An OCD Marriage

My previous blog regarding my personal experience and history with OCD turned out to be more serious than I had intended. My original intention was to write an amusing ditty of what happens when two people with mild OCD meet, fall in love, and marry, despite massive obstacles such as: not getting the mail immediately, skipping a workout, and other similar horrifying experiences.

Okay, it’s not really that big of a deal. But there have been some amusing moments when we just have laugh at ourselves, or each other. In a perfect OCD marriage (I don’t even know what that means); maybe both partners would obsess over the same things. But not us. Nope, we obsess over completely different, and sometimes opposite things. For example, I do not handle spur of the moment changes in my daily schedule well, especially if it means I don’t get to work out. My husband, on the other hand, loves to get these last minute social summons, and frequently attends them, albeit without me. We’ve come to an acceptable agreement that we both can live with: he goes to these events, and I stay home (or whatever my original schedule called for), and neither gets angry or upset at the other. It has actually worked quite nicely thus far, in our almost 3 years together.  

Another example: mail. I could go days without getting the mail (and often do, when my husband travels), despite the fact that I walk past our mailbox at least twice a day. It’s not a matter of energy; I just don’t think or care that much about it. My husband, on the other hand, will check the mail immediately upon his arrival, sometimes at the expense of greeting me, his lovely wife. The good news about your spouse suffering from OCD is that he/she doesn’t take offense to these kinds of things, which might, to non-OCD sufferers, seem like a terrible slight.

When we returned from our over 3 week wedding/honeymoon event last month, one of the first things he did was sort through the mail (although, since we had another OCD friend house-sitting, it was neatly sorted into his, hers, magazines, and junk piles, much to his dismay and disappointment). One of the first things I did? You guessed it, went to the gym. Now, to both of our credits, despite our gym/mail compulsions, we did manage to clean up the massive flooding that had occurred while we were gone before allowing ourselves the luxury of indulging in our respect compulsive activities. Don’t think for a minute that both of us weren’t calculating in our heads how long it would be before we could indulge, we just didn’t say it out loud. Because letting your carpet continue to mold while you open the mail or workout would just be crazy.

Tag: Obsessive | OCD | marriage