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.
