The Ghosts We Date
On Lena Dunham’s “Too Much,” the post-breakup panopticon of social media, and the fantasy of rewriting your past through someone new
Lena Dunham’s new TV show Too Much presents itself as a modern rom-com—but really, it’s a ghost story. Not in the supernatural sense, but in the way past relationships haunt us: the lovers who leave but still linger, and the versions of ourselves we can’t quite shake.
The show follows Jessica, a 30-something producer who moves to London to reinvent herself after a bad breakup. Almost immediately, she stumbles into a meet-cute with Felix, an indie musician who seems tailor-made to fuel her expat fantasies. The two fall into a whirlwind romance. But as she tries to rebuild her life, she’s haunted by the ghosts of her past—visions of her ex, Zeb, who intrudes on intimate moments with barbed commentary.
His new partner, Wendy, also takes up residence in Jessica’s imagination, becoming not just a rival, but an unlikely confidant. From her private finsta, Jessica addresses Wendy in a series of unfiltered vlogs: desperate confessions from a bathroom stall, veiled threats, and one particularly memorable dispatch in which she accidentally sets herself on fire. It’s a kind of reverse haunting: Jessica is haunted by the idea of their life together, so she decides to haunt Wendy back, issuing dispatches from the other side of the pond—and the breakup—that force her to confront what it means to be left behind.
Jessica is infuriated by Wendy, but she’s also enamored with her: “The worst thing is, I can’t even hate her.” This mix of jealousy and admiration is complicated by the fact that, on social media, her gaslighting ex appears to be showering Wendy with the affection she never received. In one video, Wendy poses a silly question—“Would you love me if I was a worm?”—and gets a heartwarming answer. In a flashback, we see Jessica ask the same question and instantly get shut down.
To make matters worse, Wendy’s a knitting influencer with exotic pets who looks like (and is played by) Emily Ratajkowski. But the real problem isn’t just that she’s beautiful and adorably quirky. It’s that her relationship with Zeb throws Jessica’s experience into question, making her doubt the emotional abuse she’s only just begun to unpack. Watching her toxic ex become someone else’s perfect partner, she’s forced to wonder: Was he really such an asshole, or was I just not worthy of his affection?
The real problem isn’t just that she’s beautiful and adorably quirky. It’s that her relationship with Zeb throws Jessica’s experience into question, making her doubt the emotional abuse she’s only just begun to unpack.
I recognized the illusion instantly. I’ve been Jessica—only instead of my ex’s new girlfriend, I was obsessed with the one who came before me. Not just because I feared he loved her more, but because their seemingly perfect life destabilized my sense of reality at a time when our relationship was beginning to feel less like a dream, and more like a nightmare. Late at night, I’d scroll through her feed, comparing the inside of my relationship to the outside of theirs: vibrant, Valencia-filtered, and frozen in amber on social media. If she loved him, I thought, he couldn’t be that bad.
As Jessica watches Zeb’s new relationship blossom on Instagram, we watch theirs unravel in flashbacks. He belittles her taste in fashion and music, or talks down to her in front of his friends, who favor Lacanian theory and Ivy League name-dropping over unpacking the latest season of Vanderpump Rules. But even as these micro-critiques become more pointed, his image of himself as the consummate martyr—a loving man who dotes on women who just don’t love themselves—remains intact.
In him, I recognize a type of man I’ve dated: One who identifies as feminist, but subtly undermines the women he dates. He’s drawn to Jessica’s adventurous spirit and over-the-top personality… until he isn’t. And instead of celebrating their differences, he starts paring down the parts of her that are—forgive me—too much, trying to reshape her into someone easier to love.
Like a frog in boiling water, it can be hard to recognize this dynamic until it’s too late. And after exiting my own toxic relationship, I was on red alert, scanning future partners for red flags from miles away. We see this in Jessica’s relationship with Felix, as she faces off with the specter of abuses real and imagined: “I feel like you’re fighting with someone who isn’t even here,” he tells her—repeating, verbatim, a phrase a different boyfriend once said to me.
That’s not the only uncanny echo I found in the show. In the end, Jessica makes contact with Wendy—an interaction that directly mirrors my own encounter with my ex’s ex. Ours came about when, years after the shared ex moved out, I discovered a carefully concealed box of old photos and love letters—not from our relationship, but theirs. Later that week, his ex followed me on Instagram. It felt like a cosmic gesture, so I messaged her.
We talked for hours, trading notes on our shared ex and discovering that our experiences, anxieties, and arguments were eerily similar. We’d both felt gaslit and manipulated by the same man, and we’d both fantasized that the other woman had it better. Seeking evidence that he was capable of a healthy relationship, I’d latched onto social media posts from years ago: A digital shrine of a relationship that had long since soured. Meanwhile, he’d been scrolling through my Instagram, wondering if he’d actually changed, or if I was privately facing the same struggles.
Dunham’s latest project may not be a generation-defining saga, but it captures something essential about modern dating: the impulse to reinvent yourself through a new relationship—and how we use other people, and social media, to rewrite our stories.
For me, the show’s emotional engine wasn’t romance. It was fantasy, and the ways our relationships force us to face our delusions about ourselves and others—and ourselves with others.
We live in an era where abandonment is literally called ghosting, and our exes live on as curated images on our feeds. At the same time, we’ve been equipped with fresh terminology to describe our experiences. Your ex isn’t a well-meaning but flawed person; they’re a lovebomber, a gaslighter, a narcissist—all words that could be applied to the show’s leading man, Felix.
He, too, is haunted by a history he can’t seem to outrun: old friends who question whether this time is “really different,” unresolved sexual trauma, and a dysfunctional family that fuel his addictions—both to partying and to people. In meeting his exes, Jessica is forced to reckon with the fact that her new love might be the villain in someone else’s story. But does that mean he can’t be the hero in hers?
Too Much is far more rose-tinted than Girls, and offers a more forgiving take on life and love; it’s billed as a rom-com. But for me, the show’s emotional engine wasn’t romance. It was fantasy, and the ways our relationships force us to face our delusions about ourselves and others—and ourselves with others.
We’ll do anything to outrun the past, but as the old trope goes: wherever you go, there you are. And in the Instagram era, well… all your exes are there, too.
Ever been obsessed with someone who dated the same person as you? I’m reporting a story on this, and I’d love to interview you about your experience. If you relate, leave your story (and contact info) on this anonymous form.
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