Why overthinking can damage healthy relationships

The reason so many people found Normal People — Sally Rooney's 2018 novel and its 2020 Hulu adaptation so heartbreakingly relatable, were the scenes in which Connell and Marianne are so close, but so far.

They are both intelligent people, deeply in love with each other for most of the novel, and still they cannot stop interpreting one another long enough to ask a direct question, each of them so thoroughly convinced they already understand what the other is feeling that the actual conversation never happens.

Connell loses his job, cannot afford to stay in Dublin for the summer, and rather than asking Marianne directly if he can stay with her, he reads her ambiguous response as a polite refusal and moves home to Carricklea. An entire year of their relationship dissolves because neither of them could tolerate the vulnerability of saying the true thing out loud.

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The book is a portrait of two people for whom language does not so much fail as go unused, because using it would require admitting what they want, and admitting what they want would mean risking the version of the other person they have each constructed so carefully inside their own heads.

The story you tell yourself is not the story

"When you overthink, you assume things in your head that aren't even real, and you tend to believe that it is the truth," says Aaliya Shalla, 27, with a plainness that most longer explanations fail to achieve. She is possibly describing a form of  internal narration that begins as interpretation and ends as conviction, without any outside fact having been consulted along the way.

You read a silence as withdrawal. You read warmth as performance. You read the ordinary texture of another person's mood as a message directed specifically at you, and because the reading feels so self-evidently correct, it never occurs to you to verify it against the actual person sitting across from you, who may be thinking about something else entirely.

The difficulty is that overthinking does not feel like a problem while you are doing it. It feels like attentiveness, like being the kind of person who pays close attention and does not make reckless assumptions about the people they love, and the data it produces feels entirely real because you gathered it yourself, using the full force of your intelligence and emotional history, without stopping to notice that the gathering happened entirely inside your own head.

What literature has always known

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina spends the final third of the novel consuming herself with jealousy and suspicion, reading Vronsky's every silence and glance and ordinary gesture for evidence of waning love, building elaborate catastrophes out of ambiguities that might have dissolved with a single honest exchange.

The tragedy of the novel is not only the affair, or the society that closes its doors on her afterward, but the internal machinery that she cannot quiet, the part of her that converts uncertainty into conclusion and conclusion into action, until she has thought herself all the way to the edge of a platform with no way back.

Hamlet is a man so consumed by the noise of his own deliberating mind that the people around him can barely reach him. His relationship with Ophelia collapses because he is too deep inside his own head to communicate anything coherent from it, leaving her to interpret his behaviour without any of the information she would need to do so accurately. The interpretations she arrives at, mediated as they are by her father, her brother, and the anxious atmosphere of the court, destroy her slowly and then all at once.

The circularity that makes it so hard to stop

The cruelty of overthinking in a relationship is that it tends to produce the very outcome it was organised to prevent. You are afraid of losing someone, so you construct the loss in advance and begin to behave as though it has already happened, pulling back and getting cold and asking questions with their answers already embedded in them, until the person across from you notices the shift and thinks something is wrong. They are correct, of course, though the wrong thing exists nowhere except inside your own head, and by the time that becomes clear the distance has already accumulated into something difficult to cross.

Noah Baumbach traced this with forensic patience in Marriage Story, in which Charlie and Nicole have each built a complete and internally consistent version of their marriage, lived inside those separate versions for years without comparing them, and arrived at the point of lawyers and court dates having destroyed something that neither of them set out to destroy.

The argument that finally erupts between them, ending with one person screaming that they wish the other would die, is cathartic precisely because it is the first moment in the film when something true actually leaves anyone's mouth, and by then it no longer matters in the way it once would have.

Connell and Marianne's problem, finally, is not that language fails them but that they never quite trust it enough to try.