You, Me and OCD

“It’s just…”

The words stalled in her mouth. They felt unfinished and suddenly fragile. Maeve let the thought hang there while her eyes drifted around the room. She searched for a gentler sentence. Nothing came to mind.

The room was suddenly too small tonight. Or maybe it always had been that way, and she was only just noticing. Noticing while she was standing there, feeling exposed.

Unable to find anything softer, anything kinder, she swallowed and finally said it.

“This just isn’t what I signed up for.”

The words sounded dull as they landed. They weren't dramatic or angry, just so unbelievably heavy. It was the kind of sentence that didn’t need to be responded to.

Andrew felt it hit him somewhere low in his body, way below the ribs. His first instinct was to try to dissect it - to somehow decide where it belonged. Maeve was always so kind; this was hard to interpret. Was this a threat or maybe a complaint? He needed to know what kind of thing it was so he could respond correctly.

He didn’t look at her right away. He couldn't. Instead, his eyes dropped to the floor.

They landed in the laundry pile. He hadn’t meant to leave it there. He had planned to fold it... like he had planned to do a lot of things. The sight of it scattered across the wooden boards made his chest tighten, a familiar pressure building behind his sternum. This thing in his brain, this...disorder always did that. It wasn’t the mess itself. It was what the mess and what the mess represented. A loss of control and clear evidence of failure.

His gaze slid over to her shoes. Still on and tied slightly. That registered as something important, though he wasn’t sure why. Like a signal, or maybe a warning. She would not be staying.

Slowly, his eyes traced their way upward. To her ankles, calves. The familiar lines of her legs, once a source of comfort, now charged with something else. He paused at her belt line, a reflex he couldn’t quite stop, a muscle memory from a time when touch still felt familiar. Then higher. Over her sweater, the one he’d seen her wear so many times.

When his eyes finally met hers, he locked in.

Maeve held the gaze, though it took effort. Before, his looks had been full of promise. Like small, wordless assurances that something good was coming. A kiss. Sex. An embrace. They always held a sense that they were moving toward something.

This time, there was nothing she could read. His eyes were flat and guarded. Like a newspaper left out in the rain. The headlines were still somewhat visible, but the details blurred, bleeding into each other until meaning itself became suspect.

“I don’t know what to do with this, Andrew,” she said. “I’m not a therapist.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, she regretted the sharpness of them. She did regret the sentiment, just the edge that they had. They hadn’t sounded like that in her head. In her head, they had been reasonable.

Andrew flinched, though he tried not to let it show. The word therapist. It felt almost invasive, and he felt exposed by it. Seen in a way that made his skin prickle. He wanted to explain. He wanted to say that he wasn’t asking her to fix him. He just needed her to stay, just a while longer, while he figured things out.

On their first date, Maeve had walked away dizzy. Not from attraction exactly, but from feeling recognized. The unsettling sense that Andrew had already somehow mapped her interior. He remembered things she hadn’t realized she’d said. He noted patterns within her that she thought were invisible. He spoke aloud thoughts she’d only ever allowed to exist privately in her mind.

She had felt understood in a way that was almost frightening. She felt fully seen... by a man nonetheless. Men, whom she had sworn off just a week earlier, with a glass of wine in her hand and conviction in her voice. After her last breakup with Ben, 6 months had passed, and she thought to herself I’m done. And she’d meant it. At least she thought she did. Until a tall, endearingly awkward man approached her at the bar. Andrew.

The flame between them had grown quickly after that. Too quickly, maybe. Long conversations over cheap Mexican food. Beers that turned into theories and arguments that felt like foreplay. They kissed everywhere. Cars, parks, dark corners of the world. Like teenagers.

The sex, when it came, was quieter than she expected. She didn’t feel watched or evaluated. Andrew seemed content simply to exist beside her, and that, somehow, felt more intimate than anything she’d known.

She’d labeled the feeling carefully and tucked it away. Could be love, but unsure. Something to revisit later.

And now, later had arrived.

“It’s not like I want to be this way, Maeve," Andrew said now, his voice low. He was staring at his shirt, at a wrinkle he hadn’t noticed before. “I’m—”

A sudden crash cut him off.

The stack of mail in the corner toppled over, envelopes sliding across the floor in a chaotic spill.

Maeve moved without thinking. She crouched instinctively, reaching for the pile, wanting to fix it. Hope to smooth the moment over...the way she always did.

“Please," he paused. "Don’t.” Andrew’s voice snapped, panic threading through it. “It’s fine. Just...leave it.”

She froze mid-motion, her hand hovering uselessly above the floor before she slowly stood again. Heat rushed to her face, embarrassment mingling with something darker. Resentment, maybe.

Then she remembered. The mail was a trigger. No, everything was a trigger. Andrew called it being particular. Said it lightly, like a joke. Like it was an endearing quirk.

Maeve had a different word for it.

Undiagnosed, untreated, and unaddressed OCD. Quietly dictating the shape of their lives.

She had learned his rules the hard way. What could be touched. What couldn’t. What words to avoid. What moments to redirect. She had begun to move through the space like someone navigating a minefield.

Andrew watched her stand back up and felt the familiar swell of guilt twist in his chest. He hated that look on her face. The one that she gave when she was shrinking to accommodate him. But the idea of her touching the mail made his skin crawl. He couldn’t explain why.

“I’m trying,” he said, though he wasn’t sure what he was trying for. To get better? To hold on? To keep the room from collapsing?

Maeve looked around again. The room felt even smaller now.

Love wasn’t supposed to feel like this, she thought. It wasn’t supposed to require constant vigilance. It wasn’t supposed to make you disappear, piece by piece, just to keep the peace.

“I can’t live like this,” she said quietly.

Andrew’s head snapped up. “Like what?”

“Like I’m always bracing,” she replied. “Like one wrong move will break something I’m responsible for holding together.”

Something inside him cracked then.

Just enough to let the truth seep through.

“I need you,” he said, and in his voice was fear.

Meave felt it then. A shift. The moment when care tipped into obligation. When love stopped being mutual and became more of a job.

And that was the thing she hadn’t signed up for.

She turned, stepped over the pile of mail, and slowly tracked toward the door.

Behind her, Andrew stood still, surrounded by the quiet wreckage of a life that had finally, unmistakably, fallen out of alignment.