RAZOR, June, 2005
Sweet Revenge
Lashing out, one ex at a time
By Anna David
They say that living well is the best revenge. And while there’s surely something to that, “living well” is sort of subjective and indefinable – which, you have to admit, can’t really be said for the sheer pleasure that can surge through your veins when you’re doling out some good, old-fashioned payback.
I got a taste of such sweet vengeance several years ago after being blown off by a fellow writer at the website where we toiled. While we were dating, I had been willing, giddy even, to spend my days turning his grammatically challenged and occasionally plagiarized copy into usable articles. (Sexy though this guy was, a writer he was not.) But after sending me an IM saying that our affair had become “too intense” and then cutting off all communication, I became less willing to be this guy’s writing beard. And when I was temporarily put into a position where I was his boss, I had my chance to get back at him: I gave him a writing assignment I knew he was wholly incapable of completing, and “cc’d” the head of our department so that his humiliation would be public — and damaging.
As any manufacturer of voodoo dolls can surely attest, I’m certainly not the only woman out there who has tried to exact revenge on a former lover. You men, however, seem to be far less vengeance-crazy. I asked literally every guy I know if he had a relationship revenge story for me, and all of them swore that it just wasn’t their “style” or they “didn’t believe in it.”
“I could tell you stories about getting revenge on people at work,” my friend Nick said, “but I’d never do something like that to a girl.” My friend Rob recounted a time when a gal he broke up with immediately hooked up with one of his friends. “I knew she was doing it to get back at me – and at first it worked,” he says, “but in the end it just made me realize she was lame.”
It’s true that you never hear about a guy doing a reverse Lorena Bobbitt on his cheating wife or dumping the ashes of an ex’s brother all over the ex’s bedroom (as Jacqueline Dodge of New Hampshire did to her former flame last November), or even giving a girl a work assignment she’s not capable of completing. Maybe it’s the same instinct that keeps a man from throwing a punch at the girl in the bar who’s mouthing off in a far more obnoxious way than the guy he just knocked out — the pick-on-someone-your-own-size mentality.
My friend Mike thinks that women are genetically predisposed to lash out when their pride has been wounded. “You know that famous Shakespeare line, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?’” he says. “It’s true, and I think that’s what revenge is all about. Guys don’t turn off the way girls do. When a girl stops loving you, she’s done. She doesn’t even see the guy as the same person anymore.” Years of experience had taught Mike that it’s best to simply ignore women trying to twist the knife, so when a girl he dated started spreading untrue rumors about him, he opted not to launch a personal press campaign to exonerate himself. “I just ignored what she was doing, and then years later I found out everyone thinks she’s crazy, anyway,” he says.
