Was She Pretty? Getting Hung Up About Ex-Girlfriends

Unless you've been going out with the same person since you were about 14 and neither of you have ever gone out with anybody else, you've probably found yourself wondering, or maybe  worrying, about The Ex. That mysterious girl (or boy) who was there before you. Whom your partner once liked, or even loved, as much as they liked you.

Most of us have been there,  getting paranoid or even slightly obsessed with a person we've never met. We have moments when we worry about whether our partner secretly misses them, or is comparing us to them. We might hear their friends going about how great she was, and then apologising when they realise that we mightn't want to hear this.

We've basically found ourselves feeling like Liz Phair in her brilliant song 'Jealousy': "I don't wanna look but I'm already hooked on jealousy... I can't believe you had a life before me, I can't believe they let you run around free, just putting your body wherever it seemed like a good idea..."

There's nothing new about being jealous of an ex, even when there's absolutely no way the ex can be a part of your partner's life again - just think of Daphne DuMaurier's chilling Rebecca, in which a young wife is almost literally haunted by the memory of her husband's first wife. And now the brilliant Canadian author and artist Leanne Shapton has turned her attention to the subject. Her new book Was She Pretty is an examination of the jealousy, paranoia and fear that can be inspired by someone who is no longer around and who you might never have met.

It's a collection of images, combined with a couple of lines that sum up why this person still feels like a threat: "Greg's ex-girlfriend was Lucy. She was a British actress living in L.A. She had perfect features but was always told she was too prettty for roles." Or "Eric's ex-girlfriend was Joanna. She has since married but sends Eric letters with no return address every few years expressing how fondly she remembers their time together." It brilliantly sums up the little things that can make an ex-girlfriend seem like a threat.

The thing is, sometimes our paranoia can be justified. I'm not proud of this, but many, many years ago, I was the ex-girlfriend you should be worried about. When I was in college, my boyfriend dumped me for someone else. I discovered that I had been dumped in excruciating awful circumstances. I was really angry. And yet I still sort of fancied him and I still got on with him, and worst of all he still sort of fancied me. So every so often we'd end up fooling around together, and I'm afraid I didn't feel guilty about it at all.

Mostly because I realised that he and his girlfriend had started going out just before we split up (why I still wanted to fool around with someone who had done this remains a mystery). Anyway, his girlfriend hated me, unsurprisingly, but that just fueled my wicked glee and made me want to do it even more. Like I said, I'm not proud of this.

I wondered whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that another ex clearly disliked his ex-girlfriend - he wasn't gratuitously mean, and at least it meant that he didn't want to get back with her,  but did that mean that he'd talk about me that way some day? Is it worse if a partner fondly remembers their ex, or if they bitterly complain about her? Both gives the ex too much influence over your life. After all these years, I've come to think that the ideal is for someone to just say something along the lines of, "she was really nice, but it didn't work out."

So what about you? Have you ever been haunted by an ex? Or have you ever been the nightmare ex yourself?