A recent email to me from a young woman confided that she is driven crazy by intrusive thoughts of her partner’s ex and how she believes he must be comparing her. She went on to say that not only had she met his ex – and found her to be beautiful and accomplished – but that also at the start of their relationship, her boyfriend had in fact compared her during an argument.
I hear this anxiety – or a close variant of it – very, very often.
Does it help to know how common these feelings are? It should.
Exhaustive reading of profiles of your partner’s ex on social media, studying photographs, listening to stories, asking questions and obsessing about details are activities which are time consuming, anxiety provoking, compulsive and secretive. Engaging in these behaviours does not prove that you are deranged, on the contrary, they are all responses which spring from the well-documented primal fear of abandonment.
And there is the double-edged sword, all rolled into one ambiguous package: attachment with all its lovely glue, and its dark twin, the terror of being discarded.