I Cyber-Stalked His Ex

woman with laptop — (Image credit: Justin Horrocks)

When my boyfriend and I had just started dating and he told me that he and the ex-wife had remained pals, I innocently cruised over to his MySpace profile to see what I could find out. I scrolled through his friends, and then I found her. "No, no: We'd agreed spaghetti is evil!" read a comment she'd posted on his profile where everyone in his network could see the inside joke.

I logged off and tried to quell my rising jealousy with the reminder that he was no longer with her — he was with me. But as time went on, our relationship started to founder, and the more I felt incompatible with him (he was ready to leave New York; I wasn't), the more I kept hunting for info on whom he'd once been compatible with. Cyber drive-bys turned into a full-scale scouring of her online photo albums. MySpacing turned into Googling.

Eventually, I found her last name, what shows she'd worked on as a designer ... I had just enough scraps of information to construct an identity for this woman I'd never met. My ill-gotten knowledge enriched every word my boyfriend said about her, although he didn't talk about her much. "Know-it-all" became "enchantingly brilliant." "Ambitious" meant the show she'd worked on won a Tony. "Incompatible" was code for "except in bed" — that sultry vixen with legs up to her chin. Soon, I was totally fixated on her.