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.)
