I keep comparing myself to him and it is not the fun kind

Nine months in, roughly six evenings, and by any sensible measure it is going well. She is happy. He is fine. Nothing has gone wrong.

The problem is in my head and it is embarrassing.

I have started comparing myself to him. Not during, which I could live with, and which if I am honest is part of what I signed up for. Afterwards. Days afterwards. At work. He is taller, which is not news to anybody. He has a job people find interesting when he says it at a table. He is easy in a way I have never once been easy in my life, and I watched her laugh at something he said in the first ten minutes in a way she has not laughed at anything I have said in about four years.

When I imagined this the comparison was the point. I thought I would enjoy feeling like the lesser one, and in the moment I sometimes do. What I did not expect is that it would carry on running in the background on a Wednesday afternoon with nothing to do with any of it, and that on a Wednesday afternoon it is not enjoyable at all, it is just a low opinion of myself with his face attached to it.

I have not said any of this to her. She thinks I am fine and she is not wrong on the nights themselves.

I suppose what I want to know is whether other people manage to keep the comparison inside the evening. Is there a trick to putting it down. Or is this what people mean when they say some of us should not do this at all.