UNTREATABLE.COM
Patient scrolls Instagram and compares their own relationship to every couple they see. Has concluded that everyone else has a better one. Does not know these couples. Has not spoken to most of them in years. Is comparing a live-in Tuesday-night reality — which contains dishes, bad moods, and a fight about a thermostat — to other people's posed Cabo sunset carousels. The comparison is, structurally, unwinnable.
Chronic. Worsens on Sundays.
None. Logging off for a week produces temporary remission.
Patients with Pathological Comparison-Couple Shopping typically present with some or all of the following:
Pathological Comparison-Couple Shopping belongs to the Institute's growing taxonomy of behaviors that real medicine has declined to name. It exists, roughly, at the intersection of internet culture, interpersonal friction, and whatever is happening in the lives of our patients. It is fictional and it is everywhere.
Under its Latin label Comparatio coniugum online, the condition appears only in the Institute's own catalog. Real clinicians do not recognize the term. They recognize the behavior.
Think you have it? Find out what else you might be suffering from at the diagnosis generator. Or browse the full index of afflictions.