I found explicit photos of my boyfriend and his ex and I felt sick...
because she was so unattractive. I'm one of thousands struggling with 'Rebecca Syndrome' By Lucy Holden Published: 12:03, 20 June 2024 | Updated: 12:22, 20 June 2024 e-mail 1 View comments It’s 2am and I’m home alone, falling down a rabbit hole online. On my phone is the Instagram profile of a new man I’m seeing, and I’m forensically looking through it for evidence of his past love life.
There are holiday photos, party photos, weekend-away photos. And in all of them, I hunt for ‘her’ – the one before me..
. and the ones before that. My thumb hovers over each, making sure not to inadvertently hit the ‘like’ button that would alert him to my nocturnal snooping.
When I was younger, and people were less prudent about what they shared online, there would be years’ worth of these images to torture myself with, my new boyfriend smiling with his arm around another woman. Now I’m in my 30s, and most have us have wised up a bit about the wisdom of documenting every moment of our lives on social media, I have to look harder for evidence of girlfriends past. They might be within a group shot, or silhouetted in the distance – who’s that riding the bike in front of him? – but they’ll still be there.
Lucy Holden talks to a psychoanalyst about what might be behind her obsessional Instagram scrolling to find out about her new man's exes Armie Hammer, left, and Lily James in the film Rebecca. The.
