It is eleven at night. He is asleep beside you, or he is downstairs with the telly on, and his phone is lying face up on the arm of the couch. You did not go looking. Or you did, a little. Either way you have seen it again: the little red heart under a woman in a bikini on a boat, the new follow, the account that is nothing but one girl’s body in good light. Maybe it was his Explore page, wall to wall with women. Maybe it was porn in his browser history. Your stomach drops before your mind catches up. Your chest tightens. Then the second wave, the one that is worse. Am I crazy. Am I insecure. Am I the kind of woman who snoops. So you typed it into the search bar with the brightness turned down: should I be upset that my boyfriend looks at other females online.
Should I be upset that my boyfriend looks at other females online?
Stuck in the same fight again?
Talk it through with Figlet right now. Private, judgment free, built on 17 years of couples therapy.
Yes, you are allowed to be upset. You are not crazy, and you are not petty or insecure in the way you think you are. I have been a couples therapist for seventeen years, and I have sat with hundreds of women in the exact spot you are in tonight. The hurt is not a character flaw. It is information.
Love is an emotional bond, and your nervous system treats the man next to you as a survival condition, not a nice to have. So it is always running two questions in the background. Are you there for me? Am I enough for you? When you watch his thumb land on another woman’s photo, your body is not running a legal analysis. It registers a “no” to one or both questions, and it reacts the way a bonded mammal is built to react.
What the hurt is not: it is not proof he is cheating, and it is not proof he does not love you. The ache in your gut is not nothing. Bodies are honest. But the story your mind spins around that ache can be wrong, and acting on the wrong story is what turns a fixable pattern into a real wound.
What is actually going on with him?
The range is wide. At one end, the scrolling is a habit. Most of us use our phones to manage something: anxiety, boredom, overwhelm, the need for validation. He may not be choosing those women over you. He may be trying to regulate his nervous system at the end of a long day, and he might not even know it. Attractions happen. Humans do not stop noticing other humans because they are in love.
At the other end, it is something else. Consistently liking or commenting on suggestive photos of specific people is a form of simulated pursuit. It tells you his radar is still scanning the horizon for alternatives. In my office I call that a competing attachment: anything a partner turns to outside the relationship for soothing, comfort, or aliveness instead of turning toward you. It can be work, alcohol, social media. It can be porn.
I draw the line in two places. The first is secrecy. A crush is not the problem. The secret relationship with the crush is. If he would not scroll that feed with you sitting beside him, if he tilts the screen, clears the history, or saves an account under a fake name, the hiding has become the wound. The second is the direction of the energy. The specific behavior, Instagram likes at midnight, an OnlyFans subscription you do not know about, matters less than the direction the energy is flowing. If attention, aliveness, comfort, or arousal that used to belong to the two of you is being routed to strangers on a screen, the bond is being starved and something else is being fed. I have written more about where those lines sit in what counts as micro-cheating.
Why it lands so hard in your body
When you see her photo, your limbic system has just tripped the alarm on “am I enough for you?” A wave of sinking dread arrives and leaves you feeling flawed. Not flawed in a specific way. Flawed as a whole. You do the math on her body, her face, the apartment behind her. That is shame, and shame happens in the body before it ever becomes a thought. It is the cruel companion of insecure attachment. It whispers that you are too much, or that you are not enough, and here it whispers both at once. Too much for even caring. Not enough to be the one he looks at.
In 58,221 completed relationship assessments at Empathi, the split between feeling “not enough” and “too much” was 52% to 48%. A near even split, and the wound underneath is identical. And 33 percent named “alone” as their deepest feeling when love is not working, more than rejected, more than abandoned. It feels like standing alone on a savanna at dusk, which is not you being dramatic.
Watch where the shame sends you. I use a framework called the Compass of Shame. You withdraw and go cold. You avoid, into the next scroll or the wine. You attack yourself and catalog everything wrong with your body. Or you attack him and demand to know why he follows her. None of these are character flaws. They are protector parts, and they are on your side.
Your limbic system also time travels. It cannot tell a threat happening now from one that happened when you were six. If being overlooked meant something in the house you grew up in, his thumb on a stranger’s photo touches the top of a very old pile.
A story from my own life
I know this one from the other side. Early on, after Teale and I met at Esalen, I went quiet on her for a stretch of days. Teale went looking. She internet stalked me on Facebook and noticed that my silence lined up with me spending time with an ex girlfriend. When we talked, I told her I had hooked up with my ex during that gap. Teale was crushed, and she did what a lot of people do when the wound of “was I actually chosen” gets hit. She got mad. She got critical. She pushed me away.
On my side, I was coming out of a breakup and I was highly susceptible to getting validation through being wanted. I was caught up in being “sexy Fig,” chasing outside proof that I was desirable, which was itself a strategy to mask a much older wound: that I was not lovable as myself. That is not the same as a man liking photos, and I will not pretend it is. The engine underneath is often the same. That whole conflict was my old shame reaching for validation and her old wound of not being chosen colliding in real time. If we had stayed in those protector parts, we would not be married.
The dance you are both stuck in
You see the like. You say something sharper than you meant, or you go quiet and cold, which is its own kind of protest. Or you interrogate: who is she, why do you follow her, how long has this been going on. Under your tone, your body is screaming, do I matter, am I enough. In my language you have become the Relentless Lover, the protester.
He hears none of that. What lands for him is criticism on a wound that was already raw. His shame lights up and he becomes the Reluctant Lover. He defends, he minimizes, he goes flat, or he gets more careful about hiding the phone next time. He gets better at the tilt. His retreat looks to you like proof he is hiding something. Your reach looks to him like proof he can never get it right. You reach harder. He hides better. I call it the Waltz of Pain, and secrecy grows fat inside it.
You are fighting for the connection, and you are right to. But impact is bigger than intention. Trying to solve secrecy with surveillance is like trying to solve loneliness with more locks on the door. A couple sat in my office and had the phone fight for the seventh time. He said, “You can look at my phone anytime, I have nothing to hide.” She said, “I don’t want to have to look at your phone.” Neither of them was really talking about the phone.
When it is something else
If he is lying to your face, keeping hidden accounts, messaging women in private, or telling you that you are paranoid every time you ask an honest question while his story shifts on every retelling, that is a different conversation. Your body may be picking up something true. If he isolates you, monitors you, threatens you, or makes you afraid, this article is not your answer. Please talk to someone today, a trusted friend or a domestic violence hotline, and get support that fits what is actually happening.
The same edge applies to you. If the hurt has hardened into tracking his location or punishing him for what you find, that is no longer jealousy doing its job. Jealousy needs a witness. Control needs accountability.
What to say to him tonight
Drop out of the Story of Other, the story about him and her and her body, and into the Experience of Self. Where is the tightness? Stay there for sixty seconds. Then say one sentence, and it is not “why do you follow her.” It is this:
“When I saw you liking her photos tonight, something in me got very small, and I felt alone in the room with you, and I didn’t want to tell you because I was ashamed of feeling it.”
One sentence keeps the loop spinning. The other cuts it. He can defend against a criticism. He cannot defend against a woman he loves telling him she misses him. Some men rise to meet it. Some don’t. Both outcomes are information.
If you are the boyfriend reading this
If she is upset and your first instinct is to tell her she is being irrational, stop. Ask yourself honestly. Have I been turning to something or someone outside this relationship for comfort or a hit of aliveness? Am I keeping something secret because I know how it would land? If the answer is yes, her hurt is not her problem. It is relational data. Her nervous system is reading the room accurately.
Do not defend your intent. Intent is not the ledger her body is reading. Impact is. And you cannot fix this with Fiat Love, an empty promise that it will never happen again. Sorry, smorry. Her body only updates on proof of work: close the gap, drop the secret, hand the phone over before she asks, and turn toward her in the small moments. There are no angry people in the world, only people hurting so badly they cannot let you see it any other way. Her sharpness is fear that she has lost you.
Where to go from here
If the hiding is the part keeping you up, read when your boyfriend is secretive about his phone. If you are trying to work out whether DMs and late night likes have crossed a line, is online flirting considered cheating walks through it. And if what you mostly feel is the jealousy itself, what your jealousy is trying to tell you will help you treat it as a signal instead of a flaw.
If you want help finding the words for what happened in your chest tonight, before you say them to him, that is what I built Figlet for. It is free to start, and it is there at eleven at night.
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Figs O'Sullivan
Founder · EFT couples therapist
“What I would tell you at 10pm, if I could.”
