How do I curb obsessive hypothetical relationship thoughts?
This sounds pretty normal to me. Especially because you note that it’s only in the initial infatuation sort of phase and that they don’t last. You don’t say how old you are or how much relationship experience you have. The obsession does grow less as you grow older and more secure that your life is going to be awesome regardless of what happens with your latest crush. But even with that being said – I’m nearly 40, and when I or my friends have begun new relationships, we’ve checked email constantly too, and had OMG!-type feelings. I think that life experience may solve this for you. Even though we all will always feel excited about new romantic prospects, your own heart will put the brakes on for you as you go forward. You’ll love the infatuation phase, and at the same time you’ll know that’s what it is, and you’ll be able to focus on other stuff as needed. You’re right that the person may not be right for you, and over time you’ll be better and better at understanding that when things
Normal/not normal, nobody knows. What’s important is that you don’t like it. I work under the theory that when I have obsessive thoughts I do it to avoid thinking about something else. I’d bet that the times you do those things. Think about a work or other issue you don’t like next time you do this.
I agree with lia; the future of healthfully manageing relationship interactions is going to need to include, not exclude, social networking apps. They’re not just a trendy hobby, they’re where a lot of people spend a lot of their day and do a lot of interacting – I think it’s completely possible to manage them sanely, and being offline for a certain amount of time will always be a healthy thing to do, but just setting online interactions aside as some falsely deceiving or confusing part of life isn’t going to work. They’re here to stay, so relationship issues are more a question of how to manage our own emotions and communications than a question of avoiding all online contact. Quite frankly, a lot of my early crushy obsessive interaction was done and gone well before the internet. I hung out in my folks’ living room a lot, waiting for the family dog to make the special bark that meant the mailman was coming up the steps with MAYBE a special letter from that awesome guy I met last summ
I think this is reasonably normal crushy behaviour, but that advances in technology have enabled it to be channeled into new manifestations or symptoms of crushiness, that we – as a society in general – probably haven’t been able to properly mythologise & integrate into the broader stories we tell ourselves about romantic love. Old version: waiting endlessly near the landline, hoping for a call; a stock-standard meme that we’d all be familiar with. New version: what you described, along with whatever kind of snooping might be possible – a new-technology meme; not necessarily stalking, but if your crush has given you access to their livejournal or facebook or told you who they are on metafilter, then hey – that stuff’s right in front of you & it’s hard not to be tempted into reading it. The problem I see is not so much the obsessive thinking (we’re kinda biologically hardwired to do that) but the ridiculous glut of electronic information that we can find at our disposal, which is a doub
