One night, Holly,* then 22, was sitting on the couch together with her boyfriend, Harvey, 22, in his household house, when he talked about that his ex, Concord, had an OnlyFans account. Holly joked that she was going to subscribe to Concord’s web page, they usually each laughed.
Holly, nonetheless, wasn’t joking. Again house, she discovered Concord’s web page and subscribed. She’d already checked out Concord’s Instagram, flicking by means of outdated photographs of her and Harvey at promenade, in class uniform, on vacation collectively. However scrolling by means of her OnlyFans account felt like she’d unlocked one thing else, like she was “assembly a special character altogether.”
“I’d examine photographs of her boobs, bum, vagina, and so on., and tally up the place I stood in relation,” Holly instructed me. “I simply needed to see her nipples in comparison with mine.”
In our digitally mediated worlds, now we have our companions’ whole romantic histories at our fingertips. For the curious (or forensically-obsessed) amongst us, the proximity to all this info is intoxicating. We discover ourselves mendacity in mattress, alone, stroking our iPhones, scouring our companions’ ex-flings’ LinkedIn credentials, Substacks, and sepia-tinged selfies from 2011. Obsessing over a associate’s ex feels soiled and salacious, shameful and scrumptious. Like scratching an infected mosquito chunk, the feeling is nice and stinging, all the time leaving us wanting extra. So why can we do it?
A gendered downside?
“A number of info on this topic is absolutely poor,” mentioned psychotherapist Toby Ingham, who has written a e-book about “retroactive jealousy” (a time period used to explain fixating on a associate’s romantic historical past). Whereas there was little written on the topic, Ingham makes the case that retroactive jealousy is an “obsessional downside” fueled by “outdated accidents, issues that basically predate any type of courting historical past by a very long time.” In different phrases, the compulsive feeling is much less about our associate’s ex and even our associate however “attachment type issues” from our childhoods.
After I floated my (anecdotally-driven) idea with Ingham — that retroactive jealousy was extra widespread in girls than males — he pushed again. “It appears to me that it is extra usually males who grow to be obsessed about their associate’s earlier companions,” he mentioned, explaining that he’d seen extra male purchasers about this concern.
This stunned me: I would come to consider the compulsive feeling as a distinctly feminine one (the best way I’ve masochistically in contrast each inch of my physique to my mates’ our bodies since I used to be 11). After I requested my male mates how typically they considered their companions’ exes, they appeared baffled by the query. They may take curiosity in who their ex dates after them, they instructed me, however not who they dated earlier than.
“I’ve not discovered a person who has skilled this,” Camille Sojit Pejcha, a New York Metropolis-based author who runs the Substack Pleasure Seeking, instructed me. Sojit Pejcha has written about creeping on her ex’s exes in Doc Journal. “Girls are so socialized to be so delicate about their look and the looks of others.”
Mashable After Darkish
In 2006, a psychoanalyst named Dr Darian Chief used the time period “Rebecca Syndrome” to explain the act of obsessing over a associate’s ex. “It’s a real query of female id,” he instructed The Unbiased. “It is as if the girl who got here earlier than holds the important thing.” He’d coined the time period from Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 Gothic novel, Rebecca, wherein the protagonist turns into fixated on her lover’s widow. “I considered Rebecca, energetic and delightful, arranging all the things,” she says in the direction of the beginning of the novel, “What should folks take into consideration me?”
Whereas no printed research have particularly targeted on whether or not “Rebecca Syndrome” is extra widespread in girls or males, analysis signifies that ladies usually tend to compare themselves with others on social media and usually tend to have interaction in “upward comparison.” That is hardly stunning — my Instagram Discover web page is stuffed with advertisements for rhinoplasty, face lifts, lip fillers, and Botox whereas my (straight) male mates inform me theirs are stuffed with girls with massive breasts.
Being fascinated by our associate’s exes did not start within the twenty first century, however it’s seemingly that profit-driven social media apps have added gas to the hearth. Capitalism feeds off insecurity, instilling us with the assumption that one thing about us is suboptimal however fixable, that there’s a higher model of ourselves in attain. Social media, programmed to suck our consideration, turbocharges this Sisyphean striving: the extra time we spend on the apps, the extra we scrutinize our look, the extra we hate ourselves, the extra time we spend on the apps.
The ex as a mirror
Throughout interviews with self-professed “ex fanatics,” girls described imagining their associate’s exes as if seeing them by means of their companions’ eyes. What made him fall in love together with her? They’d marvel, tracing the bump on their nostril, the hole between their entrance tooth. What does he love about me?
Sarah, a 24-year-old author, instructed me that she arrange a burner account to survey her boyfriend’s ex, and the extra she checked out her profile, the extra she felt uneasy. She started noticing eerie similarities between the ex and herself: their ethnicity, their music style, even the matters of their undergrad thesis. “I used to be just a bit bit scared that I’m only a rebound as a result of the similarity was very jarring.”
This male-centric perspective jogged my memory of artwork critic John Berger’s (albeit heteronormative) description of what it means to be a lady in a patriarchal world: disembodied “by a way of being appreciated as herself by one other.” He wrote, “Males have a look at girls. Girls watch themselves being checked out.” In a world wherein our consideration is consistently being monetized, these acts of being and being perceived tackle new that means. We linger and lurk on the profiles of different girls with an internalized male gaze, and the extra we glance, the extra the tech overlords revenue.
In a world wherein our consideration is consistently being monetized, these acts of being and being perceived tackle new that means.
For Sojit Pejcha, spending years her associate’s ex by means of a quasi-male gaze led her someplace surprising. When her ex’s ex revealed that she’d had a crush on her, she realized that she’d misinterpreted her personal compulsive conduct. “For me, the motivation was homosexual,” she instructed me. “It manifested as a perceived comparability factor however actually it was a couple of sapphic pull that I felt towards these girls… It was like I used to be capable of cover behind the dynamic of triangulation with a person.”
Holly was additionally jolted right into a confrontation when her boyfriend’s ex contacted her on OnlyFans, asking if she needed customized content material. It made her really feel responsible, like she’d taken all of it too far. Obsessing over Concord’s digital self was “a false sense of management,” she now realized. “You be taught extra about what you hate about your self than what they’re like.”
As is so typically the case with obsession, the sensation is extra concerning the topic than the item: much less concerning the particular person you might be obsessive about and extra about what they evoke in you and why. “It turns into way more an train in holding a mirror as much as your individual insecurities,” Holly mentioned.
* Names have been modified.
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