So your ex has a new girlfriend

on comparison, social media stalking, and feeling replaced

Many of us have the shared experience of mindlessly stalking our ex on social media. At a certain point, it’s not even intentional—it’s muscle memory. A name typed without thinking, a profile visited more often than we’d ever admit aloud. Easy accessibility is both a blessing and a curse.

And then it happens: the unanticipated stomach drop.

The New Girl. Maybe they have their arms around each other; maybe it’s just a glimpse of her hair. Either way, you know. Your breath catches, your heart tugs, and your hands feel clammy. Suddenly, you're swept into a sea of suffocating comparisons, unable to catch your breath. You zoom in—her face, her smile, her hair, and her body haunt your mind. You memorize her, forming some kind of demented obsession. You curse yourself for the thoughts swimming in your head, attempting to self-soothe, proclaiming that she could never amount to you, tearing down a woman you don’t know and never will. To you, she’s nearly god-like and a spawn of Satan at the same time.

You scroll through past posts searching for clues of her, confused how you missed this. You look at their comments, their banter impossible to decode by anyone who isn’t them.

She either looks just like you or nothing like you; there’s no in-between. I often wonder which is worse: the antithesis or the clone. If she looks like you, on one hand, you could wonder if this is a pathetic attempt to replace you. On the other hand, you could wonder if you were just swapped out for the better, shinier version. A version with updated software, better equipped for him than you ever were. Maybe you were just one of many who fit his “type.”

If she looks nothing like you, it could make you question if you were ever truly loved. How could someone tell you they loved you, only to move on to your complete opposite? Were you just a phase—a flavor he tried and spat out, rinsing it away for good?

This photo is proof that he is no longer thinking about you. He has to know I’d see this, you think to yourself. The worst part is that maybe he didn’t think about you finding the picture at all. Maybe he honestly and totally no longer thinks about you or how you feel. Whether you’ve really moved on or not, it still burns the same. We often resent the stomach drop, seeing it as proof that, on some small level, we still care. The healed wound is being poked at and prodded by this perfectly manicured photo and now it’s bleeding.

You see this picture and, in some twisted way, feel betrayed. Not because it’s over, but because he’s now entered a chapter of his life you’ll never touch—not even in the footnotes. The narrative has shifted and there is no longer a place for you. You can’t help but dissect this relationship, wondering if she’s better than you and what she does that you didn’t. Do his friends and family like her more than you? Does he have moments where he thinks to himself: How did I ever think it would work with anyone else when this feels so right?

In this moment, what hurts the most is the fact that you’ve been healing while he’s been moving on. You’ve been doing the work: attending therapy sessions, journaling affirmations, and letting yourself cry even when you wish you’d just stop thinking about it already. Meanwhile, he’s been learning someone else. While you’ve spent time learning to be okay alone—to not have your heart sink every night you go to bed without receiving a Goodnight text—he’s sending it to someone else. When you think of him while you watch his favorite movies, he’s now showing them to someone else, nestled up in each other’s warmth, their breathing in sync. When you sleep alone in your bed, he’s holding her in his.

precisely

You’re now nothing more than a memory—someone who he might think about briefly whenever someone asks him about this period of his life—tucked away in the box of old throwaways from his teenage years with his rusted soccer trophies, bent yearbooks, and dusted DVDs. He may remember you fondly, bitterly, or even worse: with absolute indifference. Maybe down the line he’ll see a glimpse of you somewhere. He’ll see your name on the cover of a book and think his eyes are deceiving him. She actually did it, he’ll think. Maybe he’ll even want to congratulate you, feeling some sense of ownership over your success. I used to go out with her, he’ll think of mentioning to people in the bookstore who sneak a glance at your book. Because you became someone without him. Someone great.

I think about the Natasha and Carrie of it all. The obsession that comes from it, wanting to keep the New Girl as an experiment—a case study in your control. You want to see her bedroom, smell her perfume, figure out what makes her her. You even think about reaching out to her or orchestrating a meet-cute to become her friend, waiting until she’s alone at a café to ask her if the opposing seat is taken. Then, you could become an insider. An all-knower. Maybe then, you’d understand.

Comparison is a killer, slowly swallowing you until you lose yourself in the shadow of someone else. The New Girl is someone we’ve created in our heads to be some ethereal being. We often idolize these women who have seemingly filled our shoes. We see them as flawless while also scanning their imperfections to lessen the blow. We can make as many jokes about the New Girl as we want and masquerade our hurt as honest nonchalance, but it all boils down to the same question: Why her?

Instead of wallowing in it, it’s important to highlight what we know to be true. That becomes particularly difficult after the initial heat of a breakup cools. But I am begging you to fight those rose-colored glasses with everything in you—the ones that tint the world neon pink as soon as your imagination takes the wheel, blurring reality and replacing it with something softer, sweeter, and ultimately untrue.

If he came back to you, you wouldn’t even want him. You just think you do, but that version of you who was once infatuated with him is now long gone. Your puzzle pieces have broken, never to fit together again. And maybe that’s for the best, even with fleeting moments of loneliness that he doesn’t have the privilege to ever experience. Because, yes, being able to be okay alone is a privilege.

One day, he’ll need the ability to be on his own and he won’t have it. He’s a fish out of water, needing to desperately be fixed by another lost soul he’ll soon wither. And it is an empty life to be only half of a whole person when alone.

When you see that picture (because it’s a when and not an if) and whether you utter the words “She looks nothing like me” or “She looks just like me,” it’s all the same. Something so separate from us can feel so deeply personal, an attack on everything we are. But, honestly, it’s not your ex or the New Girl, it’s the realization that we haven’t fully let go yet while learning not to hate ourselves for it.

But being alone is so much sweeter than needing to be completed by someone else, whether you know it now or not.

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