I studied the happy couple’s engagement photo. Their smiling faces, hands clasped tightly together. So much love.
I read the caption on the Facebook post.
She said yes! Can’t wait to marry my best friend!
I felt a pang of jealousy stab at me, yet I couldn’t tear my eyes away or stop reading.
I was scrolling through my then-new-boyfriend’s (now-husband’s) photos on his Facebook page. Photos with the woman he dated right before me specifically, who he was engaged to once upon a time.
She had been the one who had called off the engagement and he pined after her with a broken heart.
She was the one who got away.
I struggled with feeling like second place for a long time after that.
A consolation prize.
It was an unfair way to think of myself because the reality is that unless you are dating or married to your high school sweetheart or first love, we’ve all been in love with more than one person.
We’ve all said I love you and planned our lives with someone else. We’ve gushed about how we found THE ONE. We’ve all thought those past relationships were going to last forever.
Until those relationships ended and we started the process of falling in love all over again.
For some of us, that pattern has been repeated many times over. Some of us have even been married multiple times. We pledged eternal vows that weren’t kept for one reason or another and repeated those same vows to someone new.
But before social media, it was so much easier to leave the past in the past. To keep those memories to ourselves. You owned a shoe box dedicated to your ex, stuffed with pictures and cards and memorabilia from that life together.
You had two options after a break-up, you could cram that box in the back of your closet, a relic from another life collecting dust on a shelf. Or you could choose to toss it, preferring a clean slate, a fresh start.
What you didn’t do was leave that box open on your coffee table for your next partner to find and look through. You didn’t leave love notes you had written to your exes taped to your refrigerator door, on full display for anyone to read.
Our social media accounts are the virtual shoeboxes of yesterday, left open to examination by anyone who cares to look.
My current marriage is not my first. I was married and had two children with my previous husband. But tragically he was killed in a car accident, leaving me a widow with two young daughters.
When my late husband and I were dating, Facebook didn’t exist. Social media didn’t exist. Smartphones didn’t exist.
After we’d been married a couple of years, Facebook became a thing and we jumped in like everyone else. But we jumped in together. There was no past lurking in our digital files. Any evidence of our previous romances was relegated to that dusty box in the closet or discarded.
When I met my current husband, it was a completely different story. He is younger than me so much of his dating life was documented and preserved on social media. He didn’t delete much of anything between girlfriends, so his pictures and status updates lived on long after the relationships themselves were gone.
My Facebook albums were also packed full of pictures and posts about my and my late husband’s life together. Pictures of our celebrations, our vacations, our children, our family.
For the first two months we were dating, my current husband and I didn’t friend each other on Facebook. I wasn’t sure how to navigate a new relationship with social media. It felt strange and alien to me.
I asked him, “Are we supposed to be friends on Facebook?”
He shrugged. “It’s up to you. Only if you want.”
One night after too many gin cocktails, I finally sent him a friend request. He immediately accepted and then I instantly scrolled his page to see what he was all about.
I soon learned more than I wanted.
There weren’t many posts or pictures from his current life, the one I was now a part of. There was no mention of me at all. I had no idea if that meant anything, if it was normal for a new relationship, or how much I should read into it.
But there were plenty of posts from his past.
I knew he had been engaged to his previous girlfriend. But knowing and seeing are two different things. I studied the engagement photo and the many other photos with her, photos of all their happy times together. I read the posts he wrote about her, sometimes professing his love, sometimes praising what a wonderful person she was. I saw the check-ins to their favorite restaurants and special events.
Our relationship was still new and unlabeled. It felt weird to be scrolling through his life. Did I want to know all this? Should I know all this?
Those thoughts didn’t stop me of course.
His job had transferred him to my city right before I met him, so he didn’t know anyone here other than his coworkers. Even though I’ve lived in the same city for years, I only had a handful of friends I could introduce him to. Being a single mom, my social life at the time was pretty sporadic and often nonexistent.
But on Facebook, I saw that he and his ex had a large social circle that they spent time with regularly. They went to parties, dinners, theme parks and concerts together.
As I scrolled through his pictures of all the fun times, I wondered if he missed that life with her.
I wondered if our time together measured up.
Comparison can be a deadly byproduct of social media consumption. But comparison of love and relationships is the deadliest.
He deleted many of the photos of his most recent ex shortly after we became social media friends, when it was obvious our relationship was no longer casual. I neither mentioned those photos nor prompted him to delete them. It was an awkward topic that I didn’t want to breach.
One day they were just gone.
My digging into his past, my need to know, should’ve ended there.
But it didn’t.
Once I got a taste of learning what his life was like before me, I kept going back for more. Going through his pictures, seeing the ones he shared or was tagged in, and reading his past updates became an obsession.
An appetite for knowledge that was both insatiable and damaging.
I analyzed the content of his posts and compared them to his new life, to his relationship with me. Always performing impossible mental calculations to see how I measured up.
I have a past as well, a romantic history longer than my husband’s due to our age difference. I was fully aware that my insecurity and anxiety were unfair and hypocritical. When my brain would get the better of me, I tried to remind myself of that.
But insecurity and anxiety have no logic. They can’t be reasoned away with facts.
My husband admitted that he also looked through my photos in the early days when we first became Facebook friends. I think for most of us, it’s a natural thing to do in our current social media culture. But he didn’t look through many and told me it was uncomfortable to see picture after picture of me with my late husband.
He knew those images were better off left unseen.
He’s expressed his insecurities over being a second choice as well. But unlike me, he made the decision not to pull that thread.
Delving deep into my past is something he is simply not interested in.
I wish I had understood that power of not knowing sooner. I wish I had realized the beauty of that blissful ignorance earlier.
For a new relationship to work, you can’t think about the fact that the same declarations of love you are hearing have been made before. Your partner has uttered those words to someone else. You too have professed them to someone else.
Love with someone new requires a suspension of disbelief. For love to thrive we must believe that our new relationship is somehow better than the last one. More perfect. More right for us. More right for them.
Maybe it is.
Maybe it’s just simply different.
But either way, digging through your partner’s past can shatter that illusion. Seeing the tangible evidence of the love shared with someone else before you makes that suspension of disbelief difficult, if not impossible.
No matter how self-confident and secure in your relationship you are, it hurts.
Should we know everything about our partner’s romantic past? I think it’s important to have a general idea, who they dated or married, maybe why those relationships ended. But unless that past is causing issues in your current life, you don’t need to know the details of those relationships.
There is no benefit and no joy in those details.
You are not the first. Your partner is not the first. You have both loved before and it may have been deeply and completely. You may have chosen to leave when that love didn’t work out. You may have been the one left with a broken heart.
Past relationships, no matter how uncomfortable they may make you, shaped you and your partner into who you are. The key to being happy in your current relationship is to not focus on or dive deeply into that past, but to live fully in the love you have now.
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Previously published on Medium.com.
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Photo credit: Persnickety Prints on Unsplash