Why do we become obsessed with our partners exes?

One evening, Holly,* then 22, was sitting on the sofa with her boyfriend, Harvey, 22, in his family home, when he mentioned that his ex, Harmony, had an OnlyFans account. Holly joked that she was going to subscribe to Harmony's page, and they both laughed. 

Holly, however, wasn't joking. Back home, she found Harmony's page and subscribed. She'd already looked at Harmony's Instagram, flicking through old photos of her and Harvey at prom, in school uniform, on holiday together. But scrolling through her OnlyFans account felt like she'd unlocked something else, like she was "meeting a different character altogether."

"I would study photos of her boobs, bum, vagina, etc., and tally up where I stood in relation," Holly told me. "I just wanted to see her nipples compared to mine."

In our digitally mediated worlds, we have our partners' entire romantic histories at our fingertips. For the curious (or forensically-obsessed) among us, the proximity to all this information is intoxicating. We find ourselves lying in bed, alone, stroking our iPhones, scouring our partners' ex-flings' LinkedIn credentials, Substacks, and sepia-tinged selfies from 2011. Obsessing over a partner's ex feels dirty and salacious, shameful and delicious. Like scratching an inflamed mosquito bite, the sensation is sweet and stinging, always leaving us wanting more. So why do we do it?

A gendered problem?

"A lot of information on this subject is really poor," said psychotherapist Toby Ingham, who has written a book about "retroactive jealousy" (a term used to describe fixating on a partner's romantic history). While there has been little written on the subject, Ingham makes the case that retroactive jealousy is an "obsessional problem" fueled by "old injuries, things that really predate any kind of dating history by a long time." In other words, the compulsive feeling is less about our partner's ex or even our partner but "attachment type problems" from our childhoods.

When I floated my (anecdotally-driven) theory with Ingham — that retroactive jealousy was more common in women than men — he pushed back. "It seems to me that it's more typically men who become obsessed about their partner's previous partners," he said, explaining that he'd seen more male clients about this issue. 

This surprised me: I'd come to think of the compulsive feeling as a distinctly female one (the way I've masochistically compared every inch of my body to my friends' bodies since I was 11). When I asked my male friends how often they thought about their partners' exes, they seemed baffled by the question. They might take interest in who their ex dates after them, they told me, but not who they dated before.

"I have not found a man who has experienced this," Camille Sojit Pejcha, a New York City-based writer who runs the Substack Pleasure Seeking, told me. Sojit Pejcha has written about creeping on her ex's exes in Document Journal. "Women are so socialized to be so sensitive about their appearance and the appearance of others."

In 2006, a psychoanalyst named Dr Darian Leader used the term "Rebecca Syndrome" to describe the act of obsessing over a partner's ex. "It is a genuine question of feminine identity," he told The Independent. "It's as if the woman who came before holds the key." He'd coined the term from Daphne du Maurier's 1938 Gothic novel, Rebecca, in which the protagonist becomes fixated on her lover's widow. "I thought of Rebecca, lively and beautiful, arranging everything," she says towards the start of the novel, "What must people think about me?" 

While no published studies have specifically focused on whether "Rebecca Syndrome" is more common in women or men, research indicates that women are more likely to compare themselves with others on social media and are more likely to engage in "upward comparison." This is hardly surprising — my Instagram Explore page is filled with ads for rhinoplasty, face lifts, lip fillers, and Botox while my (straight) male friends tell me theirs are filled with women with big breasts. 

Being fascinated by our partner's exes didn't begin in the 21st century, but it's likely that profit-driven social media apps have added fuel to the fire. Capitalism feeds off insecurity, instilling us with the belief that something about us is suboptimal but fixable, that there is a better version of ourselves in reach. Social media, programmed to suck our attention, turbocharges this Sisyphean striving: the more time we spend on the apps, the more we scrutinize our appearance, the more we hate ourselves, the more time we spend on the apps.

The ex as a mirror

Across interviews with self-professed "ex fanatics," women described imagining their partner's exes as if seeing them through their partners' eyes. What made him fall in love with her? They'd wonder, tracing the bump on their nose, the gap between their front teeth. What does he love about me? 

Sarah, a 24-year-old writer, told me that she set up a burner account to survey her boyfriend's ex, and the more she looked at her profile, the more she felt uneasy. She began noticing eerie similarities between the ex and herself: their ethnicity, their music taste, even the topics of their undergrad thesis. "I was just a little bit scared that I am just a rebound because the similarity was very jarring."

This male-centric perspective reminded me of art critic John Berger's (albeit heteronormative) description of what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal world: disembodied "by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another." He wrote, "Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at." In a world in which our attention is constantly being monetized, these acts of being and being perceived take on new meaning. We linger and lurk on the profiles of other women with an internalized male gaze, and the more we look, the more the tech overlords profit. In a world in which our attention is constantly being monetized, these acts of being and being perceived take on new meaning.

For Sojit Pejcha, spending years looking at her partner's ex through a quasi-male gaze led her somewhere unexpected. When her ex's ex revealed that she'd had a crush on her, she realized that she'd misinterpreted her own compulsive behavior. "For me, the motivation was gay," she told me. "It manifested as a perceived comparison thing but really it was about a sapphic pull that I felt toward these women… It was like I was able to hide behind the dynamic of triangulation with a man."

Holly was also jolted into a confrontation when her boyfriend's ex contacted her on OnlyFans, asking if she wanted personalized content. It made her feel guilty, like she'd taken it all too far. Obsessing over Harmony's virtual self was "a false sense of control," she now realized. "You learn more about what you hate about yourself than what they're like." 

As is so often the case with obsession, the feeling is more about the subject than the object: less about the person you are obsessed with and more about what they evoke in you and why. "It becomes far more an exercise in holding a mirror up to your own insecurities," Holly said.

* Names have been changed.