When Does Cyber-Stalking Your Partner’s Ex Become a Problem?

It’s pretty much internet law that, if you go searching online, you’ll probably find something to confirm your worst suspicions. Your ear might be sore because you went swimming yesterday, but it could also mean you’re going deaf or have a brain tumor. There’s always something to send us into a doom spiral.

“Rebecca Syndrome” is, in many ways, a product of this 21st-century affliction. The psychological phenomenon—which has been around for years but is currently seeing a surge of interest on social media—was named after Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel, Rebecca, in which the heroine develops an obsession with her husband’s dead first wife and imagines that she’ll never live up to her. Psychologists define it as pathological jealousy, with sufferers constantly comparing themselves to their partner’s ex.

Sound familiar? It’s something we’ve probably all done to some extent—that is, spending time thinking about, maybe even worrying about, a partner’s ex. Rare is the person who doesn’t want to know anything at all about the person who came before them, and if you really want to know, you can just google it. A quick search, or 20, can reveal where they live, work, go on holiday, and, of course, how they look. And then, having found this all out, we naturally tend to feel discombobulated by it. Are they more successful? More attractive? Fundamentally better than us?

It’s easy to spiral. Before you know it, you might find yourself looking up the female colleague your partner always seems to mention, the girl they had an unrequited crush on in college, their first kiss. And if you discover that your partner is still liking their pictures or commenting on their posts… well, then what? Your brain wants to jump to the worst conclusion, the same way it did about that earache.

Here’s what worries me: the mindlessness of my reactions online. Could I tell you the last thing I liked on social media? Absolutely not. Do I know whether it was posted by a man, woman, or someone I think is attractive? Nope. I click and comment on all sorts of things that I like or agree with. I rarely consider how they could look if someone (my husband) were to look at them out of context or search for “patterns.”