My friend J. Keith believes that when it comes to revenge, gender differences have more to do with the ever-sexually-optimistic nature of the typical male than the overly vindictive nature of the typical female. “No matter how impossible the chances are of you ever getting back together, you still don’t want to burn the bridge entirely and know that you’ll never have a chance of having sex with her again,” he says. While it’s a bit unsettling to imagine that while we’re waging war, you’re wondering if you can still get us naked, by the time most of us have set down the path of vengeance, we’re almost past the point of caring about what you’re thinking at all.
“I sent ‘The Grifter’ an invoice for the money he owed me,” my friend Caitlin says, “more for me than to get at him.” “The grifter,” or TG, was her last serious boyfriend, and his name pretty much says it all. Since TG didn’t actually have an address, or even a phone number after she took back the cell phone she’d given him, Caitlin sent the bill to TG’s mom. The total? “Seventeen grand – it was a rough estimate of what he would have paid if he’d covered his own car, rent, food, and drugs,” she says casually, adding, “I didn’t tell his Mom about the drugs. I categorized it under ‘Goods and Services Billed but Never Received.’” Did mom respond? “Not to me,” Caitlin all but whistles. “But I bet she did to him.”
Others find the silent, stealth kind of revenge more effective than the grand calls-to-mom type gestures. Cheryl, a friend of a friend, recounts how she got back at her college boyfriend after she walked in on him in bed with another woman. He gave her the requisite “this isn’t what it seems” speech but for Cheryl, the relationship was over. “Some time later, it occurred to me that I still knew his password for his phone and e-mail,” Cheryl explains. “So I started accessing both and deleting messages from her. He never caught on.” Cheryl was lucky – how many times have I longed for the opportunity to morph into some kind of all-powerful combination of God and Big Brother? — and she enjoyed feeling like she was finally the one in control. “Their relationship didn’t last long, but maybe it would have if I hadn’t been making him think she wasn’t e-mailing him back,” Cheryl theorizes.
Of course, you don’t have to be in a relationship to get back at him. My friend Nicole went out on a date with a guy who left her place, hooked up with her neighbor (who Nicole had introduced him to when he first picked her up), and then categorically denied doing it. Knowing that the female bond can surpass the roll-in-the-hay kind, Nicole coaxed her free-loving neighbor into agreeing to call the guy together to say hello. “Just to fuck with him,” Nicole recalls. “It was fantastic.”
My own experience with revenge wasn’t quite as wonderful in the end. See, I’d taken on perhaps the one guy who had absolutely no problem brawling with a girl – clearly he’d abandoned any notion of keeping our sex door open — and in retaliation, he essentially embarked on a full-speed-ahead mission to have me fired. While he wasn’t successful – in fact, he ended up getting fired for his efforts, not to mention his lack of writing skills — the battle was so bloody that I actually longed for the days when I’d corrected his nonsensical copy. And so, even in “winning,” I lost.
