It’s 2am, I’m home alone, falling into a hole in the internet: On my phone is the Instagram profile of a new guy I’m dating, and I’m forensically examining evidence of his past love life.
Holiday photos, party photos, weekend getaway photos, etc. And in every one of them, I look for “her.” The photo of him in front of me, and the photo before that. I place my thumb over each one, careful not to accidentally hit the “like” button and let him know I’ve been snooping around in the middle of the night.
When I was younger, when people were less careful about what they shared online, years’ worth of images like this one of my new boyfriend smiling with his arm around another woman’s shoulder would have haunted me.
Now that I’m in my 30s and most of us have gotten a little wiser about the wisdom of documenting every moment of our lives on social media, I have to look harder to find evidence of past girlfriends. They might be in a group photo, or silhouetted in the distance (guess who’s riding a bike in front of him?), but they’re there nonetheless.
Lucy Holden spoke to a psychologist about what’s behind her obsession with scrolling through Instagram to find out about her new boyfriend’s exes.
Armie Hammer, left, and Lily James, right, star in the film “Rebecca.” The term Rebecca syndrome comes from the 1938 novel by Daphne du Maurier on which the film is based.
Lily James plays Mrs. de Winter in the film “Rebecca,” a story about a woman who marries a widower and finds her new home haunted by memories of her late wife.
I am rational enough (even when I’m doing irrational things like that) to understand that comparing myself to past girlfriends is completely pointless, but when you know next to nothing about his exes, it’s natural to wonder what’s not being said.
Was the “me” before me a Heidi Klum type who started her own charity and runs ultramarathons as a hobby? Or a charitable doctor who didn’t mind a drink on the weekends?
I can’t help but imagine that she, or whoever they are, is all more impressive than anything I can offer, so I turn to social media to search for concrete evidence that will somehow vindicate me.
Now, the habit has a catchy new name: “Rebecca Syndrome.”
Also known as retroactive jealousy, the term originates from a 1938 Daphne du Maurier novel, in which a young woman marries a widower but soon finds that her new home holds lingering memories of his late wife, Rebecca, and the second Mrs. de Winter becomes haunted by the indelible presence of her predecessor.
It’s only gotten worse in the age of social media. Nowadays, all a new lover and their ex-lover need is a public Instagram account to get a wealth of information. And once you find her account, you can’t help but compare yourself to her.
Psychoanalyst Toby Ingham has written a book about this phenomenon called Making Sense of Retroactive Jealousy. He says: “Why do people want to think that their partner has had other partners before?”
“I believe Rebecca syndrome is an obsession issue, and that it’s rekindling older attachment issues rather than current romantic relationships.”
This got me thinking. I’m convinced that the reason I doubt my relationships is because I think they won’t last. But why? I’ve been in a lot of relationships, and I’ve broken up just as often.
Maybe it’s because I don’t know what I want and I’m looking for an excuse to stop doing it. Or maybe I have attachment issues because I moved away when I was little and got used to people leaving their loved ones behind. It’s better to just leave first, right?
“Rebecca,” starring Armie Hammer and Lily James, tells the story of a young woman who becomes obsessed with the memory of her husband’s first wife.
Obsessive scrolling to find out about your new man’s exes may be a sign that attachment issues from his past are reviving in the present.
But there may be a more recent explanation for my “retroactive jealousy.” When I was 26, I was dating a married man who told me he was leaving his wife and had already moved out of his family home. It turned out to be a lie, and I still wonder a little bit why I didn’t try harder to uncover it. Why didn’t I go online and look into it?
Maybe his (still) wife feels the same way, because just recently I woke up to find that she had requested to follow me on Instagram. Perhaps she made a careless mistake while browsing my profile late at night. By the time I checked her account, the request had already been cancelled. Scary. But it could happen to anyone.
The problem is, no matter what you find, you can’t win. I once found some explicit photos of a former relationship on my boyfriend’s computer, and the thing that initially made me feel so bad was that the woman wasn’t that attractive. If she had been that much more attractive than me, I would have felt terrible. So why did the fact that she was less attractive than me also make me feel so bad? Perhaps it was a sign that I wasn’t that attractive either?
Rebecca syndrome taints new relationships in a variety of subtle ways. Vacation photos are especially bad. If he’s already had a great time in Malta or the Amalfi Coast, you know you don’t want to go there. Then you suddenly feel sick as you realize you’re looking at a wedding you attended together in 2017. Were they ever going to get married? Was he even thinking about getting married?
This digital detective work may sound extreme, but for those of us who spend a significant portion of our lives online, it makes sense — not to mention a lot less stressful than verbally interrogating a new partner about their past relationships.
No matter how common Rebecca syndrome is, Ingham argues it’s still unhealthy.
“We’ve never seen the kind of emotional anxiety that comes with dating, and of course, modern technology has totally exacerbated that anxiety by letting us see what our partners have ‘liked’ on social media or if they’re still friends with their exes.”
“People with OCD get caught in an introspective loop without even realizing it.”
“Cyberstalking is the worst,” agrees my friend Lottie, 34. “Not only does it make you feel like a psychopath, it ruins the start of any relationship.”
“I don’t consider myself a jealous person, so why can’t I resist looking at someone’s past online? Even my sister, who is now married with kids, does this.”
Another friend took a more extreme stance: “If men weren’t so untrustworthy, we wouldn’t feel pressured to do our due diligence,” she said.
“There’s nothing worse than being surprised by a chat that says, ‘I got back together with my ex’. If someone’s Instagram is full of recent photos of the two of you, that’s a huge red flag to me.”
Of course, I’ve dated plenty of jealous men, so I know that cyberstalking is a male issue too, and can easily escalate into something more harmful. I had a controlling boyfriend who hacked into my emails, stole my phone, and made me research all of my dating history to “make himself feel better” (which of course never did).
Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that we tend to document only the best moments on social media, curating an enviable version of a relationship that in reality may be far from perfect.
At the end of du Maurier’s novel, the illusion is shattered: the charming and seductive Rebecca turns out to be a terrible woman: spiteful, “wicked,” adulterous, and she dies pregnant with another man’s child.
That’s the ending a guy should remember the next time he stares at a post of him and his ex making out. After all, they broke up, right?