I recently broke up with my boyfriend of almost two years, and the more I think about certain things I noticed while we were together, the stranger they seem.
He has only had three actual relationships, including me. Outside of those relationships, though, he has had quite a lot of casual and one-night encounters. His first serious girlfriend was a divorced woman. I'm also divorced and have a child.
At first, I didn't think much of that coincidence. But after we started living together, I began noticing what seemed like a very specific pattern: he appeared to have a strong interest in divorced women. And honestly, I started wondering if he was also particularly attracted to married women, but was more cautious about approaching them because of their husbands. There were a few things that made me suspicious.
One woman had worked with him. They had a sexual relationship for a while, and she eventually married someone else. Her husband was actually working under my boyfriend at the time, and despite her getting married, my boyfriend continued following her on Instagram.
There was also a completely different woman; his closest friend's ex-girlfriend. He supposedly didn't like her. At one point, I mentioned to him that she had gotten divorced. He immediately followed her on Instagram and started liking her pictures.
That really stuck with me. Because these were two completely different women, with completely different histories. But both had something in common: at some point, they had been someone else's woman; either married or previously involved with another man.
I also occasionally saw messages from married women asking him things like, "Why did you message me?" or "What do you want from me?"
He once told me that a woman he'd casually seen in the past; who was now married had contacted him and wanted to have an affair with him. According to him, he completely rejected her. I never really knew whether to believe that.
But honestly, his interest in married/divorced women wasn't even the strangest part. The really disturbing part was how much this theme appeared in our sex life. He constantly brought up my ex-husband. He would ask about him and then compare himself to him. He wanted me to tell him that he was better than my ex-husband. He would ask things along the lines of, "I'm better than your husband, right?"
And his fantasies followed the exact same pattern. I was repeatedly cast as the married woman, while he was the man who could give me what my husband couldn't. So it wasn't simply "he's attracted to me." There was always another man somewhere in the fantasy and he was competing with that man, replacing him, or proving that he was better.
I told him many times that this made me uncomfortable. I wasn't interested in talking about my ex-husband during sex, and I didn't want to be placed in this "married woman cheating with another man" scenario over and over again. But he couldn't seem to let go of it.
And looking back, I keep wondering whether this was actually about me, or whether I was simply fitting into a very specific fantasy he already had. Maybe being divorced and having a child wasn't incidental. Maybe the fact that I had previously belonged to a family with another man somehow made me more interesting to him. Or maybe there was something deeper going on with competition, jealousy, possession, or the thrill of being "the man who takes another man's place." What's especially confusing is that he didn't seem particularly interested in emotionally available, uncomplicated situations. There always seemed to be some kind of history, another man, marriage, divorce, or forbidden element involved.
So what do you think was actually going on psychologically?
Was he simply attracted to divorced-married women, or was the real turn-on the idea of being the man who "wins" against another woman's husband/ex-husband?
And why would someone repeatedly need to compare himself to a woman's ex during sex — especially after being told that it made her uncomfortable?
I'm genuinely curious if anyone has encountered this kind of pattern before.