The Day I Became Friends with My Ex's Ex
Something strange happened this past year: At 40 years old, I began to make new friends. With women. And not just any women—these ones were iconic. I’d stalked them from my Finsta, gossiped about them, loved hating them. It was as if they'd been genetically engineered to make me feel inadequate and jealous and to doubt my outfits and life choices. Hearing their names would straighten my spine and churn my stomach with the paradoxical desire to know what it felt like to be them and to destroy them. Who were these women I was so familiar with but didn’t really know?
They were my exes’ exes. And now they are some of my besties.
We’ve all heard of being friends with an ex; it’s totally a thing. A recent Wall Street Journal article by Katie Roiphe touted the benefits of reconnecting with a past self when meeting up with a former love. But even if you rekindle, however innocently, an old connection and see your past through their eyes, you’re not discovering someone or something new. With exes’ exes, you do. This is the final frontier of friendship, and, having made it here myself, I think everyone should be lighting out for this undiscovered country.
In Olivia Rodrigo’s recent single, “Obsessed,” she sings, “If I told you how much I think about her, you’d think I was in love,” then admits knowing her subject’s star sign and blood type. I too, knew all their astrological placements. We all know the nagging aura of a lover’s ex-lover.
Take a man I used to love; let’s call him Daniel. The word Angie—not her actual name, either—came out of his mouth far too often for my liking. How was she so relevant to everything he said? Like any sane person, I looked her up on the socials, and I didn’t like what I found (do you ever?). She was tall, stylish, unequivocally hot. More than that, she was cool—a jet-setter who was successful as a writer, something I’d only dreamed of as a kid. We even shared the same sun sign. She was what in astrological parlance we call: a better version of me.
When I confronted Daniel about Angie—whom I’d begun to look up to, while desperate to see her fall like Icarus—and the frequency with which he seemed to wax lyrical about “that time on vacation when…,” he got defensive and called me, you guessed it, crazy. He assured me it was all in the past. I think he even said that: “Angie’s in the past.”
Fast-forward 10 years, and I met Angie through a mutual friend. Turns out we shared more than our star chart, similar interests, and our mutual pal: Our relationships with Daniel happened at the same time, with both of us believing the other was the “other woman.” My name on his lips, worming into her ears and brain, had her picturing me as an evil seductress, luring her man into my honey trap.
All these years spent hating each another, when all along he was the problem! Sharing our experiences of deception at the hands of the same man bonded us instantly and deeply. It was like a healthy trauma bond. Turns out, I wasn’t crazy. I was right. And she wasn’t crazy, either. She was right. We were validating each other in a way only we could.
This was my awakening to the possibilities of what this kind of friendship could deliver. Not long afterward, my friend Chloe revealed that one of her best friends is someone she’d once stalked online, back in the Myspace days. When the dude she was dating fully moved on to this hip Myspace girlie, Chloe’s obsession escalated to checking her page daily (okay, several times a day, but don’t tell Chloe I told you). It had begun innocently, as an attempt to uncover details of any suspected overlap, but soon turned parasocial. “She was just so cool,” she said, crimson-cheeked from her embarrassed laughter. When they finally met, Myspace girl lightly mentioned that she could see who looked at her page. She was cool, and likely empathized, as they’ve been great pals ever since.
These friendships don’t always start salaciously, though. Sometimes they’re based on admiration. When I was 19, I put Jessy on a pedestal. She was older (which automatically made her cooler, to my teen self), a brilliant musician, and it was clear the guy I was dating was not totally over her. They’d shared not only a bed but also stages across the world, playing in bands together, and he still got all gooey and dreamy when her name came up. Upon discovering it was she who’d done the dumping, well, yeah, that just fanned the flames for me.
I’ll never forget first meeting Jessy all those years ago, shaking her hand while shaking with envy. So taken by her aquamarine eyes and thick, raven mane, I quite possibly may have been in love with her myself. A real “girl crush” or “Jolene” kind of moment.
Twenty years later, I reached out to her via Instagram and asked her to meet me for coffee. We sat outside at a café in Venice Beach, marveling at our analogous lives and how we’d never actually hung out, just us two, when she let it spill that she’d felt intimidated upon meeting me, that she’d thought, God, she’s so beautiful, when she saw me. What?!
It stunned me to know we were having the same experience from opposite sides. Envy is often a mirror. What you desire in someone else might be something repressed in yourself. Or a part of yourself you can’t quite see. And how sweet to discover it was mutual. We were equals. After all, a few years later, just like her, I’d also outgrown our guy and broken it off.
Last fall, I wrote a personal essay about being dumped by a guy who went on to date a big Hollywood star. By coincidence, I had recently befriended two of his exes. To celebrate its release, we had dinner together the night it came out (and went viral). Adding to the karmic poetry of the occasion, I was able to get long-awaited clarity as they revealed their stories.
I’d carried a lot of shame around who I was during the time I dated this particular ex. I think we all get cringey feelings about our past selves; who hasn’t been clumsy and embarrassing? But talking with these women showed me that a lot of my insecurities with him were warranted. They’d experienced them with him, too.
The isolation I’d felt when this person dumped me was now something I could share with my sisters in rejection. Exchanging certain details—that he’d flown us all out to visit his family within a very short time of meeting, and that we’d all considered it a big deal—was hilarious but also a balm for old wounds. Perhaps we weren’t complete idiots after all. Maybe we’d been a little bit tricked, or simply dickmatized, which is another fun subject that invariably comes up when the coven gathers.
In the 2014 rom-com The Other Women, Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann, and Kate Upton get sweet revenge on a lying, cheating scumbag played by Nikolai Coster-Waldau. Similarly, a recent Andrew Huberman exposé in New York magazine detailed the radical, burgeoning friendship between six women who found each other when they outed their parallel experiences with the Stanford science bro on convergent timelines.
Everyone I mention in this story is so very moved on, and not in need of retribution. That’s not what it was about for us. Whether we were in love with the same guy or later found love for one another, it’s all about love. And clinking glasses over little gems and pomme frites, alfresco on an L.A. autumn evening, is its own kind of justice and reward.
Our toast: “At least we were in good company. Clearly, he has great taste.”
Holly Solem is a model, actress, writer, and singer/songwriter known for her work on Amazon’s original series Hand of God. She has written personal essays for Vogue and The Huffington Post and is currently working on her debut memoir. Read her Substack “HollyWould,” watch/listen to her podcast of the same name, and follow her on Instagram @hollymsolem.
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