A Marriage Stressed by Obsessions and Compulsions

Supported by

Modern Love

My husband was kind, honest, supportive and way too protective.

By Nicole Comforto

One morning, when our son was four months old, my husband noticed a little red spot on the boy’s lip. Like any sleep-deprived parent, my husband went to his computer and Googled “red spot on baby’s lip.” Twenty minutes later, he came back pale-faced and hyperventilating; he even had to put his head between his knees to keep from passing out. He had gone down a dark hole on the internet and found the story of a baby with a red spot on his lip who ended up tragically ill.

Our baby’s spot faded within hours. But it was, in fact, the first sign of something terrifying — my husband’s anxiety disorder.

The night I met Mike, he charmed me at a pub trivia game in Seattle with his encyclopedic knowledge. I am terrible at trivia, but I found myself wanting to learn everything about this 25-year-old computer scientist who smiled easily and shared my love of making up silly lyrics to pop songs. He often lost things and had a refrigerator full of expired food, but he was dependable in the ways that matter: treating people with kindness, telling the truth, showing up.

He eagerly tagged along with me to music festivals, remote villages in South America and my graduate program in Paris.

Some things he taught me during those adventurous years:

All computer languages are made of zeros and ones.

Cauliflower is actually a flower.

It takes eight minutes for light from the sun to reach Earth.

I didn’t know what had made him react so strongly to the spot on our baby’s lip that day. Maybe it was new-parent exhaustion? Neither of us had slept more than five hours straight for months. And a certain amount of worry seemed normal. The question was, how much was too much?

Over the next few years, Mike displayed that level of disabling anxiety several more times, when some minor discovery spelled doom. Each time, he panicked and then grew despondent, as if the worst possible outcome had already happened. Each time, I reassured him until the fear passed. A few hours later, my logical, reliable husband would be back.

Then I got pregnant again. As soon as we learned a new baby was on the way, Mike’s anxiety became more than an occasional visitor: It officially moved in. We recently had bought a family-size home with a yard in Seattle, and suddenly he saw danger everywhere.

One February day, he threw a piece of scrap lumber left by the previous owners into the wood stove and then rushed off to do an internet deep dive on the potential dangers of burning scrap lumber. Twenty minutes later, he emerged ashen and shaking. “Oh no,” he said, sinking to the floor.

“What?”

“I’m so sorry. I’m such an idiot. That wood I put into the fire? It was probably treated with arsenic.”

What did that mean? I had never heard of people dying from burning lumber in their wood stove, but what did I know? “Why didn’t you think about this before you put it in the stove?”

“I don’t know!”

“It’s going to be OK,” I said. “We’re not going to die from this.”

“Are you sure? Promise me that I haven’t just poisoned our family.”

I promised him, over and over, but it took days for him to calm down. We weren’t allowed to touch the wood stove for the rest of the winter.

It wasn’t just the stove. Mike became terrified of anything he thought might harm us. When summer came, he forbade us from eating blueberries from the bushes on our deck because the wood in the planters might have been treated with arsenic that could have leached into the soil. Concerns of food poisoning and botulism meant we had to throw out perishable food anywhere near its expiration date. Whenever we left for a trip, he always had to drive back home at least once to check the oven and doors. He spotted poisonous plants around our neighborhood and made us steer clear.

Some things I learned about rational (and irrational) fears:

Arsenic can indeed poison people, but it takes years of exposure, most commonly from contaminated water.

Botulism takes up to 72 hours to start paralyzing your muscles.

Poison hemlock can start to kill you within an hour.

When someone you trust starts to act irrationally, it’s destabilizing. There was always a small kernel of truth to his worries. I had no reason to believe the horrible things he feared would happen, but I also couldn’t prove they wouldn’t. And, it turns out, if you look to the internet to justify your fears, it tends to deliver.

I knew his worry came from his love and desire to protect us, but it was impossible to live with. Several times a day, he would freak out about some obscure threat that never would have crossed my mind. I tried reassuring him, walking through the situation logically, pointing out how ridiculous his fears were.

For the first time in our relationship, I started hiding things from him (yes, I ate the blueberries from the deck). While Mike worried about everything that might harm us, I worried about Mike. Our life became a matter of day-to-day survival, getting through the crisis of the moment. Worried people aren’t making plans or going on adventures.

As my belly grew, Mike’s anxiety grew more frequent and more powerful. He started seeing a therapist, but it didn’t help. My reassurances were no longer enough; he would spiral deeper into fear, scouring the internet for hours. I started to wonder if we might have to live separately, because he couldn’t seem to bear the fear of living with us.

The irony is that obsessing about safety can actually make you less safe because you become so focused on an imagined problem that you don’t see the real one. When he dropped off our son at preschool, Mike began worrying that he had accidentally hit someone and not known it. Instead of watching the road, he started obsessively checking the rearview mirror.

I pleaded with him to stop worrying and pay attention.

When I explained the situation to my therapist, she recommended we see someone who specialized in obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, which Mike and I knew little about. Rather, we thought we knew, but what we imagined was the movie version: frequent hand washing, turning lights on and off, avoiding stepping on cracks. Those weren’t Mike’s problems.

Also, people often associate OCD with being a “neat freak.” How could my absent-minded husband, with his piles of unfolded clothes, possibly have OCD?

A specialist explained that Mike’s obsession wasn’t neatness but safety, especially around contamination and poisoning. His compulsions were research and seeking reassurance. Like an addictive drug, the reassurances had less effect each time, so he required more and more to get over his fear. So every time I had promised him that everything was going to be fine, I was actually feeding his disorder.

What we learned about OCD:

Symptoms usually emerge in childhood or adolescence, but can also emerge in adulthood.

Once symptoms begin, it often takes many years for people to receive the correct diagnosis and treatment.

Luckily, the treatment can be very effective.

At our first appointment with the specialist, we made a list of all the things Mike worried about and ranked them in order. Then, starting with the easier ones, he started to face his fears and just sit with the discomfort.

He ate an unwashed berry. He brought shoes with mud (and germs) into our entryway. He fired up our long dormant wood stove. With the help of anti-anxiety medication, he worked at changing his reaction to these situations and others that previously would have left him immobilized.

Mike still has bouts of anxiety, but we have a protocol now, and it has probably saved our marriage, especially with the added stress of the pandemic. When he gets anxious in a way that can spell trouble, he uses a code phrase to sneak away from the children (“Daddy needs to fix something in the bedroom”).

After stepping out, he calls a friend or family member to get a “reasonable person’s” perspective on what they would do about the situation. Then, he must do whatever this “reasonable person” would do, which is usually nothing.

He also shares his story widely, and encourages me to do the same, with the hope that others may benefit from it.

Our children are now 6 and 2. They both have inherited Mike’s huge smile, his gift of gab and his delight in learning how things work. They also could have inherited his predisposition for OCD.

Here are the hardest lessons I have learned:

We can’t always protect the people we love, no matter how much we know.

Our plans — and our lives — can unravel in an instant.

Make plans anyway.

Nicole Comforto is a writer in Seattle. She and her husband recently finished co-writing a novel.

Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.

To find previous Modern Love essays, Tiny Love Stories and podcast episodes, visit our archive.

Want more from Modern Love? Watch the TV series; sign up for the newsletter; or listen to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or Google Play. We also have swag at the NYT Store and two books, “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption” and “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.”