How Rebecca syndrome has been co-opted by the manosphere to shame women

It’s a condition that sees sufferers struggle with jealousy over their partner’s exes. But in an increasingly misogynist online culture, it’s being weaponised to punish people for having a sexual past, finds Helen Coffey

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” It may be one of the best-known opening lines in all of literature, but now Rebecca has become famous for another reason altogether: Daphne du Maurier’s haunting novel has unwittingly lent its name to “Rebecca syndrome”.

The story, adapted a number of times for film and television since the book’s 1938 publication, sees the narrator meet widower Maxim de Winter and marry him in haste. But as they begin their life together as newlyweds, she becomes increasingly obsessed with his late wife, Rebecca – an object of glamour and fascination, whom the second Mrs de Winter feels she will never live up to.

As it turns out, this phenomenon is not unique to fiction. Rebecca syndrome, as it’s become known – originally referred to as retroactive jealousy – is an obsessive envy over a partner’s past relationships. It’s not a question of trust; you’re not worried about your partner’s actions in the here and now. Instead, you’re fixated on their past and the exes that came before you.

“This feeling of jealousy is so extreme that it is considered pathological, causing extreme and unacceptable behaviour, and very powerful feelings that you cannot control,” says Jodie Cariss, therapist and co-founder of high-street mental health practice Self Space. “It often arises without solid grounds and can affect your normal behaviour and negatively impact your life.”

The idea isn’t necessarily new, but the term has started to gain traction on social media over the past few years, with vast numbers of TikTok and YouTube videos dedicated to explaining the concept and giving tips of varying quality for overcoming it. Social media may have had a bigger part to play in increasing the number of people who struggle with this specific form of irrational jealousy – it enabled us to put a name to the ghosts of girl/boyfriends past.

“Social media creates the problem whereby someone’s past is there forever,” Toby Ingham, a psychotherapist and author of the book Retroactive Jealousy, Making Sense of It, says. He’s seen a marked uptick in clients coming to him who are struggling with Rebecca syndrome since the rise of these online platforms. “Instagram is often part of these conversations. And within Instagram, you’ll have boyfriends who are going through their partners’ posts to see if any of their exes have liked them. You get this whole trail of people’s pasts that exists within the social media sphere.”

Even before the likes of Insta served up perfectly curated grids of someone’s former beloved to obsessively scroll through, from the mid-Noughties onwards we already had the potential to stalk a new squeeze’s previous liaisons via the medium of Facebook.

Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs Danvers and Lily James as Mrs de Winter in Ben Wheatley’s ‘Rebecca’ (Netflix)

“I still remember when one of my first boyfriends in my twenties mentioned the girl who’d broken his heart,” a friend reminisces. “I spent hours going through photos of them on holiday together; I went through her profile with a fine-tooth comb to find all the ways she was superior to me. It was torture looking at this person I knew he’d been madly in love with before me, but I couldn’t help myself.”

Cariss agrees that it’s this comparison between ourselves and others that can drive us mad, exacerbated by the “gaps” we fill in when all we have to go on is the shiny digital version presented to the world. “This allows our own unconscious to run riot,” she says. “People we know well and who we are close to are much more human to us. However, the idea of someone without any real closeness or intimacy can seem otherworldly, unreachable, perhaps perfect.” We might fixate on the unrealistic differences between us and them, she adds, “shrinking our own self-worth as we elevate these mythical characters”.

But while giving into temptation and indulging in a little cyberstalking when we have a new crush or relationship might be a familiar vice for many, Rebecca syndrome can become far more destructive. For some, it can be so toxic and pervasive that it ruins meaningful, long-term relationships – and even marriages.

The sexual element can be particularly damaging, says Ingham: “There is a preoccupation, typically from the male side, about the idea that your partner has slept with people before you.” Online forum Reddit has enabled this insecurity to flourish, becoming a hub for men sharing their experiences under the “retroactivejealousy” subreddit. Some of the accounts are tragic – men who are so obsessed with their partner’s exes that they’ve become convinced the only solution is to throw away a treasured relationship to be free of the torment.

The idea of someone without any real closeness or intimacy can seem otherworldly, unreachable, perhaps perfect

Jodie Cariss, Self Space

“Breaking up after seven years, been together since we were basically teenagers,” reads one. “She was my first, I was not hers. Before I take my own life this is the best thing for me because it’s eating me up every day I wake up.” The poster claimed to be “so in love” with his girlfriend – this was the woman he had planned on marrying, he said – and yet he felt he had no choice: “I am getting the most vivid movies in my head of what happened.”

The trouble is that, according to Ingham, the problem lies wholly with the person experiencing retroactive jealousy – not with their partner. Failing to address the root cause means those feelings will never really go away. “My approach to it has been to understand it as part of an obsessional problem,” he says. “Typically what happens in retroactive jealousy is that someone projects into their new relationship all kinds of ideas about what’s wrong with the new partner – in this case, derived from their sexual past. What I’ve invariably found is that the person themselves tends to have suffered attachment issues in their early years.”

Injuries that have occurred much earlier in someone’s development, that predate any kind of romantic or sexual relationship, become “activated, and that provides the energy that then turns into these projections about what’s wrong with the partner”, adds Ingham. Issues can usually be traced back to a person’s family dynamics growing up – the older “attachment injuries” that get provoked and translate into Rebecca syndrome include feeling less important than somebody else; feeling second best; feeling excluded. “Those are associations and thoughts that people carry with them already,” adds Ingham. A romantic relationship can simply reactivate them.

And as well as sabotaging perfectly happy relationships, this obsession has the potential to morph and twist into something far uglier and more sexist. In a world where online culture has seen the rise of incels and the manosphere, where the term “cuck” is used to mock men who have been cheated on, and where regressive discourse around women’s “body count” is once again branding those deemed too promiscuous as “sluts”, Rebecca syndrome has been co-opted by some quarters to shame women for having any kind of history of physical intimacy.

Social media can exacerbate pathological feelings of jealousy (Getty)

“Every time I meet a new girl to date, I can’t help but think of all the guys who’ve used her before,” reads one Reddit entry. “I think about all the rough raunchy sex she’s had in the past, any potential nudes or videos that exist of her out there. I become disgusted and resentful, eventually I lose attraction and blame the girl for being a ‘hoe’.” He attributes his feelings to a fear of other men “laughing” at him – of calling him a “cuck” because they’ve already had sex with his girlfriend.

Another man expresses a similar sentiment towards his own wife, despite being happily married for decades. “I call it the ghost of bedrooms past,” he admitted on the subreddit. “It is a demon in my life that won’t go away. It changed my marriage. I firmly believe that this is the price we pay for uncommitted recreational sex. Many disagree with me, but it has been a dominating force in my life for 38 years. My wife loves me. She has given me everything a woman can give to a marriage, but most of the time, I don’t even want to look at her because of her past.”

Ingham has observed how the changes in search engine function – with sites like Reddit and “toxic” Facebook groups getting higher priority on Google, for example – have contributed to desperate men being funnelled towards harmful, instead of helpful, content. “There’s been a bit of a reduction in website search, which has coincided with an increase in AI on Google,” he explains. “So, in other words, people are getting the AI answers rather than necessarily going to experts like myself. And I think there’s room for quite a bit of toxic masculinity around that.”

A lot of the “advice” around retroactive jealousy feeds into already pernicious narratives about women’s purity and it somehow being the partner’s fault. “Typically the information available is not very helpful,” agrees Ingham. “Very little of it addresses underlying attachment issues in the self, and tends to look at there being a problem with the partner that we have to learn to adapt to, rather than, ‘I need to consider the ways in which I project these problems.’”

Try to get hold of your own intrusive thoughts and treat them as something of yours that requires attention

Toby Ingham, psychotherapist

For those struggling with pathological jealousy, there are ways through it – but becoming immersed in online forums where the focus is not on self-reflection but on wallowing in an echo chamber and engaging in the blame game is unlikely to help. Cariss recommends working with a therapist to determine what is making you feel inadequate. “Come into contact with your own vulnerability, self-doubt, and fears, and this will highlight what might be missing or needed in your life.”

Ingham, meanwhile, emphasises the need to get the heck off Instagram: “I always encourage people to stop looking at social media; get off the forums; stop looking at your partner’s phone. Try to get hold of your own intrusive thoughts and treat them as something of yours that requires attention and that may, in fact, have nothing to do with your relationship.” The good news is that he’s seen a very high success rate in clients who are prepared to do the work and look inward, though.

“Take this as a signal that something in you needs attention,” he says. “I think if you can embrace that, and find a place to do that work – perhaps with a psychotherapist – and have a confidential place to talk about your fears… well, you might be able to actually enjoy the fact that you’ve just met someone new that you’re excited about.”

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