It all ended the same way it began: on her phone. For Michelle, 28, knowing her long-term relationship was over—one that had started with a DM, spanned four years, and was turbulent in the way that made letting go feel impossible—came down to seeing him with someone else…in a video watched by over a million people.
The moment she saw it—her ex, grinning beside a beauty influencer—she let out a guttural screech and vowed to delete Instagram altogether. But she didn’t, of course. Instead, like the rest of us glued to our phones, she kept scrolling, watching their life together unfold as if they were right in front of her, silently saying, Look how well he’s doing without you.
She watched them cook meals side by side, rehashing how they met (“It was like fate! Like a movie!”). Instinctively, she knew she should stop—so did her therapist. But honestly, who behaves rationally upon seeing a recent ex with someone else? Especially when that someone else is tanned, beautiful, and regularly gifted Westman Atelier contour sticks?
It’s a question, Michelle tells Vogue, that at first she thought was “distinctly her own.” But then she watched Too Much, the semi-autobiographical scripted show by Lena Dunham. The series’s main character, Jessica (Megan Stalter), had been dating her live-in boyfriend, Zev (Michael Zegen), for seven years when he left her for Wendy, a devastatingly hot knitting influencer (Emily Ratajkowski, naturally). Even as Jessica moves on and falls in love again, Wendy remains an obsession, not least because her romance with Zev is exhaustively chronicled online.
Holly, 42, also recognized her own story in Dunham’s show. But her ex didn’t leave her for an influencer, per se; instead, he trailed behind his new girlfriend on red carpets, his face occasionally appearing in checkout-line tabloids. She was a major celebrity—the kind of person even your mother would know. But Holly says that no matter who your ex ends up with after you—whether you’re the only person who knows her name or she’s a proper public figure—it’s all the same sting.
Holly’s Zev was everything she was looking for when she was 30—successful, handsome, creative—and older: seven years her senior. He’d flown her out to the UK to meet his family and spent money on fancy dinners. Where her life felt fledging and disordered, his was, well, not. “I was sort of like a grown-up teenager,” Holly tells me. “I remember him saying, ‘You need to grow up, you need to be autonomous. You need to have your own life outside of me.’” (A similar dynamic plays out between Jessica and Zev in Too Much: He tells her she needs to fix her anxious attachment style.)
So when Holly saw him coupled up with someone famous, she couldn’t help but wonder if that was part of why he left: because his new girlfriend was more polished. Holly couldn’t be her, she knew; nor could she look at social media without seeing them together. It was a nightmare.
Samantha, 26, was scrolling through TikTok when she saw her long-term on-again, off-again hookup on a popular lifestyle blogger and content creator’s page. “I guess that’s how algorithms work now?” she muses. “They feed you people you’ve seen naked?”
While she says the discovery wasn’t so heartbreaking, given they weren’t in a committed relationship, it was definitely strange, watching her former fling’s proposal rack up hundreds of thousands of views.
“Knowing someone that intimately, it’s jarring to see their name pop up on snark pages or in the comments of their videos—people saying how handsome he is, how their relationship is ‘goals.’” Samantha tells me. Still, it was hard to resist following along, even if she sometimes felt a pang of, Why not me?
So what does closure look like in such circumstances? Reflecting back on it all a decade later, Holly admits that the heartbreak and humiliation were actually pretty galvanizing. “It kind of snapped me awake to the fact that he was right: I wasn’t living up to my potential,” she says. “I wasn’t independent. I really did need to get my shit together. So, yeah, it turned into one of those stories where the best revenge is becoming your best self.”
And then there’s the scenario enacted in Too Much: In one of the final, and most memorable, scenes of the show, Wendy and Jessica meet for a cup of coffee. It s a vulnerable moment, the two women—alternately guarded and overeager—coming together to swap stories and validate their personal experiences, what once divided them becoming a point of connection.
“That’s the scene where Jessica says, ‘My joy is not going to come from his destruction or yours,’” Michelle points out. “And that’s the biggest thing, right? I hated this influencer—but at times I wanted to be her. I still do.”
There is also a small part of her, she says, that hopes that if her ex were to one day disappear from her feed, Michelle could ask his shiny, pretty, brand deal-rich influencer the aching, intrusive question that she feels almost entitled to: Did he hurt you the same way he hurt me?