Hi! I came here with advice. I am a 16 year old female. I have been dating my boyfriend for well over a year, and I feel pretty secure in our relationship. Like, I know he loves me and he knows I love him, I trust him with everything. But, I have a pretty bad overthinking problem. Everytime I spend a day with him when I get home I overthink the way I acted and everything I said just because Im scared of him losing feelings for me or me pushing him away. I have talked to him about this before and he has again and again told me how he would never lose feelings for me and how he loves me so much, I don’t know why my worries won’t go away. I think it’s because I see him as just so far out of my league and I don’t know how I got to be with someone this incredible. But, if I am too much of an overthinker, I don’t want to ruin what we have. What should I do?
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TL;DR: Advice needed on the overthinking problem I have in my relationship
2 comments
Learn to live in the moment and enjoy life in the moment. The actual chance of your relationship lasting “forever” and neither of you losing feelings for the other is very low. But it’s a good thing right now, so enjoy it and stop overthinking. But it’s good to also be realistic and understand that at your age, this probably won’t last.
You are currently relying on external validation, from other people, to give you a sense of your own self worth. So right now, even though he *says* that he loves you and so forth, a part of your brain is worried that if he ever *stops* saying those things, suddenly you will have nothing that causes you to feel like you are valuable as a person.
What you need is to stop relying on external validation from others in order to build up your self esteem, and instead begin to rely on *internal* validation in order to strengthen your self-*respect*.
Esteem from others can be easily given, and just as easily taken away, so it’s dangerous to use as a basis for your understanding of your value as a person. But while esteem can be *given*, respect must be *earned*. And if you earn *self*-respect, no one can take it away from you. So it’s a *very* safe thing to use as a basis for your understanding of your own value as a person.
The way you earn self-respect is the same as the way *anyone* earns respect: by setting goals and reaching them, by facing challenges and surpassing them, by taking on obstacles and overcoming them.
So it’s time for you to set some challenges or goals for yourself. Start small: things that you are pretty certain you *can* do, but which will take some real effort on your part to achieve. Then *do* those things; reach those goals, overcome those challenges.
When you do that, you will gain some self-respect, because it wasn’t anyone else who did those things, accomplished those things…it was *you*, and that’s a thing worthy of respect. And with that self-respect will come self-confidence, which will make you brave enough to set slightly *more* challenging goals for yourself.
As the challenges and goals you set for yourself become greater, so will the self-respect that comes from reaching them, and so will the self-confidence that comes from that self-respect.
At some point you will get to a place where you no longer need *him* (or anyone else) to tell you that you are worth something, in order to feel good about yourself.