If I am the ex girlfriend of someone you are currently dating, and you have found me through social media and seen photos of me and your boyfriend together from years ago, I just want to say: I know what you’re going through and it sucks!

Please do not covet me. I truly am nothing special, although through the mindset of social media stalking you might think I am.

Also, I want you to know that I have bunions! You probably can’t see them in any of the photos of me with your current boyfriend, but I have huge bunions and I also have very dry, prone-to-Rosacea skin, and I want you to know this and get the whole picture and give you whatever relief I can possibly give you because I’ve been in your situational shoes before, and it’s not fun. It’s not fun at all.

Every girl goes through the experience of looking up her current boyfriend’s ex partner. It’s just something innate in us. Birds know how to fly south for the winter, fish know how to breathe oxygen from water, and human girls know exactly how to hurt our own feelings by digging up details of ex-girlfriends.

We all know participating in this creepy online tradition is only going to hurt our feelings, but who the fuck cares. I’m sick of people being saying “don’t do (insert activity here) it’s only going to make you feel bad!”

Yes, it’s called being human. Humans consistently do things that are poison for us, and sometimes - actually most of the time - the thing negatively impacts us and we still do it again.

We illogically crave things that are poison for us. Sometimes I like to do all of them at once. I can’t lie, the scenario of smoking a cigarette while eating McDonalds french fries and freely browsing the socials of my boyfriends ex-girlfriend is something that I would sickly crave. Almost even want. That kind of sounds like a great way to spend a Tuesday afternoon.

So yes, I’ve been in your shoes before. Particularly, last night. I went through the depths of social media and matched up profiles to see who my boyfriend followed that his other friends also followed and…well, I won’t walk you through it but I found her.

And she is pretty.

Damnit all to hell, she is unmistakably pretty.

Pretty in a way that gnarls in your stomach and before you think that I’m vain and jealous (I am both of those things, but still, lest you think that of me) please know that all girls think this. We’re conditioned from the day we’re born to be praised for our looks and to see other women as competition for male attention. It’s bad enough we feel jealousy and envy over how attractive other women are, but now in a post-feminist world we have to feel guilt for the fact that we innately feel envy?

Anyway, that’s a blog post for another time. Let’s get back to how attractive my boyfriend’s alleged ex-girlfriend is. (Alleged because I was trying to hide my crazy so I didn’t tell him I online stalked, and I didn’t have confirmation that I was looking at the right person).

She does that painstaking thing of looking both like a very sweet, nice girl, and also being downright beautiful. She looks like those auditions you see of Victoria’s Secret models where they’re dressed down and just walking toward the camera with jeans and a t-shirt on, but you know that they’re attractive despite the dressed down look. Both pleasing to glance at but also interesting enough to make you look again, and believe me, I looked again.

For some reason I had pictured my boyfriend previously dating a pale girl with thick, black, wavy hair, and this comforted me. I don’t know why, but I had conjured a comforting delusion in my head that all of my boyfriend’s past relationships were with girls that were perfectly nice, sweet, a bit quiet and nerdy, and had Hermione Granger like hair. When I thought of his exes I thought of Hermione Granger (the book version, of course, god forbid not Emma Watson) and it comforted me.

But the girl I saw online last night was not Hermione Granger. She has a perfect side profile and smooth hair and I suddenly found myself cringing at the way I throw on Banana Republic clearance sweaters and leave the house. I suddenly felt like a slob of a person.

That’s one of the dangers of online stalking your boyfriend’s ex. The photo you see of them together - it’s never a casual-moment photo. It’s always taken at a gala or wedding or otherwise nice event, and the photo is taken with a high quality camera so everyone looks particularly beautiful. Conversely, when you stalk your boyfriend’s ex you are almost 100% of the time at home, alone, in sweatpants with your hair in a bun and just to top it off, you’re probably on your period too.

Maybe there’s a life hack in here somewhere about dressing up in preparation to stalk your boyfriends ex so you don’t feel quite as badly about yourself as it happens.

But enough about me. This post is for you - the girl who found me online, and is currently dating one of my exes. I’m trying to see myself through your eyes. (Because the natural next step after stalking someone online is to visit your own page, right? You head to your page and evaluate yourself through the eyes of a third party).

So, let’s get back to you.

You might think I’m attractive and I want you to know that I’ve gotten a nose job. I just always want to be upfront about that. I was a girl who was into horses in high school, the embodiment of the PEN15 TV series, and while I might have blonde hair and blue eyes I don’t want you to think that I am one of those girls who is naturally hot because if I ever appear hot - it is only because I put a lot of work into it for an event or something.

I personally rate hotness on a LOST scale. You know the TV show LOST where the plane crashed on an island? Some people on that island still managed to be hot, and without a hair straighter, face razor, bb cream, and eyebrow pencil I am not hot so I don’t consider myself naturally hot - aka “LOST hot” - but once again, blog post for another time. Let’s get back to you.

You might also think that I look nice, and I am mostly, but I’m also a bit deranged and sometimes awful to be around, and I want you to know that too. I don’t know how to fight well and I’m a girl who indulges in moody moments and stony silences like a four year old instead of communicating her feelings and all - literally all - of my past partners have not liked that about me. I can guarantee your boyfriend (or girlfriend) did not like how I did that. There were a lot of things I did that they did not like.

Also none of my past flames hold a torch for me. Similar to literally every person alive, I wish my exes did hold a flame for me, but they don’t. Every relationship I’ve had has either ended in frustrated dislike of each other, or the bleak and sad disappearance of love. (And trust me, we tried to find so much as a spark to keep the thing going but it was totally out and had been for some time before we finally broke up).

So please know that your current partner is not pining over me. You might think they are because you’re a current victim of online stalking logic but that is not the case!

I guess all I can say is that you are me, I am you, she is me, I am her…god there is something so heart-breakingly magical about women and the shared experiences we all go through.

I think the way we view our partner’s exes is also so different. Guys worry about things like body count and how far you went with your exes, what you did with them in bed, things like that. I look at my boyfriend’s exes and I wonder which wonderful personality traits they have that I don’t. Are they more organized than me? Are they one of those girls that enjoys exercising? I wonder what esteemable qualities she holds that I’m constantly trying to embody and never will.

I guess, essentially: how much of a better woman is she than me?

It’s funny, back when Taylor Swift and Joe Jonas were dating (god, what a time) they had that infamous phone call breakup, and both wrote songs about each other. The Jonas Brothers wrote “Much Better” in reference to Taylor Swift - a song about how Joe Jonas’s new girlfriend was, of course, much better. It had lines like:

But now I see
Everything I'd ever need
Is the girl in front of me
She's much better

And in the chorus, simply “You're much better”

People wrote it off as a silly pop song, but in Taylor Swift’s song about the situation, “Better Than Revenge” at the very end of the song, she sings something that most people don’t talk about.

Let's hear the applause
C'mon show me how much better you are
See you deserve some applause
'Cause you're so much better

And you really hear the venom in her voice when she sings “cause you’re so much better” and sometimes when I listen to “Better Than Revenge” I play that part over a few times.

I never thought about it then, but having a song written about you where someone is hailed as “much better” is kind of the ultimate insult. Who could have guessed that virgin teenage brothers could be so mean!

At the end of the day, that’s really what we’re most nervous about. Because the next level of the question “am I enough?” is asking the question “am I better?” and that’s what seeing an ex-girlfriend does to you. You physically see someone living in the position that you now live in, and you can’t help but wonder who did the better job.

Sigh. The things we do and the thoughts we have all for the sake of making sure a guy is interested in us. I’m disappointed in myself for even falling into this trap - as human as it is.

So I guess all I can really offer you is the sincere statement that you are much better. By virtue (and by Jonas Brother lyric) anyone who comes after is “better” so please, please take that to heart. It sounds like hokey advice, but it is true that your boyfriend wants to be with you and if he ever didn’t - trust in me - he certainly knows how to break-up with someone hahaha. I am of no importance in your relationship, I’m just the ritual that you, and every girl, has to go through once they get a new boyfriend. So think of me as that. I’m just a ritual you have to go through for a few days, but I truly don’t matter.

And if that doesn’t help, there’s always my bunions…and my very dry skin :)

Ripping the band-aid off and stalking your boyfriend's ex-girlfriend