When it’s late, when I’m bored or feeling insecure or nosy or destructive, I follow the pad of my thumb to one place I have no good reason to go: Megan’s Instagram. It’s an endless grid of Frenchie puppies, wine bars in the inner north, trips to Whistler, 30th birthday parties, hollow cheekbones, and daily affirmations. It’s a story at its midway point, told week to week, month to month.
I don’t know Megan. That’s not her real name, anyway. We’ve never met, and I’m not sure she knows I exist. I don’t even follow her! We have only one thing in common: the same ex-boyfriend.
Her satellite entered my orbit years and years ago, in one of those late-night adventures in which I prowled the digital space for reasons to self-loathe. Back then, I shelved her as the other woman; the one my almost-boyfriend at the time really wished I was. She was everything I wasn’t, both my competition and a guide to what not to be.
In the naivety of youth and insecurity, I believed that if I struck the right balance — if I became all the things that guy once loved about her, and rejected all the things she did wrong — then the scales would come level, and he would fall so hard for me that he would forget her name. You may be shocked to learn that it didn’t work out that way.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, What the f—? You’re thinking, someone needs to evaluate this woman. You’re thinking, Megan, whoever you are — get a restraining order.
It’s crazy behaviour, certainly, but not uncommon. I’m not the only one who holds up a complete stranger as a micro-micro-celebrity, a little obsessed from a vast distance. I know Boomers who still taste blood at the sound of their ex-husband’s ex-wife’s name. It’s almost a ritual for me and all the women I know, at the start of each relationship, to reel back through their new partner’s life and search the annals of who they were before us.
“Here’s his ex,” is a text that precedes half-a-dozen screenshots of some unsuspecting civilian in group chats from here to the end of time and space. “Discuss.”
Show me someone who denies ever having done this, and I’ll show you a liar. Mania shared is mania divided, and this is all completely fine. Right?
