The Hidden Spiritual Battle in Relationship Anxiety

Feeling bogged down by anxious thoughts?

Dealing with anxiety is a part of any relationship. That’s true whether it’s personal or professional, but it’s most significant when the anxiety appears in a romantic relationship. What does it mean?

Is this a part of the normal relationship course that everyone goes through, or is the anxiety the sign of a red flag that means it's time to cut your losses and move on? How you and your significant other handle these murky emotional waters will decide the future of the relationship.

Anxiety is driven by emotions. We live amidst a secular world that has essentially deified our emotions and turned the great reality of love into nothing more than a really good feeling. Clearly, this error must be rejected and we need to embrace the reality that love is a decision, not a feeling.

But it's also important to avoid the other extreme by pretending that our emotions are unimportant. Emotions can be very intuitive and they often serve as an early warning system that something is amiss.

While the consequences of Original Sin have marred our emotions and thus make it important to proceed carefully, emotions are still from God—and therefore a part of our nature and a good thing. The challenge is how to properly integrate them with the cooler realm of reason.

This is going to require you to make an honest examination of your own baggage.

It’s that baggage which is the primary blockage of clear communication between your anxiety and your reason.

Let’s say you were in a previous relationship with someone who could get verbally abusive. You’ve since done some good work on yourself to ensure it doesn’t happen again. As a result, you’re very alert to anything that smacks of disrespect from your significant other. That alertness is very good, but it’s also possible that your background will cause you to overreact to relatively mild slights. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and finding that middle ground can be very challenging, emotional work.

The integration of emotion and reason requires a strong spiritual life as its foundation and a good community of people to accompany you. The rosary, the chaplet of Divine Mercy and daily Mass (to the extent possible) are the potent spiritual weapons, while trusted friends whose advice you can be confident in is also necessary to help you sort through your anxieties.

Then it’s time to sit down and work through exactly what you're anxious about. This will depend on a number of factors that begin with what stage the relationship is at. The anxieties of someone flush with young love after six weeks of dating will be different than the anxiety that comes with shopping for an engagement ring or making the final leap of faith at the altar.

Here are some specific possibilities of gnawing fears that often make people anxious in a relationship…

Are we moving too fast?
This would be for the couple in the early stages of a relationship, and the first question to ask is what exactly you mean by “too fast”? If you’ve started making wedding plans before you’ve met their extended family and friends, then the answer might be yes. If it’s simply that you’ve committed to date this person exclusively and are just experiencing the racing mind that can come with the prospect of change, then your pace is probably fine.

Where do we stand?
Are you feeling anxious that you seem to be more in love with your dating partner than they are with you? Or vice-versa? There’s nothing wrong with this per se—people “fall for each other” at different stages. If this is the anxiety-inducing question, there’s really no way around it than having an honest conversation. Unless of course, you had the conversation a week ago, resolved it well and now are feeling the same fears. Then there’s a deeper problem with trust that needs to be addressed.

What will happen to us?
The most common times for this are when it’s time to make a leap of faith. In a long-distance relationship, it could be one person relocating to be with the other. It could be the decision to propose or to accept a proposal. Or it could be three days before your wedding. In other words, plain old cold feet. The antidote is to shift the focus off of yourself and onto God—rephrase the question into “God, am I doing Your will?”.

If the answer to that is yes, it doesn’t mean that everything will be a bed of roses. In fact, it’s a guarantee that crosses will be in your future. But whatever does happen will be in accord with the Divine Will and lead to Heaven for you and your significant other. And you’ll be at least reasonably content on this side of eternity.

Finally, don’t underestimate the spiritual battle that takes place in these times of anxiety.

The Enemy of our eternal salvation and earthly contentment takes advantage of uncertain times to pound away at our fears and goad us in to whatever path will move us further from God.

Our ally in this battle is the Mother of Christ. Invoke her under the title of Mother of Sorrows, the surest way to expose the tactics of the Enemy. Pray to your guardian angel to show you the path. In the great spiritual battle that ultimately undergirds relationship anxieties, we have a lot of weaponry in our arsenal.