I Dated My Biggest Hater

“You’re not a celebrity,” someone once told me. “Why are you taking so many pictures of yourself?”

The voice wasn’t that of a frenemy (those girls who hype up your outfit while silently deciding it makes you look fat, who fail to mention when you have lipstick on your teeth—or worse, do mention it too late, after you’ve just said hi to your crush). No, this particular critique didn’t come from a friend but… wait for it… my own boyfriend.

When we talk about signs of male jealousy, we usually focus on the classics—monitoring your outfits, your location, your texts, crashing out when a guy hits on you at a bar.

What’s more insidious, harder to diagnose, is the jealousy that isn’t about controlling where you go but who you are. It’s jealousy of your very being and all the things you think they should love about you: your humor, your confidence, your achievements, even your gift for friendship. It’s the anxiety of comparative self-worth, of looking at the person you love and thinking: She is better than me, and that isn’t gonna fly.

I once dated a TikToker—embarrassing, I know, but let’s move past it. He had quit a perfectly stable finance job to review restaurants in the city, a decision that seemed brave and visionary in 2020 when making it big on TikTok was still like buying Bitcoin in 2012. At first, he was supportive of my own content creation journey. I had 500 followers, was pulling in girl-next-door numbers of maybe 5,000 views per post.

“You’re hilarious,” he’d say. “You’ll get there one day.”

And then, somewhat inconveniently for him, I did.

My videos started hitting the millions. His, meanwhile, plateaued at five figures. He was in denial about his slow motion fall-off, even emailing TikTok’s customer support claiming he was “shadowbanned.”

“I don’t think this will last,” he mused when I hit 100K followers in under a month. “It’s always like this in the beginning. Then they forget about you.”

The implication being: You're peaking. Enjoy it while you can. Start job hunting now. In other words: If I’m flopping, you have to be too.

We assume the men we love are proud of us, that our successes reflect well on them, that they see us as a flex. But the problem is some men have a zero-sum mindset: your success isn’t shared—it’s stolen.

One of my first boyfriends was, in retrospect, also one of my biggest haters. Not in an obvious way—he didn’t tell me to change or snoop through my phone. He didn’t want to possess me. He wanted to outshine me or, more precisely, not let me outshine him.

I started noticing things. When I asked him to take my picture, he’d take three blurry ones and tell me he was done for the day. At parties, even ones with his friends, he’d fold in on himself, annoyed I was having a good time. I was too loud, too talkative, too much.

He was great in a crisis—rushing in, gleam in his eyes, if I fell out with a friend or didn’t land a job I wanted. With good news, however, his reaction was suspiciously muted. No congratulations, no compliments, because, as he said once: “you already know you're beautiful.” He also liked to tell me, repeatedly, how I thought I was better than he was, even though I never once said that. (Not out loud, at least.)

I didn’t catch on until I decided after college to take an acting class—something I’d loved as a kid but lost touch with in high school. By the way he reacted, you’d think I’d announced plans to catch the next SpaceX flight.

“Really?” he scoffed. “I think you should just stick to modeling. Acting isn’t gonna happen for you.”

He then pulled up a video of himself from senior year, in which he played a murderer in a friend’s short film. A clear attempt to establish himself as the real actor in the relationship. To be fair, he did have a serial killer vibe. He really should’ve leaned into playing villains instead of settling for a career in insurance.

He also hated my best friend, Jade. The kind of fun, independent, effortlessly glamorous girl that a man who prefers his girlfriend in a state of quiet deference will always despise. Girls’ nights with Jade always resulted in a fight.

“How come when you’re with Jade, you stay out all night?”

Because Jade is fun, and you, my dear, are about as exciting as a tax seminar. Instead of saying that though, I just smiled and saw her less. Because Jade was a trigger for him.

At the time, I assumed this was just youthful insecurity. Surely, my next boyfriend wouldn’t see me as his opponent.

But then it happened again.

And again.

There was the preppy lawyer who didn’t mind my looks but found it unacceptable that I also liked to read and write poetry. (He was the self-styled intellectual of the relationship, big on his one deep read of Infinite Jest.) There was the guy who nodded politely when I got a feature in a major magazine but nearly wept with joy when he was reposted by a meme account with 10K followers.

And that’s when I realized: some men don’t date women. They date their own egos.

When their fragile sense of superiority is threatened, the knives come out. They’re hardwired to believe they need to dominate in all spheres: career, social life, dinner check coverage. (Okay, the latter is fine.) And when that hierarchy gets disrupted, say, you get a promotion, or a stranger compliments you in front of them, they spiral. If she’s thriving, what does that make me? A supportive boyfriend? A loving partner? No, a beta cuck.And that simply won’t do.

So, they cope the only way they know how: by minimizing your success: “It’s not that impressive.” By guilt-tripping you: “You’re always working now.” By one-upping you:“I actually passed on that project, but you should do it.” If they’re truly desperate, they’ll try to rewrite history: “I let you win.”

Dude, the only thing you guided me toward was the realization that having a boyfriend can feel like competing in an unpaid talent show.

At the root of all this is fear. If you become too successful, too impressive, too out of their league, you’ll leave. The irony is, passive-aggressive put downs are the fastest way to make that happen. Because no woman wants to date a man who sees her as an opponent. We want someone who cheers us on, not secretly hopes we trip on our way to the stage.

Because if we’re going to fall, we’d rather land in the arms of someone who actually likes us.