6 min read
The question won’t stop. It takes different forms — Is this the right person? Do I really love them? Would I be happier with someone else? Why can’t I just feel certain? — but the engine underneath is the same: a low-grade, persistent anxiety that has chosen your relationship as its target. It’s one of the most common things I see in couples therapy.
You’ve probably done the analysis. You’ve listed pros and cons. You’ve read about attachment styles and decided you must be anxious-preoccupied. You’ve searched “relationship OCD” and felt that uncomfortable flicker of recognition. Maybe you’ve considered leaving — not because anything is catastrophically wrong, but because the anxiety feels like a signal. Like your gut is trying to tell you something.
But here’s the question that changes the conversation: What if the anxiety isn’t about your relationship at all?
What if the anxiety is about you — specifically, about a life that has quietly emptied of purpose — and your relationship is simply the nearest available target?
A client came in convinced his relationship was the problem. He felt restless, irritable, disconnected. But as we explored it together, a different picture emerged: he had lost touch with any sense of direction or meaning outside the relationship. He was asking his partner to fill a void that no relationship can fill on its own. Once he started doing his own work on purpose and identity, the relationship complaints largely resolved.
The Purpose Vacuum
There’s a particular kind of emptiness that is easy to misidentify. It doesn’t feel like depression exactly — you can still function, still laugh, still show up. It feels more like a low-frequency hum of meaninglessness. A sense that you’re going through motions without being animated by anything in particular. A life that looks fine from the outside and feels hollow from the inside.
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Schedule your free consult →When this emptiness exists, it demands to be filled. And for most of us, the most available, most emotionally charged thing in our lives is our romantic relationship.
So the relationship absorbs the anxiety that actually belongs to the emptiness. Your partner becomes the object of a restlessness that has nothing to do with them. The question “Am I with the right person?” becomes a stand-in for the question you’re not yet asking: “Am I living a life that means something to me?”
How This Plays Out
When your partner has become your primary source of meaning — not your only source, but the one carrying the most weight — the relationship becomes dangerously overloaded. Everything your partner does or doesn’t do becomes evidence in an ongoing trial about whether your life is working.
Surveillance replaces connection. You stop experiencing your partner and start monitoring them — a dynamic that often shows up in the bedroom too. Their mood, their attention, their level of enthusiasm for you — all of it gets processed as data about your worth and your life’s trajectory. This isn’t love. It’s an anxiety management system that looks like love.
The “rightness” obsession. You check your feelings the way a hypochondriac checks their body. Do I feel in love right now? Was that moment of irritation a sign? Why wasn’t I more excited to see them? You’re not assessing the relationship; you’re asking the relationship to provide a certainty that no human connection can deliver. The fantasy isn’t a different partner. The fantasy is a state of feeling in which anxiety simply doesn’t exist.
Normal imperfection becomes intolerable. A good relationship that feels “ordinary” on a Tuesday night starts to feel like evidence of failure — not because it’s failing, but because you need it to be extraordinary enough to fill a purpose-shaped hole. No relationship can do that. And when yours inevitably can’t, the anxiety spikes, and the cycle of questioning begins again.
What the Anxiety Is Actually Telling You
The anxiety is real. It’s just misdirected.
What it’s usually saying, underneath the relationship obsession, is something like: I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. I don’t feel alive in my work. I’ve lost touch with the things that used to engage me. I’ve built a life that looks right and feels wrong. And I don’t know how to talk about this because I’m supposed to be fine.
The relationship becomes the scapegoat because it’s the one area where questioning feels legitimate. “Am I with the right person?” is a question the culture takes seriously. “Does my life have meaning?” is a question that sounds melodramatic, even though it’s the more honest one.
The Shift
The uncomfortable truth is that you can’t solve a purpose problem from inside a relationship. You can’t love your way out of meaninglessness, and leaving won’t fix it either — the same anxiety will travel with you into the next relationship, because it was never about the relationship.
The work is building a life that isn’t organized around your partner as its center of gravity. Not pulling away from the relationship — but developing enough of your own substance that the relationship doesn’t have to carry everything.
This means reconnecting with work that engages you, friendships that sustain you, interests that absorb you, and a sense of your own direction that doesn’t depend on someone else’s validation. It means learning what psychologists call differentiation — the capacity to be your own person while also being in a relationship. To manage your own anxiety rather than reflexively exporting it to your partner.
It also means examining what’s driving the anxiety in the first place. Often it traces back to earlier experiences — families where your worth was conditional on achievement, environments where “just being” wasn’t enough, attachment relationships where you learned that your needs would be met only if you were extraordinary. The fairy tale of the perfect partner is often a cousin of the fantasy of the perfect life — and both serve the same defensive function.
Often it traces back to earlier experiences — families where your worth was conditional on achievement, environments where “just being” wasn’t enough, attachment relationships where you learned that your needs would be met only if you were extraordinary.
When to Get Help
If the questioning has become a permanent feature of your inner life — if you can’t enjoy your relationship because you’re too busy auditing it — individual therapy can help you untangle what’s actually going on. Not by answering the question “should I stay or go?” (therapy isn’t a Magic 8-Ball), but by helping you understand what the anxiety is really about, so you can address the actual problem rather than the one it’s hiding behind.
If the anxiety is affecting the relationship itself — if your partner feels the surveillance, the withdrawal, the constant questioning — couples work can help you address that directly, so the relationship doesn’t become collateral damage while you’re figuring out the rest.
A free 15-minute consultation is the place to start.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can lack of personal purpose cause relationship problems?
Yes. When someone lacks a sense of direction or meaning in their own life, they often unconsciously look to the relationship to fill that void. This places enormous pressure on the partner and the relationship, creating anxiety that gets mistaken for relationship problems.
How do you tell the difference between relationship anxiety and real problems?
Relationship anxiety often feels urgent and all-consuming but shifts targets — one week it is about commitment, the next about attraction. Real relationship problems tend to be more consistent and specific. Therapy helps distinguish between the two.
Does individual therapy help with relationship anxiety?
Often, yes. When the anxiety is rooted in personal identity, purpose, or attachment patterns rather than genuine relationship dysfunction, individual work can be more effective than couples therapy — at least initially.
About the Author
Jonah Taylor, LCSW, CST is a psychodynamic therapist and AASECT Certified Sex Therapist in Pittsburgh. He specializes in Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples, sex therapy, problematic sexual behavior, and men’s psychology — bringing analytic rigor to the deep patterns that shape how people relate, desire, and get stuck. Book a free consultation.
