Are you obsessed with your man’s exes? You could be suffering from Rebecca Syndrome… what it is & how to deal with it
AS soon as I picked up the photo, I saw red.
Here was this other woman, gazing lovingly down the lens of a camera — straight at my husband Anthony.
Immediately, I launched into a full-on interrogation of him.
“Where was the picture taken?” I demanded. Why was she looking at him in such a sappy way? Had they already had sex?
Once the green-eyed monster had got its teeth into me, I couldn’t stop. I dissed her hair, her dress, and topped it off by saying she looked “annoying”.
What followed was a row, in which Anthony told me I was being “unreasonable”. When he defended her dress as “not that bad”, I became even more enraged.
But, of course, Anthony was right and — dress aside — I really was being unreasonable.
The picture, in an envelope of old family photos, had been taken 25 years ago at a family christening.
He’d gone out with this woman before we’d started dating and hadn’t seen her since they broke up.
But over the next few days, visions of them kissing, holding hands — and worse — kept popping into my head.
Because this ex-girlfriend posed zero threat to my relationship, my flare-up really bothered me.
As a rational person who’s training for a masters degree in psychotherapy, it was completely out of character.
So once I had calmed down, I resolved to find out what this was really about.
It turns out feeling jealous of a partner’s exes is a guilty secret for many of us — and it’s on the rise.
According to one study, 63 per cent of people now stalk their exes online up to once a month.
Around 38 per cent even do so after getting married.
With more of us than ever before logging on to social media, we use it as a tool to check up on our former partners — as well as snooping on who our current partners used to date.
This phenomenon is known as retroactive jealousy, or Rebecca Syndrome — after the Daphne Du Maurier novel, in which a young woman fears she will never live up to her husband’s late wife.
Of course, everyone gets jealous. And no matter how secure you are in your relationship, imagining your partner with someone else can be painful.
Only these days, we don’t need to imagine it — we can see the evidence online.
According to a 2018 study in the journal Social Media and Society, platforms such as Instagram and Facebook have made retroactive jealousy more likely.
And while people believe finding out more about their partner’s past lovers will make them feel better, it has the opposite effect.
If the thoughts become repetitive and trigger them to repeatedly question their partners, then it can even destroy relationships.
Psychotherapist Toby Ingham is the author of new book Retroactive Jealousy, Making Sense Of It.
He says retroactive jealousy is a threat to relationships, adding that it can even become a form of obsessive compulsive disorder.
In his view, the key to understanding retroactive jealousy OCD is to realise that it’s not about your partner’s past. It’s about yours.
Toby says: “Retroactive jealousy is a symptom of a deeper issue from the past.
“Say you grew up feeling your mother or father weren’t particularly interested in you — or you felt overlooked for another sibling.
“There are obviously lots of variations on those themes, but it means that you were left longing for something which you couldn’t have — predictable love and care.
“This can trigger overwhelming insecurities and jealousies that you couldn’t deal with at the time and which then tend to surface in another form when you start your first romantic relationships.
These kinds of fears and insecurities can then get projected into your love relationship and become the basis for retroactive jealousy.”
Some factors can make Rebecca Syndrome worse.
These include your partner taking a long time to get over their ex, you hooking up with them while they were still on the rebound, or if the ex is still in their life as a friend.
Legal secretary Karina, 34, checks up on her partner’s exes every few months, even though she has been in a secure and happy relationship for five years.
She says: “I know my partner’s phone passcode, so when he’s asleep I check out what his exes are up to, on Facebook. I trust him but I just want to be sure they haven’t been messaging him or trying to get back together.
“I have zero reason to think they would but I just like to be sure. The other day, we were talking about his exes and he admitted he knew that one of them had had a baby. I was furious because then I knew it meant he’d been checking up on her too — and he admitted he had.
“That triggered massive insecurities for me — that he still has feelings for her, he never got over her breaking up with him, and that I was just the sloppy seconds.
“No matter how many times he tells me he loves me, I can’t get that thought out of my mind”.
Helen, 43, a store manager, admits to “stalking” her partner’s ex online. She says:
“I don’t really know what I am looking for. I know full-well she doesn’t pose any threat to our marriage and wouldn’t want him back anyway.
“Maybe I’m jealous that she had him when he was young and fit, and had a six-pack instead of a beer belly?
“He once told me the most times he’d ever had sex in one night was six, with his first serious girlfriend when he was 21.
“We’re lucky to have sex once a week these days.”
Taken to extremes, Rebecca Syndrome can destroy relationships. For construction worker Harry*, 31, retroactive jealousy struck when he first fell in love ten years ago. He says:
“I was so obsessed with her, I started checking out the guys she’d been going out with before, on social media.
I’d disappear down rabbit holes, comparing myself to them and grilling her about them.
“I could not bear the thought of other men having sex with her before me. I did it so much that she saw it as a huge red flag and thought I was some kind of weird stalker, so she ended the relationship. I now realise it was all in my head.”
As for me, just knowing there’s a name for the uncomfortable feeling I get when thinking of my partner’s past relationships has given me a handle on it.
I also now see how my Rebecca Syndrome links back to my child-hood, when my dad had numerous affairs.
When his infidelity broke up my parents’ marriage and he moved abroad and had more kids, I realised I’d felt forgotten.
Now that I know my reaction had nothing to do with my husband and everything to do with my own past, I can finally put the ghosts of his ex-girlfriends to rest.
* Names have been changed.
- Retroactive Jealousy, Making Sense Of It, by Toby Ingham, is out now, priced £8.99.
HOW TO DEAL WITH REBECCA SYNDROME
DON’T seek reassurance from your partner: Work on your own feelings of self-worth. Remind yourself that it’s your issue, not your partner’s. We all have a past, and there’s nothing we can do to change that.
TELL your partner: Unless your other half understands what you are going through, your behaviour will spark rows and raise red flags.
Share your retroactive jealousy with your partner, while taking responsibility for it – and make it clear you don’t blame them.
LIVE in the now: Focus on the strengths in your current relationship and create more opportunities for special one-on-one time together.
Try some new adventures or activities that will set your relationship apart from your partner’s previous ones.
AVOID feeding it: You may think that finding out more details about your partner’s exes will make you feel better, but research has found it only feeds retroactive jealousy.
Create obstacles to you checking up on them, by blocking their accounts from your socials.
SWAP places: Just like your partner, you probably have exes too. Think of the reasons you’re no longer together. The likelihood is that it’s because something wasn’t quite right.
This will be a useful reminder that it’s possible to have an intimate relationship with someone and leave any romantic feelings behind you.