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A couple of months ago, I made a post about my struggles with retroactive jealousy/relationship OCD.
https://www.themotte.org/post/825/wellness-wednesday-for-january-10-2024/178374?context=8#context
I'm happy to report, I've beaten it (and waited a couple of months to be sure), without breaking up with my girlfriend. It was very, very hard, but I came up with an effective strategy that was successful, my girlfriend was supportive in her way too. If you go to Reddit communities about this thing, it looks pretty dire and terminal, but there is hope!
So here's a quick summary that might work for other modal mottizians:
The process was first to never ask another question about her past relationships, no matter how innocuous, never trusting my subconscious to not have an ulterior motive. The disease is categorized by an escalating need for certainty that can never be fulfilled. This was the hardest step and where most people fail. I managed by committing myself to ask these burning questions, tomorrow or a month, and see if I still cared to know exactly how often she cuddled with her ex or whatever. Also, I told my Girlfriend not tell me even if I asked, which mostly served to make the commitment public and easier to keep.
The second step was trying to fix the bad world model I had that caused the issue in the first place. Which was also very hard. I talked to a select few of my female friends and asked very personal question about their past love life, questions that I would have like to ask my girlfriend but didn't let myself. It really put it into perspective how ridiculous and unproductive my probing was, and how woman just didn't think like that. Reading about internet woman's experiences also helped.
The third step was exposure therapy, where I went through some bad scenarios in my head and came up with answers to questions that would hurt me the most. This was and seemingly didn't work at first. I felt like my confidence levels plummeted those weeks, and I felt like I was losing my pride.
Finally, since I hated that, I just started acting like I was amazing. Being completely shamelessly confident in my sexual and relationship abilities. Stating out loud how I'm way better than other guys in this or that. Just being super cocky. Because fake problems require fake solutions. And it worked amazingly. Obviously, my girlfriend didn't mind me saying those things, because she believed it too! That's the great thing about woman, if they love you, you are their one and only.
Positive delusions, are said to be good in relationships. I couldn't just will it into being, though, I couldn't just stop caring about her past either. I firmly believe I had to go through the previous steps, my heroes journey, to really get me to believe in my new truth. It's all fiction, and I needed to make myself a story.
These are some crazy gymnastics. It reminds me of the brainwashing polyamorous people abuse themselves with to convince their monkey hindbrain it isn’t all so bad while it screams at them in protest.
Maybe your instinctual preference for purity in your woman is real and good and you should listen to it.
Should I fix myself? No, it is the women who are wrong.
Could be true, but probably not very useful advice.
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Is it real and good, though? If you have a partner, is she "pure"? Restricting myself to virgins is not a viable life strategy, and way harder than fixing this. According to others with this condition who have tried, it doesn't even help. If anything, my monkey hindbrain is using this as an excuse to break up with her for other reasons. I'm open to admitting that.
Yes, I’m her one and only. And I’ll admit I’m lucky.
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If we step out of the realm of absolutes and extremes, I think we can say that a preference for some degree of chastity in a partner is real and good, or at least a perfectly legitimate preference. My personal belief is that women who have had a large number of sexual partners tend to be emotionally damaged and are probably not going to be good long-term relationship choices. Preferring someone that has a more normal history seems just fine to me.
On the flip side, like you said, it's worth noting that just getting someone that has a fairly normal history isn't actually sufficient to tamp down the gnawing insecurity about the past. There really is a part of the male ego that many of us have to vary degrees that just wants to be the fucking best, period, completely unthreatened by those losers in the past. But then if they were losers, that devalues her! This whole mental spiral is just wildly unhelpful, so addressing it internally is worthwhile. Addressing it also doesn't mean completely throwing away the healthy alarm bell though - if you notice that someone really did hook up with dozens of guys, yeah, there's probably a problem there and it's good to not just smash that feeling.
Like so many emotions, the emotion has value, but needs to be balanced. Righteous anger is an appropriate response to some situations and a poor response to others. The correct approach to righteous anger isn't to try to eliminate it, it's to understand its origins and make sure that it's only triggering when it's actually appropriate. Likewise for the old green-eyed jealousy - you should feel like guarding your partner, but you can't take it to the extreme of getting all weepy because you're not the first partner a 25-year-old woman has had.
For sure. I was pretty tired while writing my post, so I didn't do a very good job of expressing my overall intent with it. What I had was an extreme, and unhealthy reaction to my girlfriend's normal past.
You hit the nail on the head here. I was definitely struggling with swinging between these two extremes. To fix that, I had to do a lot of work with empathy, understanding why my girlfriend got together with these people and why she left. But I could only start doing that after I got over obsessing about details in the past.
I still try to focus more on how great I am and not how bad they were, as that's healthier. It's all a crutch to get to the ultimate end goal of becoming fully secure in myself and not thinking about her past any more than a mentally healthy person normally would. Getting older should take care of that. For now, it beats feeling bad all the time.
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The kind of woman who would be 'impure' a few hundred years ago is one who went against the explicit desires of her family and culture. The kind of woman who is 'impure' today is one who does what the culture guides you to do. The supposedly deontological choice is just selecting for something very different today. Nothing is absolute, and not being pure is, if it's a negative signal, necessarily a weaker one today, and not one worth trading off against everything else. Just like a culture with deep traditions about planting and harvest times need to modify those traditions when they move to a new climate.
Restating your opinion in the form of a wojak picture doesn't make it more true.
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This is an unwarranted response, I think.
I'm generally suspicious of CS_CA but he's right here.
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