Last month I was at a Planned Parenthood benefit lunch at the Pierre hotel, making small talk with a fashion designer seated next to me. “That woman over there,” the designer said, pointing across the room, “is my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend.” I immediately knew what I had to do. “Ugh, she looks like a foot,” I said, reassuringly. The designer looked at me like I was Ann Coulter. “She’s actually a really incredible woman and an important activist in the fight for women’s reproductive rights,” she scoffed, and then turned away from me, choosing instead to face the literal wall.
Had I misread the cues? I didn’t actually think the girl looked like a foot; sometimes it’s just hard to gauge whether you’re supposed to be a friend or a feminist, ya know? And besides, aren’t we all obliged to irrationally hate our partner’s exes, for the sole reason that we both loved the same dick?
Circle of trust: I have a habit of becoming sort of obsessed with the people my partners dated before me. I can’t help but want to know: Who are you? What do we have in common? How are we different? Could we have been friends in a parallel universe? Who has more followers? And also, am I supposed to pretend I don’t recognize you when I see you at Whole Foods, despite the fact that we share all the same strains of HPV? Of course, it’s natural to be interested in your partner’s previous relationships because it’s an insight into their romantic personality. But where’s the line between natural curiosity and straight-up obsession?
Take my friend Linda, for example (not her real name). Linda is a 27-year-old event planner and part-time dominatrix. She’s been with her boyfriend for more than a year, yet his ex is still an ever-present ghost in her life. “The other day I was walking through Washington Square Park,” Linda told me over coffee last week, “and out of the corner of my eye I saw long blonde hair and red sunglasses, and I didn’t even have to turn around, I just knew it was her.” Linda nervously glanced behind her, seemingly checking if she was being followed. “Is it sad that I’ve never met this woman, but I’ve stalked her so hard that I recognized her from just a passing glimpse of her sunglasses in the distance?” I gave a noncommittal shrug. “Anyway, I was right, because a couple hours later I checked her Instagram and she’d posted a photo of herself in the Village, wearing the glasses.”
Sure, Linda sounds psychotic, but we’ve all been her. But what exactly are we looking for, in these hours and days spent digging through our partner’s relationship garbage? “The thing is,” said Linda, “at the beginning of a new relationship, you make checking the ex’s page such a habit that you continue doing it long after you no longer really care. Like, I live with my boyfriend, and his ex lives with her new boyfriend, but I still check her page every fucking day. I don’t know what she could post that would make me feel any better or worse. I guess I’m just endlessly interested in what she’s doing, and where she gets brunch.”
Of course, this behavior is sad and obsessive and disgusting. Which is why it must be done in absolute secrecy. Letting it slip in front of your partner that you know too much about their ex is a major party foul. But playing dumb isn’t always easy. It reminds me of this one time, when an ex-CIA operative told me that one of the hardest things about being an American spy in China was pretending not to understand the language—training himself not to respond to anything in Mandarin or to accidentally laugh at overheard jokes. Basically, being in a new relationship is like being a government agent: You’re both acquiring high-value intelligence that must be kept absolutely classified. Your life is at risk.
And then there’s the Mean Girl factor. The funny thing is, unless the ex is actively trying to steal your partner back from you, there’s really no reason to be jealous or to see them as the enemy. And yet, I’m embarrassed to admit, I often feel compelled to trash-talk my partner’s exes, even if I’ve never even seen them in three dimensions. Maybe I’m testing my partner, to see if they’ll join in on my trash-talking. Or maybe it’s an effort to distinguish myself from the ex—to assert myself as different, and somehow better.
For instance, in my last serious relationship, my girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend was really into New Age culture. This meant that every time someone brought up astrology—which unfortunately is like every six minutes—I would launch into a tirade about how New Age people are anti-science morons who should go choke on a crystal, and how chakras make me want to kill myself, blah blah—you get the idea. And yeah, I guess I do think New Age stuff is dumb, but not to the point where I could rationally justify losing my voice from shouting rageful criticisms of it. So why did I need to hate on it? I guess the easy answer is that it was some sort of defense mechanism against insecurity. But insecurity about what? That my partner had a life before me?
I posed this dilemma to my friends over drinks at Lucien this past weekend. “It’s fine to hate the exes,” said Stacey, a documentary producer. “It’s therapeutic. And besides, you know they’re simultaneously stalking you. The other night I got a ‘like’ from my guy’s ex on a photo at 3:00 a.m. But then when I went to see which photo it was, the notification was gone, because she’d clearly accidentally liked it when she was drunk.”
“I never get obsessed with my girlfriend’s exes,” said Ryan, a filmmaker. “But I intentionally don’t find out anything about them, to avoid being jealous. But if it’s a casual lover, I want to know everything.” According to Ryan, when he’s not emotionally involved, hearing about a girl’s past sexual experiences can be kind of hot. The problem here, of course, is if your casual thing turns into a serious thing, and then you’re left wishing you could Eternal Sunshine your mind.
“Well, I always idealize my boyfriend’s exes,” said Candy, a fashion writer. “If my boyfriend’s ex is amazing, it means he has good taste—it reflects better on him, which reflects better on me.” She was clearly very proud of herself. “I imagine them as being these really talented, incredible women . . . but then when I meet them in real life, I realize they’re ultimately just regular people with flaws. It’s usually a letdown, honestly.” I asked Candy if maybe glorifying these women was actually a subconscious way of justifying critiquing them in the flesh. She flipped her platinum hair. “No, I actually want to be impressed. It’s not my fault they’re always disappointingly basic.”
“The worst-case scenario, of course, is when you meet the ex and actually end up liking them,” said Stacey, “because then you have to admit that you’re a bad feminist. It’s sort of like how Republicans hate gay people until they actually meet a gay person, and then they change their mind. You assume your boyfriend’s ex is the enemy, but then when you meet her in person you’re like, ‘I guess you’re not so bad.’ ”
She’s right. But there’s another twist in the plot: the moment when you and your partner break up, and suddenly all the animosity you felt toward their ex turns to affinity. Having a mutual ex with someone can be a strange point of connection, even if you spent the months or years prior shunning them. It happened to me: I’d just moved to New York and was dating a writer. His ex was a special case—the rare type of woman who makes the extra effort to be nice to the new girlfriend. Of course, this creeped me out. I’d see her at art openings and book parties, and she’d always come up and say hi. She even invited me to a lecture on pansexuality once, knowing I wrote about sex. I declined, and then spent the next year referring to her as “Swimfan.” I assumed she must have some ulterior motive. But then after the writer and I broke up and she was still being nice, I gave in. Now she’s one of my closest friends, and I find it ridiculous to think that I once saw her as the enemy, simply because we have the same bad taste in men.
Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.
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