable happens: your relationships stop being performances or survival mechanisms and start becoming homes.
I provide mental health treatment to help couples improve relationship quality in Los Angeles - I provide in-person and online therapy and treat a range of anxiety disorders in my practice.
Substance abuse
Interpersonal therapy
Couples Communication Challenges.
FAQ Addressing Common Concerns
"What if therapy reveals we're incompatible?"
Worries like this are normal and also a sign of relationship anxiety - but for the record, therapy for relationships doesn't predetermine outcomes. Instead, it clarifies what's fear-based distortion versus genuine incompatibility. Most clients discover that addressing attachment issues actually reveals deeper compatibility than they imagined.
"Can you help with panic disorders and relationship anxiety together?"
Absolutely. Panic attacks often accompany romantic distress.
We'll address both the panic disorder symptoms and their specific triggers within your partnership, developing comprehensive strategies for both issues.
"What about porn use affecting our connection?"
Sexual concerns, including porn use, often intertwine with attachment issues and emotional disconnection. We can address these sensitive topics within the broader context of rebuilding intimacy and trust and figure out how much anxiety is playing into this concern.
"How do you maintain professional boundaries while being warm?"
Personal space and professional boundaries create safety for deep work. While I maintain clear boundaries as your mental health professional, our therapeutic setting will feel warm, accepting, and genuinely caring.
Taking Your First Step Toward Secure Love - Beating Relationship Anxiety's Rules
From my practice in the heart of West Hollywood, steps from Santa Monica Boulevard's bustling energy, I've witnessed countless individuals and couples transform their emotional distress into emotional well-being. You don't have to navigate relationship anxiety alone.
Whether you're struggling with ROCD, trust issues from traumatic experiences, or simply want to develop healthier communication skills, evidence-based therapies can help. Together, we'll uncover the patterns keeping you stuck and develop the security you need to love fully—without losing yourself.
Contact my West Hollywood office today to begin your journey from relationship anxiety to authentic, secure connection. Because everyone deserves to experience love as a source of peace, not panic.
How to Book a Session with Oliver Drakeford Therapy
To get started with me - just schedule a free consultation call by clicking the link below - it's 15 minutes and gives you the opportunity to ask me questions, and me the chance to make sure I can help and that our schedules align.