Anxiety is extremely common and is extremely debilitating. It’s especially harmful if you struggle with severe social anxiety, panic attacks and anxiety that keeps you locked up inside, afraid and worried about unrealistic occurrences. If you love someone struggling with this illness, I can’t imagine the difficulty you face while watching them struggle so much.

You probably feel like there isn’t anything you can do for them, and you’re right, because sometimes there’s really nothing you can do.

We don’t expect you to understand. We hardly understand it ourselves. We just expect a hug when we’re shaking after walking out a store that was full of people. We expect a hand firmly held while walking into your friend’s party. We expect patience when we say that we can’t leave the house today because the world feels too scary. We expect a lot of patience. Give us patience, most of all. We feel bad enough as it is. We feel crazy. Then we start to believe you think we’re crazy as well.

We’re going to question everything, and you have to understand, as a significant other, that it’s not a reflection of you as a person. It’s a reflection of our constant uncertainty about ourselves that we push upon everyone else.

We’re going to get jealous easily. Most of the time, we don’t have a reason to be, but we just are. It’s because the anxiety makes us so self-conscious of ourselves, that we constantly don’t feel good enough. We feel so insecure about our illness and are always set on thinking that you’ll move on and find another girl without this crazy problem.

We get EASILY overwhelmed. It feels like our lives are over if our mother calls us to pick up another bottle of milk because we had ten other things to get done that day, even though it would take five minutes to do this one task. We just don’t process that as something that’s not a big deal. We have trouble separating assignments in our minds- when we get them assigned; they all clash together in our brains and create this huge ball of chaotic stress. It’s not until we can write everything out and plan exactly what day we are getting what done are we feeling a little bit better.

We're never late. So, if you're dating someone with any level of anxiety, prepare to be extremely punctual- like, you're gonna be at least 20 minutes early to any event. We'd rather sit there twiddling our thumbs than be just right on time.

We always have to be doing something productive, no matter what. Getting our minds to relax is extremely difficult.

We are planners. Don’t get mad when we make you sit down with us to plan out an entire vacation or even just an afternoon. Spontaneity makes us anxious. We don’t take spontaneous very well. We like things in an orderly fashion; we like knowing exactly what is going to happen and when. We can't just go with the flow; that sounds absolutely terrifying to us.

We are control freaks. I mean it. We need things to go a certain way. We plan and think about something for so long and when something goes off balance, we have a minor mental freak out. It’s hard to explain, but our mind kind of sighs in a defeated way.

Meeting new people, for us, is the scariest thing you could subject us to. So don’t get offended if we keep putting off meeting your parents or friends; we’re just completely terrified to the core. We second-guess ourselves too much.

Hopefully you can gain a little insight from this article about those struggling with this scary and debilitating illness. We just need a lot of patience and a kind heart.