You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Mariel.

In romantic relationships, doubt can feel like a dirty word.

If it's love, true love, then you'll just know it for certain.

You'll lock eyes, preferably across a crowded room, maybe on New Year's Eve,

and know that this person is the one for you.

As if there's some, like, mystical, like, judge who has a secret answer.

There's no secret answer.

Haley Nauman is a culture writer, an editor and author of Maybe Baby, a newsletter and weekly

podcast about the mysteries of modern life.

There is just a set of circumstances that have upsides and downsides.

And like, if you happen to be a relationship that has maybe a few more downsides than another hypothetical relationship you could be in,

that doesn't mean you, it's wrong.

Like, you could still choose it because it's really meaningful to you.

Right.

Doubt in a relationship is like kind of the endless circle game of like attempting to figure out if what you're doing is following your heart or just like reacting

to your own paranoia.

And this is Danny Nelson, Haley's friend and co-host of Dear Danny, the Maybe Baby

advice column where similar to our show, they help readers and listeners with their thornyest love

questions.

Now sometimes, Haley and Danny say, you're in a romantic relationship and your doubts get louder and louder to the point where you cannot ignore them.

Yeah, and if you want to keep avoiding it, you're going to have to build more and more and more like protection against it and you're going to start to feel so false.

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