How Do I Stop Comparing Myself to My Girlfriend’s Exes?

Dear Dr. NerdLove:

I’ve been stuck in my own head and I don’t know how to get out.

Until a few years ago, I was significantly overweight. There are all sorts of reasons – unhealthy relationship with food, eating my feelings, convenience – but ultimately it came down to my choosing not to do anything about it. Eventually, I got tired of feeling bad about myself and decided to make changes. I wasn’t aiming to lose a lot of weight, just to feel better about myself and my life, so I hit the gym hard, did my best to eat a healthier diet and ultimately lost around 40 lbs. Between that and putting on some muscle, I was in the best shape of my life. I felt like I’d finally clawed my way to the surface after years underwater, like I finally had control over my life and I felt amazing about myself for the first time ever, really.

That’s around when I met my girlfriend.

She’s smart, a brilliant writer and comedian and gorgeous. We’ve been together for over a year now and I guess you could say it’s getting serious. I could see her being my forever person and she says the same about me. We both agree: we can easily see ourselves still together in the retirement home as she makes me laugh with her jokes and stories and me making little toys and gadgets (I like engineering little 3d printed toys as a hobby). But lately, I’ve been struggling again. Work’s been stressful, it’s hard to eat perfectly when time is short, I’ve been skipping gym days and honestly, the pounds are creeping back on. Not a lot, but enough that I see softness around my middle and losing some definition that I had. I was never going to be a fitness influencer, but even so, the confidence I worked so hard to build is cracking.

Here’s my issue: my girlfriend works in the entertainment industry as a creative and as a journalist and she has a history of dating guys who are, frankly, next level. We’re talking former (and some still current) Instagram models, professional actors and musicians, that whole scene. She’s on good terms with most of them and some of them are still in her life, if not as friends, then at least digitally. Even if she doesn’t see them in person these days, she still follows them, likes their posts, communicates with them in DMs (she tells me, unprompted, about it) and from what I can tell, most of them still look like they were carved out of marble.

I know it’s not fair to compare myself to other men, but I can’t help it. When I compare myself to the kinds of guys she used to be with — guys who seem effortlessly perfect — I start to spiral. I wonder if she’s just settling with me or if she’s with me because I was at least close to their level of fitness and hotness when we met. I worry whether I’m the “nice guy” she chose after she got tired of the flashy ones and if she’s going to get bored with me if I’m not able to stay on their level. And with my own body image issues resurfacing, that fear gets louder. I’m terrified she’ll stop being attracted to me. Or maybe never really was, at least not in the same way and she’ll want to go back to guys with perfectly chiseled cheekbones and washboard abs instead of a dude with a softening jawline and the beginnings of love handles.

I haven’t brought this up with her, because I don’t want to come off as insecure or controlling. I REALLY don’t want to police who she follows or what she does. But I also can’t keep pretending it’s not eating away at me. I just want to feel like she wants me like she did and isn’t wishing for what she used to have and, let’s be honest, probably could have them again.

So here I am, asking you: How do I deal with this? How do I quiet that voice in my head that says I’m never going to measure up? And how do I talk to her about this without sounding like I’m trying to compete with ghosts from her past?

Thanks for listening.

—The Man in the Funhouse Mirror

Your letter, MITFM, is why I tell people that changing their looks isn’t the cure-all they often think it is – at least, not the way most guys go about it. A person’s physical appearance isn’t the end-all, be-all of attraction, and changing that aspect of yourself – whether it’s a matter of losing weight, putting on muscle or going as far as cosmetic surgery to “fix” their face or even try to be taller – isn’t going to solve your problems. Not when those problems are mostly internal. External solutions never solve internal issues; it’s like painting the walls to hide wood rot. You can pretend that the problem’s not there, but it’s continuing to linger and to spread.

That is to say: this is very much a “the call is coming from inside the house” kind of issue. You’re not seeing actual signs that your girlfriend is losing interest. Her behavior’s not changing. She hasn’t demonstrated through her actions or attitudes that she’s shallow or focused on appearance. She’s not sneaking around or acting any differently with her exes. This really isn’t about how she feels about you, it’s about how you feel about you. This is anticipatory anxiety based around your self-image. And I don’t think your self-image has really changed from the one you had before you got swole.

And to be clear: I don’t think that it’s necessarily bad or a sign of anything that you feel this way. The issue is more about the way you’re dealing with these feelings and the way they’re making you feel about yourself. When you turn those feelings inward – whether blaming yourself for not “measuring up” or having them in the first place, you end up creating more problems and cause them to spiral out of control.

There’re two things that I think you need to keep in mind here. The first is how much propinquity matters when it comes to dating and attraction. We are most likely to form relationships with the people who are around us the most often and the people that we see the most frequently. For someone who works in the entertainment industry, especially in industry towns like New York or Los Angeles or Vancouver, that’s going to mean other people in the industry. This is one of the reasons why celebrities tend to date other celebrities; it’s who they are around the most often and who they interact with the most. And when so much of creative work is for video these days, that means there’re gonna be a lot of pretty people in the mix.

I would also point out that the men she used to date – emphasis on used to – are in an industry where maintaining a particular look or build is literally theirjob. Even if they don’t have their employer footing the bill, maintaining those builds takes a massive chunk of their day and it ain’t fun. Just listen to Zac Efron talking about the shit he had to endure to get and keep his body for Baywatch and other movies.

But here’s the thing: beauty is as much about contrast as it is about aesthetics. When you see the same thing over and over again, it’s not unusual or different; it’s the norm. Strip club bouncers and DJs talk about the moment they realized that being surrounded by hot naked women didn’t phase them anymore and how little they noticed or even cared. When *everyone* is super-hot, nobody is.That’s kinda important. In fact, it’s so important that it is part of what brings me to my second point to keep in mind: It wasn’t the change in your looksthat made this relationship possible.

This was very much a “Dumbo’s Magic Feather” moment for you. Your weight loss and all didn’t change who you were as a person. It just gave you permission to unlock and use aspects of yourself that were always there. She didn’t pick you because you looked like you stepped off the cover of Men’s Health, it was the confidence you felt. You felt better about yourself. You carried yourself with pride, you felt emboldened and braver. You were willing to take bigger swings because you felt like a million bucks. You took a chance with someone you felt was out of your league and as it turns out, she always was in your league because she liked what you had to offer. If looks were all that made this possible, you’d be in a very different situation. You wouldn’t be talking about getting serious after having been together for more than a year; the novelty of hooking up with you would’ve worn off long before then. If there wasn’t actual substance and connection, this would’ve been a fling, not a relationship.

The problem here is that you changed your body but not your mind. You’ve got the same beliefs about yourself and your value that you had before and you’re basing it all on your physical appearance. Believe me, I’m a huge fan of personal transformations and if losing weight and putting on muscle makes you feel better and encourages other positive changes, I’m all in favor of it. But you have to understand that just changing the outside doesn’t change the inside. If you don’t deal with your insecurities or recognize your worth is more than whether you can bounce a quarter off your abs, you’re going to feel like an unlovable dude whose pulling off a scam and you’re about to get caught.

(And trust me: being classically handsome and jacked isn’t proof against insecurity. Brendan Frasier, at the peak of his career in the 90s, did permanent damage his body because of the way Hollywood played on his anxieties and insecurities.)

While I won’t tell you not to do what you can about your diet or to get more exercise, I do have to tell you that this is ultimately a losing battle. Even if we leave aside what we’ve learned about how our bodies fight weight loss, nobody can defeat time. Entropy and gravity will get us all in the end. Metabolisms slow as we age, our ability to put on muscle decreases, fat distribution changes, hair falls out, skin loses elasticity and so on. Time makes fools of us all; this is part of why love is more than skin-deep. It’s about connection and what we bring to the table.

If you were to ask your girlfriend about why she dated the guys she did, I suspect that looks wouldn’t be the first thing that came up. I would be willing to bet cash money that what you’d hear about where how one guy made her laugh or how she and other guy had great conversations or this other person’s talent and so on. And the common denominator of all of it is how they made her feel. That’s why she’s with you: because of the way you make her feel and vice versa.

So I think part of what you need is what I’ve told many a man dealing with insecurity: ask her to love you a little louder when those feelings come up and remind yourself about why the two of you are still together. Cultivate that sense of worth that’s inherent in you rather than contingent on your looks. You’re not worth any less just because you can’t maintain the insane fitness regimen you had when you were younger, nor because you have a body fat percentage higher than single digits.

You should treat yourself with more kindness than you currently are, especially if gaining a little weight back is throwing your self-esteem for a loop. You can’t shame yourself into being a stronger or more confident person; you can only make yourself feel worse. Trying to beat yourself into being “better” just makes “better” how you try to make the bad feelings go away. It doesn’t bring good feelings out or encourage you or make you feel stronger, it just teaches you that you can never feel completely secure or at ease.

Work out because it makes you feel good. Eat well because the body is a machine and it’s important to make sure it gets the right balance of nutrients and protein and carbs. But also build in a level of grace and forgiveness, because there’s nothing wrong with NOT being carved from marble. You’re just as loveable and just as wonderful even if you’re softer and hugging you doesn’t feel like hugging a statue. And honestly: food isn’t just fuel, food is life. Sometimes you gotta stop and eat some carbs and sugars and fats simply because they’re delicious and make life worth living. Sometimes your inner possum wants trash and that’s fine.

Your girlfriend loves you for you, not for any muscle striation or vascularity. You should love yourself for the same reasons.

Good luck.

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Dear Dr. NerdLove;

My boyfriend and I have been together in a monogamous relationship for 2 years. It’s been going really well. One of the things I struggle with however is being around his ex, who is part of the hobby group that we are in and they still teach a weekly class together. Although I’m not very close with her, I’d still consider her a friend and I appreciate her as a person which makes the reactions triggered in me even more confusing! I can’t avoid her because of the mutual group we share.

For context, my boyfriend and his ex were together for 4 years. Most of that time, they were in an open relationship. He ended the relationship.

Even though on a logical level, I know that my boyfriend ended that relationship for a reason and that me and his ex are unique people, being around her triggers so much in me:

– insecurity brought from comparison (around looks, skill level, etc)

– fear of loss that my boyfriend will want to open the relationship to get back together with her in some capacity

– self judgement from having these reactions at all in the first place

I feel like I’m “not allowed” to have insecurity about her. I feel alone in trying to deal with this.

How can I get my heart to match the understanding of my brain?

Appreciate the help!

Bad Vibes Brain

there’re two different issues at play here. We’ll talk about the jealousy issue in a moment; for now, I want to focus on this part: “I feel like I’m “not allowed” to have insecurity about her”

Toss that shit out the window, because this is a bad mindset. Any talk about not being “allowed” to feel a particular way is unhelpful because it denies a fundamental truth: you do feel this way. Your feelings are real. They’re valid, in as much as that you are feeling them and they are causing you actual distress. When we say that ‘we’re not allowed’ to feel a certain way, what we end up doing is making ourselves feel worse about the way we feel; not only are we having these feelings that we know aren’t rational, but we’re a bad person for feeling them at all. GOOD people wouldn’t feel this way!

Framing things about what we’re “allowed” to feel or how we “should” feel just ends up putting up barriers between ourselves and actually dealing with those feelings.

You feel insecure. That’s real. You know, on some level, that your feelings are irrational and unfounded. That’s good. But that doesn’t mean that you’re not feeling them, and you’re not a bad person for feeling them in the first place. It’s far better to acknowledge that you’re feeling these ­things than to beat yourself up about them, because only one of these approaches will let you actually resolve them… and it ain’t the “I need to shove these feelings away because I’m bad” one.

Now, part of the problem is that – as is so often the case – you’re trying to logic your way out of something that you haven’t logic-ed your way into. Trust me, I’m an expert on this; I’ve done the “I shouldn’t feel this way so I just won’t!” dance more times than I care to count. All it did was pressurize those feelings – squeezing them down and making them more intense until the slightest jostle or impact made them break containment, messily and all over the place.

You feel how you feel. That is neither bad nor good. You are allowed to feel how you feel, because you can’t forbid feelings. It’s all in how you deal with them.

So let’s talk about the feelings themselves and what to do with them. As I’ve said many times before, jealousy is like the check engine light of relationships. When it comes on, it means there’s something that needs attention. Sometimes it’s as simple and banal as needing to tighten the gas cap all the way. Other times, it means “maybe take your car to the mechanic if only to make sure the engine’s not about to fall out of the chassis.”

In this case, as in many cases, this is a ‘call is coming from inside the house’ kind of situation, where you’re comparing yourself to his ex in the same way that people compare their unedited raw footage to someone else’s highlight reel. You worry about these issues, not because there’s a logical basis for them or even a reasonable inference to be made based on his behavior, but because you compare yourself to his ex and find yourself wanting. And part of the problem here is that you’re seeing her through what you imagine to be his eyes, but looking at yourself through your own.

This is where we go right back to the “unedited footage” part of the metaphor; you’re basing what snippits you see of her, adding in second-hand knowledge from your boyfriend and then comparing it to the constant streaming feed of your own thoughts, experiences and feelings.Nothing positive is going to come out of that sort of comparison, simply because your brain is going to head straight to comparing what you think of as your flaws with hers. And because you’re working from very limited information, of course you’re going to think yours are worse; you have so many more of them and they have to be so much more egregious because… well, because!

But that’s a shitty way to look at things because it’s not accurate and it’s not fair. It’s not comparing apples to apples, it’s comparing a painting of an apple to every orange and lemon and kumquat ever. Not only is the painting an idealized creation that will never age or change, but even if it wasn’t, it’s an entirely different fruit and flavor profile.

And here’s why that’s important: just because someone used to like a particular kind of fruit doesn’t mean that they don’t like other kinds. You can like apples and also like orange, and having liked one doesn’t mean the other is inferior or lesser. It’s just different. People are entirely capable of appreciating both for what they are, rather than in comparison to the other.

Hell, sometimes – and admittedly, here’s where the metaphor starts to break down – you like them because they’re different; you decide apples aren’t necessarily your thing these days and oranges are where they’re at. That doesn’t make either of the fruits better or worse than the other; it’s just about what you want at that point in your life.

Case in point: your boyfriend used to be in an open relationship. He decided to leave that relationship and started a monogamous one with you. That’s the sort of thing that suggests to me that he’s not really feeling the open or poly thing. He’s been with you for two years and, in all this time, hasn’t really made any sort of noises about missing his ex, wanting to get back with her or even making moves that one could kinda-sorta-maybe see as a way of backdoor getting back with her, even if you squint.

I understand the worry that someone’s past is representative of their future, but more often than not, their past is their past for a reason. That includes relationship types, as much as the people they used to have relationships with.

Now, to bring this back around to what I said about being “allowed” to have those feelings… I wonder if that’s part of why being around her brings those feelings to the surface. You’re trying so hard to not feel them that you just make them ever-present, running in the back of your mind like an app you’ve never shut down. Being around her would mean that first you feel the twinge of those feelings and then you feel bad about feeling them at all, which then makes you feel bad about yourself, which then brings up comparisons and more self-recrimination.

I think the first thing you need to do is to forgive yourself for feeling these things in the first place. Feelings aren’t good or bad, they just are. They happen. It’s important to remember that you experience a feeling, you aren’t defined by having one. How you phrase this when you talk about them, to yourself or to others, is important: you’re having a feeling, you’re feeling X, not you are X. Don’t judge yourself for having these feelings, accept that you’re having them.

As for what to do about them? Well, I think once you stop beating yourself up about what you’re “allowed” to feel, there’re a couple things you should do. One is to give yourself a chance to get to know his ex a little better. You already consider her a friend and a good person; getting to know her better might de-mystify things and make her less of a looming presence in your mind.

Sometimes part of why an ex seems threatening to us is because of how we build them up in our minds, especially depending on how our partner talk about them. If you get to know her, independent of her relationship with your boyfriend, you might actually find that the jealousy and envy fade; the reality overtakes the myth and she goes from being a goddess to just another person with all the flaws and faults inherent to our all-too-mortal flesh. Knowing her as a person, even forming a friendship of your own with her, can recontextualize a lot of things for you, even the “skill issues”. It can also help reassure you that she has no designs on your boyfriend any more than he has interest in getting back to her.

The second thing is what I tell folks all the time: ask your boyfriend to love you a little bit louder when you have these moments. I know that there’s an understandable worry about always asking for reassurance, but there’s a difference between asking someone to manage your emotional needs for you and to give you the occasional boost and pep-talk. There’s nothing wrong with saying “hey, I’m feeling a little insecure/ jealous/ need some encouragement today; would you mind telling me what you love about me?” You’re ultimately asking him to help you see yourself the way he sees you, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

Good luck.

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This post was previously published on Doctornerdlove.com and is republished on Medium.

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