I have always thought I’m too much; I feel too much, too deeply, for too long. I don’t mean this in a ‘I’m such a great, caring person’ way; I mean this in an — if someone ghosted me in 2002, I might not be over it — way. I wanted to be a ‘Cool Girl’ who blocked, deleted, and moved on, but looking up exes on Instagram and overanalysing a situation from every angle made me feel exhausting and pitiful. My capacity to not get over people felt unique to me. Other people weren’t like this, I thought.
Then, in April 2020, I read a statistic that Google searches for ‘Why am I dreaming about my ex?’ increased by 2450% in the four weeks following the UK going into lockdown. I’d never heard anyone admit this, which made me wonder, when it came to our exes, what else weren’t we talking about?
Our lives are increasingly lived online; we work from home, connect and catch up through a screen and on social media. All this means we’re consuming more and more curated life highlights. While we might know that social media is fake, until we see proof of the reality, we internalise what we see as true.
Hoping anonymity would allow space for the thornier truths to be confessed, I created a website, lockdownlovestories.com, that allowed people to anonymously submit their true stories of what was really going on in their love lives, whatever their relationship status.
1,500 stories were shared, and more than 250 are brought together in my book, It’s Complicated: Collected Confessions of Messy Modern Love. The stories are raw, intimate accounts of the confusing, nuanced multifacted sides of love and relationships I’d never come across before. Shame had told me it was just me who felt that way about relationships ending, but the stories showed me otherwise. “Sometimes I enter your nickname into WhatsApp and type, ‘I miss you, just to get the words out of my head,’” read one testimony.
If you search breakup advice, you’ll be told to block, delete, and move on and be sold a course on how to become a more empowered, securely attached version of yourself, so it’s no wonder that looking at our exes online is followed by such shame. Yet, we all do it. The reality is we are not all blocking, deleting, and moving on — even if we’re acting like we are. “I lie here every night and do everything I can not to text you,” read another online posting. Another still: “Six years and I still think of you every day.”
In a culture of almost toxic positivity around self-love and independence, being single and wanting to find a partner can be internalised as a personal failing, as if you’re not loving yourself enough. We’re fed the idea that coupledom is the life goal, but shamed for wanting it. As one story asked, “Is it so wrong to want to be loved?” No, but it’s easy to feel like it is.
Being on the receiving end of apathy, disrespect, and ghosting is corrosive. Yet people absorb an expectation to brush it off and get back on the apps until they ‘succeed’ — as if the stepping away is failure.
The dating landscape is so bleak that it’s no wonder we succumb to the crumbs of situationships. Attractive potential partners feel so rare that heterosexual women have collectively developed a scarcity mindset. We slip into situations that are less than ideal and then doubly shame ourselves for not only being in them but staying in them despite their obvious shortcomings.
The same shame and scarcity mindset stretches beyond situationships to long-term relationships: “We’ve been together half my life. I love him, I do, but I know he’s not the love of my life,” or, as another story put it: “He’s grown into someone I can’t love. He’s told me he’s scared to be alone. I’m so scared.” The panic and paralysis are palpable. Staying in a relationship that your heart’s not in carries a triple shame of hurting someone by leaving, betraying them by staying, and selling yourself short by settling. Yet ambivalence in relationships is really common: lying next to someone and feeling alone, falling out of love but being afraid to leave, not being in love but knowing you’re not going to leave — the chasm that can exist between external presentation and inner experience is far from the fairytale we’re sold. “While I was being a good stepmum and housewife, posting pictures of dogs and baking with his kids, really, I was miserable… Don’t believe the hype,” revealed another story.
Yet I did believe the hype. By performing our lives on social media (and then comparing our lives to the versions being presented to us by others), teamed with the fantasy of individualism and self-sufficiency (not to mention increasing social disconnection), is skewering our perception of what is ‘normal’.
I always thought I was ‘too much’. But when I read the stories sent to me — raw, uncensored multitudes of emotions — I never once thought the person writing was feeling too much, I just thought they were feeling. Now I try to give myself the same permission.
It’s Complicated: Confessions of Messy Modern Love by Philippa Found is out now
