‘I’m not going to sit next to her. She’s a fucking bitch’. It’s late on Saturday night and I’m sat with two of my closest friends enjoying overpriced cocktails on Mare street. ‘Why?’ I ask, as she tightly grips her iPhone in one hand and aggressively claws the candle on the table with one of her long, painted fingernails. ‘Why won’t you sit next to her? You guys know each other right?’ Long pause.
My friend Cara and I exchange tense glances. As a friendship group we have an unwritten rule where we don’t trash talk people without very good reason. Right now the rule is being broken and everyone’s a bit tense. We’re discussing Cara’s impending birthday dinner and the seating plan, with our friend, who shall remain nameless, but is- by anyone’s standards- a sexy, smart, minxy, hilarious, successful bombshell, who falls in love as often as I shave my legs. So, like, once a fortnight. Let’s call her Kiki, ‘cos that’s a fun name.
‘I just think she’s a fucking liar…’ Kiki starts up again. ‘Wow that’s strong. Is she? What’s she lied about?’ I enquire as Cara gives me a stoney ‘leave it’ stare. ‘Well, whatever, I don’t like her. She used to hook up with Freddie and I think she’s a snake and she knows who I am and she always gives me this look, and it’s like, just come over and say “hi” we’ve been in enough of the same rooms…’
And, so, it continues. For dear Kiki falling for someone and obsessing over the object of her desire’s ex-girlfriend are one and the same thing. A professional Instagram investigator, we all await the standard slew of texts that begin ‘I fancy someone’ and end, 15 minutes later with ‘Oh my god he used to get with…’.
I often wonder why she does it to herself and more than anything I wish she’d stop. I’ve heard her talk absolute nonsense about girls she doesn’t know- and - even more worse, I’ve nodded along in apparent agreement.
I think this is a terrible secret that’s integral to the female experience that no one acknowledges. Dissing someone’s ex is compulsory and anything otherwise is a red flag sign of disloyalty. It’s almost obligatory to respond, when your friend summons her new boyfriend’s ex up on Facebook, by dismissing her as a hideous growth of basic flesh who looks like she’d be crap in bed. It’s awful and we all do it. I remember one time when on such an occasion, when a group of us were ogling a stranger’s holiday pictures, that I said something along the lines of ‘her fringe is quite sweet’. I might as well have thrown my nan into moving traffic. Never again.
I could get worthy here. I could tell you that in order to do better by one another, we need to nip this institutionalised, ritualistic and gratuitous kind of competitiveness in the proverbial bud. I could get on my Argos catalogue and shout very loudly about the pitfalls of bitchiness and the futility of jealously. But that would be hypocritical of me. Because I’ve done it myself.
It makes me cringe thinking about it, but I couldn’t stop myself. And actually my rule of thumb, to help me gauge whether or not I have strong feelings for someone, is whether I’ve stalked their ex on social media. It’s a terrible admission but if I’ve ever really, really liked you, I’ll will have one hundred percent have spied on your ex-girlfriend at some point in time. I will have wondered if her hair is better than mine, and what she looks like in a bikini, if you had nicknames for each other and I’ll imagine you fucking and cooking a stew together.
My favourite time to stalk the ex-lovers of my contemporaneous lovers, is on a come down, on a Sunday in bed, preferably after I’ve had an argument with someone or checked my bank balance. My top tips for these moments are to sit up; fully dressed in bed, block all natural light out of your room, and throw your clothes about if they’re not already littering your floor, light some candles and put some Sampha on- it will make you feel 99% more pitiful. You are now a love Racoon, ready to rummage around in another woman’s trash and cellotape her receipts together. Welcome to Anxiety twinned with Self-hate: population you (and Sampha).
This will go one of two ways. Either - and this is terrible- you will find the ex and you will feel relieved, because she’s now a) gay b) married c) living in Australia or d) basic, or, deep breath, you’ll uncover someone who looks really quite nice; maybe like someone you’d get one with, who has a good taste in shoes, is talented, well dressed, pretty, travelled, (stomach flip) smart and witty. Fuck. Is my usual reaction.
So why do I do it?
The answer is of course because we are all trained to do so. Women are pathologically brainwashed by advertising, people, family members, teachers and friends alike, to fear one another. We are programmed to function with moderate levels of inadequacy which are to be monitored and outwardly denied at all times. Unless we love and trust each other, we are pitted against our own kind, matched up, weighed, measured and compared. Hence my awful admission that sometimes uncovering an ex can be a relief because I might fancy myself a better Top Trump. Of course, the opposite can also happen and have dismal ramifications.
One friend of mine has been dating her girlfriend for eight months. They are absolutely smitten and I don’t like hanging out with her at the moment for that reason, so I called the traitor in the name of research last night, because, I know she has some deep-rooted issues around her squeeze’s ex. ‘Sometimes, if we’ve fallen out with something, my go-to is to take this piss out of her ex, who’s a singer. I’ll make a joke about Alanis Morrissett or folk music just to wind my girlfriend up and I don’t know why I do it. It’s low hanging fruit but it temporarily makes me feel more important. Like I’m belittling what they had. I’ve convinced myself she’s a loser despite never having met her.’ I ask her if she thinks it might be because she’s jealous. ‘Yeah. Of course. She had my girlfriend’s heart and full attention for three years. It’s fucked but I’ve kind of decided that unless we meet that three-year mark too, she’ll have won.’
I can relate to my friend’s irrational though processes and I have seen first-hand how poisonous jealousy can be to an otherwise stable relationship. It grows like ivy over strong pairings until one partner, feeling choked, cuts things off. I’ve been with envious people and controlling boyfriends and there’s nothing less sexy. I have too, been the ex.
In fact, my best friend Lucy (real name- she won’t mind) and I met this way. Lucy’s an amazing photographer and I booked her for a job. We began emailing. She sent very sweet responses and I looked forward to meeting her.
On shoot day, I arrived to meet a tense Lucy. I put it down to a hangover and we cracked on. Nervously, once we’d wrapped she asked me out for lunch. What ensued was four hours of drinking in Peckham, lots of merriment, lots of laughing. At the end of the meal, she looked into her lap and asked me if I knew a ‘Harry (surname withheld)’ and I sharply responded ‘no, I don’t think so’.
That wasn’t true. I did know Harry. I had slept with Harry. I had been seeing him the summer previous, had been spectacularly badly behaved and left him for dead half way through a hot August evening, ignoring all texts sent thereafter. Fucking hell, was she Harry’s best friend?
Turns out she was Harry’s recently christened ex-girlfriend (much to her dismay) and the whole time they’d been together, I had been a spectral presence in their union. They’d begun dating and she’d seen my name flash up on his phone more than once. He’d said my name by mistake. He had been searching me on Instagram. Long story short, unified by our distaste for dear Harry, we became thick as burglars. And we still are to this day. We’re not alone here – my friend Cora drunkenly started a conversation with her ex’s ex at a house party last weekend (I thought she was going over to punch her) and they’re now mates. A year ago this would simply have not been the case. The tears on tears on tears over this girl she barely knew, and then here they were - hugging it out.
The somewhat sinister but also reassuringly rational narrative behind these fables is that your current partner probably looks for similar qualities in all the people they choose to be with - you included. And, newsflash, you probably do the same.
There is a maxim, that I only remember from the ok sci-fi film Minority Report starring Tom Cruise, that could well be Socrates, but I’m going it attribute it to Minority Report, and it goes like this: ‘You dig up the past and all you get is dirty.’ Essentially what I’m trying to say is rummaging around in your partner’s past life, will mean hitting pause on your own. Jealousy and envy are the least useful and least sexy of all the deadly sins for a reason. They’re feelings we inflict upon ourselves; emotions that warp our inner lives and drive us to behave in anti-social and negative ways and most crucially they stop you from living in the present.
There is also a meme that reads ‘when you lurk and find exactly wtf you were looking for’ and it features a picture of a Furby in front of a computer- on fire. For as long as we continue to dig up the past, we’re all that flaming Furby. Thank you.
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Half-Hearted: It's A Myth That Only Men Are Commitment Phobic
Follow Nellie on Twitter @nelliefaitheden
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.