Your Boyfriend's Ex-Girlfriend

My tipsy friends on being obsessed with your partner's ex

The following is a write-up of a tipsy chat with two friends about the role your partner’s ex has in your life. Enjoy!

Leo treated the group to spritzes because we “hadn’t been out in a while” — something he says every week. We bundled into the bar’s window table, one side washed amber from the streetlights, the other red from the buzzing neon sign above us.

While Mia and I stacked our jackets, Leo settled in with a story about how one of our friends had met her boyfriend at a city bike station. It was purely by chance, he insisted, though Mia joked that it was probably a creative cover-up for Hinge.

“It’s just such a good story,” she sighed, folding her legs up onto her stool.

Leo agreed. It was, unfortunately, not the kind of story he could ever star in — he found the idea of cold-approaching a random girl on the street vaguely sociopathic. Besides, he preferred busy women, fast walkers, the type who don’t like to be bothered.

“Anyway,” he added, “I only like girls who look like their cousins could kidnap me.”

After some heated debate about what that could even mean, we began to categorise his exes. Kidnapper-cousin or not. The spritzes arrived and I bored everyone with a historical anecdote about how they were invented¹. After a few perfunctory ‘oh really?’s, the conversation immediately snapped back to exes. Leo told a story about the colleague of a flatmate of a friend of a friend who’d just had terrible run-in with their boyfriend’s ex. She didn’t enjoy it, but Leo did, thoroughly.

“If you could meet your partner’s ex,” I said, “would you?”

Mia immediately said no. Then she said it again, twice. She had met her boyfriend’s ex years ago when they were just friends, both dating other people. “There’s no point,” she concluded. “I don’t even like talking about it with him.”

“Why?” said Leo, turning in his seat the way a gameshow host might. He sprung at the chance to participate in his great passion, which was to form the minority opinion in any room.

“It’s just not relevant,” Mia said. “You’re with someone now. What’s the point?” With this, she squished her straw down into her drink, drowning an ice cube and holding it under.

“Of course it’s relevant. You get to know your partner through a lens of who they were in other dynamics, in other relationships. From what they’ve learned, they become the person that’s right for you,” he fortune cookied.

Before I could find a way to make this about Henry VIII, Mia surprised me by nodding. “That’s true, I guess. Your exes do bring out different parts of you.”

Alex Alemany, Clothes Hanging

Leo fished for an example to strengthen the case he was building. “My ex from high school in Mexico was super driven, always pushing herself to get into a good career, a good uni. When we broke up, she became a hippie who wanted to climb mountains and whatnot.”

We agreed that we couldn’t picture Leo with someone who’d been anywhere near a mountain.

“It’s so strange to compare her now to the girl that I used to date,” he went on. “Now she’s dating this mountain climber guy she met in uni. I think he’s nothing like me but he makes this version of her so much happier.” He turned to me. “You?”

Staring down the barrel of my own conversation-starter, I froze. I didn’t know.

It’s a topic I love seeing explored in fiction. There’s always been something so juicy to me about the archeological thrill of sorting through a mystery woman’s past with the love of your life. It’s delightfully creepy, like placing your hand where hers left a print on the shower glass. Trying her slippers, her pillowcase, her boyfriend. Spooky!

It’s like the diner scene in In the Mood For Love. Two neighbours, whose spouses are having an affair together, begin a strange, tender friendship. One night, while playacting as each other’s unfaithful partner, Mrs. Chan orders steak. Mr. Chow tells her to request a spicy sauce, his wife’s preference. It’s thrilling. Mrs. Chow isn’t just imagining what the other woman once tasted, she’s tasting it. A tiny, carnal trespass. A spoon dipped into someone else’s life.

It turns out this fascination didn’t translate to my real life. I knew a few scant details about my boyfriend’s exes — rough sketch of what went wrong, what he’d learned, how old he was when they met. Nothing that stirred the same forensic curiosity I felt in fiction. The way he described his old self was so foreign that it felt like hearing gossip about some vague acquaintance. The colleague of a flatmate of a friend of a friend.

“No,” I said at last. “I guess I wouldn’t be against it, but no.”

“Boring,” diagnosed Leo with a click and point.

“Is it because you’d compare yourself?” Mia asked, eyebrows arched in conspiratorial glee. “Or because you think she’d be totally different from you and you’d spiral into an identity crisis?”

“Well, I guess I don’t compare my own exes.” As soon as I said that, I realised it wasn’t true. While I wasn’t keeping a scorecard, similarities and differences came up naturally. “Wait. Yes I do. They’re not in competition but they’re not separate,” I amended. “They’re related.”

“Brothers,” she said, shaking her head solemnly in fake disapproval.

It wasn’t entirely off base. There’s something genealogical about it all. Your current relationship contains some trace of DNA from every one before it, whether it’s obvious or not.

“I just think each relationship helps me understand the rest,” I said as the next round came. “They contextualise each other. If you untangle them too much, don’t you lose bits of all of them?”

Leo leaned back in his stool, swishing melted ice around his glass, detective-style. “My ex-girlfriends are girlfriends to someone very different to me,” he said. “The versions of us that dated are a memory-version of me and her.”

“That’s exactly it! Your exes are these sort of time-capsules.”

“Of your old personality,” Mia agreed. (We’d reached the point of the night characterised by enthusiastic nodding and cutting over each other.) “That old personality lives inside you. And so do your past…lovers.” She wrinkled her nose at her own word choice, then shrugged.

“Yeah!” I said. “You become this Russian doll of all your exes. Your partner dates them all, inside you.”

I had no idea whether I was saying something valid or whether I was just a tipsy mad scientist high on her own supply, stitching together a human caterpillar of exes. I just loved the idea that when you meet someone, you meet all the little memory-people inside them too, pulling more and more characters into the web of your person.

It wasn’t an entirely new opinion. I half-stole it from a Fiona Apple song, Ladies. If we were in a movie, it would have been playing in the tinny speakers above us. She sings:

When he leaves me, please be my guest
To whatever I might've left in his kitchen cupboards,
In the back of his bathroom cabinets.
There's a dress in the closet
Don't get rid of it, you'd look good in it
I didn't fit in it, it was never mine
It belonged to the ex-wife of another ex of mine

Leo hummed, not to Fiona Apple but to whatever they were playing in the bar. Probably Sean Paul.

“Sure, why not?” he shrugged. “You have to have something in common with your exes new and past partners, even if it’s tiny.”

We agreed that when you date someone, you date the entire Matryoshka set of everyone who shaped them, who helped them stop being such a dickhead about the dishes, who taught them how to resolve fights and who ruined their favourite song. There’s a crowd in every relationship, a congregation of past selves and former lovers. You don’t just fall in love with a person, you fall in love with the long, meandering path they took to become one. We raised our glasses to the ghosts.

Is this the dweeb equivalent of starting a podcast with your mates? Was this wanky? Please let me know, and either way, thanks for reading! Here’s a poll:

Thanks to “Leo” and “Mia” for letting me record our tipsy chat — hope you like your fake names. You might also enjoy…

1. The Habsburgs annexed northern Italy and found the local wines too strong so they asked the Italians to spray (spritzen) the wine with a bit of water! If you enjoyed that, you’re the Sitara of your friend group. A heavy cross to bear, I fear.