A few months ago my boyfriend and I had a fairly major issue around him following and regularly looking up influencers or celebrities he found attractive. This tapped into a lot of insecurities about my appearance, about not being enough for him, not being his type, and the idea that if he met a woman who looked more like them he might be unfaithful. We talked about it a lot. He completely understood how I felt and was very reassuring that it was just something he did when he was bored, he loved me, it didn’t take away from our relationship, and that he would stop as he could see it hurt me so much.
About a month later I saw he’d been looking up a few of these women again (not as much as before). This time it included a woman he knows peripherally. I was incredibly hurt, not just that he was doing it, but that he’d continued doing it after he said he’d stop and in doing so had lied to me. This time our conversation got much deeper and it seemed it really did lead to a change – in the intervening month he’d been a bit in denial about the behaviour but now was confronting it and wanting to stop both for me and for him.
My issue is that I’m now having a lot of trouble trusting that this second time is true. When we discuss it and he reassures me I feel a lot better, but when we spend time apart I have these growing feelings of mistrust and fears that he might not truly desire me. Since this happened a few months ago, I have seen one of the girl’s names once more on his Instagram searches, which he says, and I believe, was just a moment of curiosity. But it still made me question everything.
I believe he loves me but I’m scared that I’ll never be his type or never be enough for him. How do I proceed when I have these feelings?
Eleanor says: It is really important to distinguish between two ways you can ask your partner not to do something. One is, “I don’t want you to do this because it interacts with my particular fears and history in a really unpleasant way”. The other is “I don’t want you to do this because I don’t think it’s fair for anyone in a relationship to do it”. The second is for the rules that nobody in a relationship could reasonably reject. The first varies person to person. Some people can’t stand it when they don’t know where the other person is, or when their partner doesn’t text back. Others can’t stand it when they’re expected to text back or always report where they are. When we ask someone to avoid hitting our particular nerve, we’re essentially asking for a kindness.
And relationships should be kind! “This really bothers my partner” is by and large a great reason not to do something.
But it is important to keep track of the distinction between recoiling from something because it exacerbates a fear – and it actually being evidence of the thing we’re afraid of.
Is it evidence that your partner would be unfaithful to you, that he looks up these people on Instagram? Is it evidence that you are not enough for him, that you are not attractive?
If this is part of a general pattern of lascivious and slack-jawed drooling, maybe it is. If your fears are being fed by critical comments he has made about your appearance, that is evidence of deeper problems too. But if all he’s doing is looking at pictures of attractive people, it’s less clear.
Realistically, there is no relationship where neither party ever finds other people attractive. Responses run the whole spectrum from glancing in a coffee shop to searching on Instagram to watching porn to flirting in person. Different couples have different attitudes about what on this continuum is disrespectful. Wherever the line is drawn, we do eventually have to make peace with the central thought that other people will sometimes be attractive to our partners.
You can make it so all those responses are off-limits. But you’ll eventually bang up against the wall of the other person’s mind, where we can’t regulate or search. If the very idea of him finding someone else attractive is intolerable, you can drive yourself spare searching for evidence of those verboten thoughts and desires. No evidence for the absence of desire will ever feel like enough. It will always look exactly like the absence of evidence.
You asked how you can proceed.
One strategy is to try to get some more peace with the inevitability that our partners will find other people beautiful. Attraction needn’t be zero sum. It does not need to mean they think you are less. That is, until you get strong evidence to the contrary, you don’t need to treat his feelings for you like they’re scarce or fragile.
In moments of fear when that isn’t possible, you could even try seeing the dread all the way through to the worst scenario. Say he was unfaithful. What then? Well, OK, you’d have learned he’s a bozo who is not worth your time. Then you’d go back to the rest of what makes you you.
There is a difference between “I’m frightened” and “this is frightening”. We get into trouble when we confuse the two. Both are legitimate, but try to keep track of which you are feeling. In a relationship, you are allowed to ask for your fears to be handled with kindness.
If he is making you feel unfavourably compared, confront him or cut him loose. On the other hand, if it’s your mind making you feel frightened, it’s much more a matter of meeting it there; as a fear instead of a reality. Sorting one from the other can be very difficult. But your self-esteem – and maybe your relationship – will thank you if you can keep them straight.
