Note: A lot of stuff in this article can be applied to men with anxiety, as well as women. But since I’m a woman who has gone through anxiety, this is going to be from my point of view.
Anxiety is nothing but excess, and excess of everything is bad. It is excess of worry, excess of thoughts and excess of expectations. It is the unnecessary amount of concern that disturbs the mental state of a person resulting in panic.
Anxiety has evidently many effects on a person’s personality; it makes them worried more than you can imagine and you might think that they are just being clingy, but all they are doing is worrying more than needed. People with anxiety can relate to the fact that it makes them different from people without anxiety in terms of behavior. Daily tasks and routine jobs can be turned into huge burdens, gifting them with only more self-doubt and low self-esteem.
Anxiety can greatly affect the way a person loves, too. Since behavior has a lot to do with how one perceives others’ general characteristics, it is important to know that a girl with anxiety will love you differently. Her love won’t be from some other planet or in a foreign language, no, it will only be a little different and all you will have to do is to understand it with patience, knowing the fact that anxiety can be difficult to deal with.
1. She Needs to Be Reassured:
Every girl, in fact, needs some reassuring of your love for her. Not just love, but of almost everything: if you love her as much as she does, if you are happy with her, if she annoys you a lot or if you would never cheat her. In short, people in relationships need reassurance just as much as they need love.
But girls with anxiety will need a little more love and reassurance than girls without anxiety because of their constant doubts (not about you, but about everything good happening around them). If she has told you she has anxiety or if you have found out some way, you need to bear with her by being patient.
She might ask you one thing ten times and still not be satisfied, but keep it in mind that she is only repeating herself because your opinion is what matters to her and she is trying her best to content herself with it.
Knowing what is going on with you would matter to her just as much as your opinion about something. Remember, reassurance is all that is needed to make her feel satisfied, so even if she is asking something for the hundredth time, keep up with her and tell her again what you told her ninety-nine times (besides telling her to calm down gently).
It will be a matter of time until your reassurance takes away all her doubts and insecurities and you might even be remembered by her as the curator.
Love, like every other thing in life, comes with expectations and hopes. If your girl has anxiety, those expectations and hopes can eat her up or drown her in them. What can save her from drowning is your hand of support.
Make her feel like she has you, and do not think that she is doubting you when she repeats her questions. Anxiety is like an ocean of thoughts and questions; if you take her out of that ocean with your hand of support, she will never let go of it.
That is the thing about people with anxiety, once they are reassured, they never forget and their love only grows stronger. Once they know you are there for them, that you won’t doubt them and feel lucky to be with them, they will do their best to leave the ocean behind forever.
2. A Rare Bond With Her:
You will notice your unique and rare bond with her as time passes. You will have come so close to her at one point that it will be near to impossible for you to even think of being with someone other than her.
This rare bond will be a result of not only time spent together, but of the closeness and openness. Openness brings people together better than being close does. It is vulnerability that opens our deepest emotional secrets and fears and displays them in front of someone. We become vulnerable to a person and that only attracts us to them more than before.
Do not think of it as something ugly if she trusts you with her insecurities. Feel lucky for she chose you to lean on. Girls with anxiety tend to lean on their loved ones more than usual, they turn to you more often than usual because for them, you are the solution to everything.
The moment you realize the value of your presence in their lives, how much they look up to you and what you are to them, you might never want to walk away, ever, for you will have become their lifeline and, in no way, you will be able to find it in your heart to look away when they look at you.
You will have a rare bond with her if she has anxiety, because you will have seen almost all of her soul. She will put out everything in front of you so will never have a connection as beautiful and open as the one you have with her. Things can be unimaginably cruel for people who have anxiety.
Imagine being given a task to complete in two hours and having the habit of being anxious; your brain will imagine all sorts of things that could happen to stop you from completing the task and the result of not completing the task would be equally worrying. With all the worrying and tension in her head, if your girl comes to you, and you only, to sort her thoughts out because she trusts you with them, it is absolutely something you should feel proud to do.
Having the power to comfort someone just by listening to them talk is no less than a blessing. Moreover, it won’t be just another person you will be comforting, it will be the person you love with all your heart.
3.You Are The One:
Once the girl with anxiety has you, it will be all. Once she is sure about you being the one, she will never look around to see if there are other potential boyfriends. It is not just their loyalty and commitment as a person that makes them stay put, but their absolute need for protection is what makes them so.
Anxiety makes a person worried about almost everything, be it small or big or medium in apparent size. They will worry if they brain says they have to. The one thing they would love to worry about less is the person they share their soul with. So once you have reassured them and built the special bond with them, they will expect you to protect them.
Anxiety changes a person in many ways, damages them emotionally. If your girl has it then she would want you to protect her at every step. Do not confuse protect with ‘holding-hands-24/7’, no, she is independent yet she would love to have you around as her protector. Even if you are overprotective, she will love it, as long as it is not oppressing.
She hates being hit on by strangers or socializing out of nowhere so she will need you by her side to show to the world that she is not alone. It will be for herself more than it will be for people to see. You will be able to see the happiness in her eyes when she holds your arm while walking down the street, knowing that she has got someone of her own.
You are her safety net. Girls with anxiety love differently because they feel differently and have slightly different emotional needs. She might just call you in a free hour t ask how you are doing but she actually would be telling herself that she has you by her side by calling you and having a conversation.
Little things like these matter to her because for her, you are the one, and having anxiety already scares her so much she would never be able to be scared by the thought of you not being there by her side. She will never be able to return to you something as valuable as your presence because you might only feel like you are her boyfriend, but to her, you are her world.
4. You Will Never Be Loved The Same Way:
The best thing about being in love with someone who has anxiety is that you will be loved like you are the most expensive and precious thing in the world. When you love someone with anxiety, you not only be with them but you handle their tantrums and listen to all their stressful stories and complains; that makes them see you as one in a million.
So if you are loved by someone with anxiety, you will never be loved the same way by anyone else. Call it an oddity or the beauty of being loved by someone with such a state of mind, but know that you are their world. If a girl with anxiety loves you, consider yourself the luckiest person in the world to be loved so much.
She will never let you go to sleep without feeling loved for she will be constantly trying to repay your love with more love, and what can be more beautiful than being loved all the time? She will gift you things for the same purpose, she will surprise you, hug you, kiss you and always be ready to fulfill your wishes as a companion, given you never flaunt your absence at times when she needs you the most.
Girls with anxiety put a lot more faith into you than you can imagine. A simple harsh sentence can crush their hearts, even if they don’t show it. It will be a war inside her if you tell to go away. More than anything, she will blame herself rather than blaming you for being rude. Anxiety comes with self-doubt, and it is as bad as any mental illness. So if you been a part in taking that illness away from her, she will shower her unmatched love for you.
If you are dating someone who has anxiety, if you are in love with her, do not let her go. Tell her she is not sick, she is not a burden and that she does not deserve to be alone. Make her feel loved for the kind heart she has, cherish her and work on her so that she feels as normal and happy as every person deserves to. In return, you will get satisfaction and her love, which is different from all the kinds of love in the world.
By Kaetlyn Summers for RelRules