Fatal Reaction, by Fawn Fitter

Fatal Reaction

P.O.V., February 1999

I am not, as a general rule, a spiteful bitch. I think most of my ex-boyfriends will back me up on this, since my romantic endings were usually rather amicable -- until I split up with a man I'll call Hal.

At first, I thought Hal and I had downshifted into a close, loyal friendship. But a year after our breakup, I discovered a few things he hadn't bothered to share with me. For one, the "new" woman he'd "just started seeing" had actually been around well before we'd split up -- in fact, she had arrived on the scene a week after he and I had both agreed to stop seeing other people. Then there was the ex-girlfriend he'd bad-mouthed to me one afternoon -- and slept with by the next morning. You know, those little unimportant details. In other words, he was what you might call, in the vernacular of the politically correct, "differently truthed." When I asked him what else he was hiding, he accused me of engaging in a jealousy-inspired snit. When that didn't work, he tried to tell me, with a straight face, that I'd forced him to lie because he didn't want to hurt me with the truth. (Please.) Once I ended our post-relationship friendship, I wanted to show him something else: namely, that he couldn't get away with it.

So I indulged in a teensy bit of revenge. First, I revealed to a few carefully selected mutual acquaintances (people whom I also knew to be big-mouthed gossips) the truth about how Hal and I met: he had answered my personal ad, a fact he hardly wanted broadcasted. Then I took out another personal ad in the newspaper, addressed by name to the new girlfriend: "He can't be trusted. He cheated on me. He cheated on the woman before me. If he's not cheating on you, it's only a matter of time."

It felt good.

Don't worry, we women don't usually act on our make-you-sorry impulses, no matter how sorry we'd like to make you. "My ultimate revenge fantasy with one of my ex-boyfriends was to call up his secretary and tell her all the crap that he pulled on me," Lisa, 30, a personal trainer, confesses. "It would have gotten around his office in seconds. His image is so important to him, it would have crushed him." The key phrase here is "would have." Most of the time, when you end a romance with us, we hardly consider it a treasonous offense in and of itself -- you win some, you lose some.

But there is a big difference between being dumped and being betrayed. Dumping your girlfriend might net you some tears, a pathetic letter or two asking for reconsideration, or even one hormone-driven outburst of anger. But betraying your girlfriend -- lying, cheating, stringing her along, pulling any kind of fast one -- that hurts. And chances are, we will hurt you back. We will become obsessed. We will spend hours, days, weeks dreaming up ways to send all that pain back to you.

Why? Women are usually the romantic fixer-uppers, the ones who invariably want to "work on things" when a relationship heads south, explains Lynn Harris, alter ego of online superhero/advice columnist "Breakup Girl." And while getting even isn't strictly a chick thing (Harris regularly gets "How can I get back at her?" letters from guys), in general, she says, it's women who have difficulty forgiving and forgetting. "Women have all this 'do something' energy, and they can't fix the relationship," she says. "So they want to fix him."

There are three basic methods of retribution women use to strike back at the blackhearts who disregard their feelings: stealth revenge, romantic revenge, and over-the-top revenge. Each has its proponents, and its uses. So even if you haven't exactly acted like a Boy Scout, follow that motto: Be prepared.

Stealth Revenge

Stealth revenge is clever, caustic, and above all, subtle. You may never know about it, or if you do find out about it, you can't necessarily trace it. During a fit of post-breakup apartment cleaning, Molly, a 27-year-old Internet editor, turned up her ex's T-shirt and underwear. She gave them back -- but only after using them to scrub out her cat's litter box. "I did wash them," she reports. "But it made me smile for months to know that there was cat shit in his underwear."

Toni, a 29-year-old writer, is fairly sure her ex, a couch-surfing musician with no phone of his own, never figured out that it was she who was behind a month's worth of beeper messages sent at random times, directing him to call his job, a friend's house or some number she just made up on the spot. "Sometimes I'd do it twice in a day, then not for a week," she recalls. "Whenever I got really bitter and resentful, it gave me satisfaction to know he was running for a pay phone somewhere."

A stealth avenger may not even want you to figure it out -- she doesn't care about getting a particular reaction out of you or teaching you a lesson. It just makes her feel better. It salves her wounded pride to write your name on the bottom of her shoe so she stomps on you with every stride. It balances her emotional scales to ritually burn the lacy lingerie you bought her.

My prize for brilliant stealth revenge goes to Martha, a 31-year-old operating room nurse, who let herself into the home of her ex while he was at work. "I went in and stole the remotes to his stereo, his TV, everything, so he could experience what it was like not to have control," she snickers.

Romantic Revenge

Romantic revenge involves actual retribution, with your love life as the bullseye. If you've moved in with someone new, your ex may have flowers delivered to your new girl with another guy's name on the card, making you wonder about her cheatin' heart. She may tell all your mutual friends that you're, ahem, underendowed. She may reveal your fetish for women's underwear. It sounds cheesy, and it is. But you'd also be surprised at how effective it can be.

Amy, a 34-year-old sales rep, had a volatile relationship with her loutish boyfriend; she once doused him with a carton of orange juice in the middle of an argument. One day she decided she'd had enough after his millionth lame excuse to cancel a weekend away with her. When she drove to his apartment to tell him off, she caught him sitting outside, about to take off with his friends. Her first reaction was to drive up on the sidewalk and run him over. But then she calmly drove home, gathered all his love letters, and took them to her office. She used the copy machine to enlarge them all, highlighted in yellow every mushy phrase, then scrawled YELLOW=LIE across them. She then returned and taped them up in the foyer of his building, wih his name and apartment number on each one, and sat in the parking lot laughing at his humiliation as she watched all of his friends and neighbors come in and read them.

Another tactic comes from the "You always want what you can't have" school. Julie, 26, an advertising producer, got tired of her boyfriend's verbal tirades and decided to strike back. She got her revenge by acting as if she couldn't have cared less when they split. When he called to say he wanted her back, she recalls, "I was just nonchalant, but I egged him on in just the slightest way, so he thought there was a chance that I'd get back together with him. He even told me he missed the smell of my hair. I was loving it."

Unfortunately for him, Julie had taken her Herbal Essences elsewhere. Once she'd had her fill of groveling, she told him -- bluntly -- to get lost. Ouch!

Over-The-Top Revenge

You know what they say about paybacks�Ķ When Terri, a 30-year-old Web designer, was trying to decide whether or not to move in with her boyfriend, the two of them decided to spend a week apart while they thought about it. On the very first night of their separation, he stayed with another woman. Unfortunately for him, the two women had mutual friends, who alerted Terri the next day. "He'd left most of his wardrobe at my house," she laughs. "So I packed everything up, neatly folded, into a cardboard box. And then I emptied a jug of maple syrup over everything, sealed it up, and left it at his doorstep."

Over-the-top revenge ranges from the legendary (using your phone to call time and temperature in another country and leaving it off the hook) to the disgusting (hiding fresh shrimp in your heating vents while you're not home). No way can you mistake the message behind this one: your behavior has been so heinous that your ex thinks it justifies wrack, ruin and rotting prawns.

After living with her boyfriend for two years, Jenn, 30, who works at a major newspaper, thought they were on their way to the altar. "He talked marriage from early on," she says. "He was all about commitment." Then one day he said he "needed his space" and abruptly moved out.

Six weeks later, Mr. Commitment was living with -- and engaged to -- someone else. But he'd left behind some expensive camera equipment, on which Jenn vented her wrath. "I took the biggest lens, worth about $500 to $700, and set it on the kitchen floor," she says dryly. "I dug a screwdriver into the lens and destroyed it. That was very cathartic."

Conclusion: if you're going to act like a jerk, make sure you have all of your stuff before she finds out. Even then, your safety isn't guaranteed. One of the best over-the-top stories I ever heard was from a woman who splashed bottles of Pepto-Bismol over her ex's car windshield; as he toiled at work, the pink stuff baked onto his window. She drove off and left him stranded (he couldn't see out the window) and facing a couple hundred bucks for new glass.

Relax. Truth is, most women aren't going to go that far. Frankly, most of us would rather drink margaritas with our girlfriends while telling horror stories about you. Someone who calls your house ten times an hour for a month, sends her burly cousins to beat you up or threatens to kill you is not vengeful, she's insane. If that's happening to you regularly, your problem isn't spiteful ex-girlfriends; it's rotten taste. That said, realize that you can't control a woman's reaction when you call it quits. Even if you're the world champion of the gentle, sincere, direct farewell, you may push a button you didn't know was there. But the fallout shouldn't be too toxic, and it won't last forever.

So what can you do to avoid a fatal reaction? There are three basic rules:

Be a gentleman. If you don't cheat, lie, tell her her thighs repulse you or read her diary to your basketball buddies, you're probably 90 percent safe from any revenge when it all goes south.
Remember that you can't dump someone without hurting her feelings. Breakups are, by definition, painful. Just don't make it worse by trying to soften the blow with a squishy layer of bull. A simple, respectful "This isn't working for me" should do. She'll still take it personally (as you would), but making her sad is still better than making her mad. "It's the extra stuff that pisses women off," Harris says. "Don't try to tell her you're not good enough for her. Don't patronize her. Don't go so overboard with how much you love her that you then beg the question of why you're dumping her."
No matter what, don't escalate. Trying to get back at her for getting back at you won't make you more of a man, but it will feed a twisted belief of hers that you wouldn't fight back if you didn't still care. And no good can come from that.

As far as I know, my lying ex, Hal, never even noticed my acts of vengeance. But I'm fine with that. I've gotten my revenge anyway -- in the words of Breakup Girl, "Nothing gets someone's goat more than wondering how you've been able to move on so gracefully." Sure, I loved the notion of doling out his comeuppance, but now my attitude toward the guy can be summed up in one word: "Whatever."

Besides, he reads P.O.V. Take that, snake.

Copyright 1999 by Fawn Fitter.
Not to be reproduced or distributed in any way without the written permission of the author.

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	Fatal Reaction P.O.V., February 1999 I am not, as a general rule, a spiteful bitch. I think most of my ex-boyfriends will back me up on this, since my romantic endings were usually rather amicable -- until I split up with a man I'll call Hal. At first, I thought Hal and I had downshifted into a close, loyal friendship. But a year after our breakup, I discovered a few things he hadn't bothered to share with me. For one, the "new" woman he'd "just started seeing" had actually been around well before we'd split up -- in fact, she had arrived on the scene a week after he and I had both agreed to stop seeing other people. Then there was the ex-girlfriend he'd bad-mouthed to me one afternoon -- and slept with by the next morning. You know, those little unimportant details. In other words, he was what you might call, in the vernacular of the politically correct, "differently truthed." When I asked him what else he was hiding, he accused me of engaging in a jealousy-inspired snit. When that didn't work, he tried to tell me, with a straight face, that I'd forced him to lie because he didn't want to hurt me with the truth. (Please.) Once I ended our post-relationship friendship, I wanted to show him something else: namely, that he couldn't get away with it. So I indulged in a teensy bit of revenge. First, I revealed to a few carefully selected mutual acquaintances (people whom I also knew to be big-mouthed gossips) the truth about how Hal and I met: he had answered my personal ad, a fact he hardly wanted broadcasted. Then I took out another personal ad in the newspaper, addressed by name to the new girlfriend: "He can't be trusted. He cheated on me. He cheated on the woman before me. If he's not cheating on you, it's only a matter of time." It felt good. Don't worry, we women don't usually act on our make-you-sorry impulses, no matter how sorry we'd like to make you. "My ultimate revenge fantasy with one of my ex-boyfriends was to call up his secretary and tell her all the crap that he pulled on me," Lisa, 30, a personal trainer, confesses. "It would have gotten around his office in seconds. His image is so important to him, it would have crushed him." The key phrase here is "would have." Most of the time, when you end a romance with us, we hardly consider it a treasonous offense in and of itself -- you win some, you lose some. But there is a big difference between being dumped and being betrayed. Dumping your girlfriend might net you some tears, a pathetic letter or two asking for reconsideration, or even one hormone-driven outburst of anger. But betraying your girlfriend -- lying, cheating, stringing her along, pulling any kind of fast one -- that hurts. And chances are, we will hurt you back. We will become obsessed. We will spend hours, days, weeks dreaming up ways to send all that pain back to you. Why? Women are usually the romantic fixer-uppers, the ones who invariably want to "work on things" when a relationship heads south, explains Lynn Harris, alter ego of online superhero/advice columnist "Breakup Girl." And while getting even isn't strictly a chick thing (Harris regularly gets "How can I get back at her?" letters from guys), in general, she says, it's women who have difficulty forgiving and forgetting. "Women have all this 'do something' energy, and they can't fix the relationship," she says. "So they want to fix him." There are three basic methods of retribution women use to strike back at the blackhearts who disregard their feelings: stealth revenge, romantic revenge, and over-the-top revenge. Each has its proponents, and its uses. So even if you haven't exactly acted like a Boy Scout, follow that motto: Be prepared. Stealth Revenge Stealth revenge is clever, caustic, and above all, subtle. You may never know about it, or if you do find out about it, you can't necessarily trace it. During a fit of post-breakup apartment cleaning, Molly, a 27-year-old Internet editor, turned up her ex's T-shirt and underwear. She gave them back -- but only after using them to scrub out her cat's litter box. "I did wash them," she reports. "But it made me smile for months to know that there was cat shit in his underwear." Toni, a 29-year-old writer, is fairly sure her ex, a couch-surfing musician with no phone of his own, never figured out that it was she who was behind a month's worth of beeper messages sent at random times, directing him to call his job, a friend's house or some number she just made up on the spot. "Sometimes I'd do it twice in a day, then not for a week," she recalls. "Whenever I got really bitter and resentful, it gave me satisfaction to know he was running for a pay phone somewhere." A stealth avenger may not even want you to figure it out -- she doesn't care about getting a particular reaction out of you or teaching you a lesson. It just makes her feel better. It salves her wounded pride to write your name on the bottom of her shoe so she stomps on you with every stride. It balances her emotional scales to ritually burn the lacy lingerie you bought her. My prize for brilliant stealth revenge goes to Martha, a 31-year-old operating room nurse, who let herself into the home of her ex while he was at work. "I went in and stole the remotes to his stereo, his TV, everything, so he could experience what it was like not to have control," she snickers. Romantic Revenge Romantic revenge involves actual retribution, with your love life as the bullseye. If you've moved in with someone new, your ex may have flowers delivered to your new girl with another guy's name on the card, making you wonder about her cheatin' heart. She may tell all your mutual friends that you're, ahem, underendowed. She may reveal your fetish for women's underwear. It sounds cheesy, and it is. But you'd also be surprised at how effective it can be. Amy, a 34-year-old sales rep, had a volatile relationship with her loutish boyfriend; she once doused him with a carton of orange juice in the middle of an argument. One day she decided she'd had enough after his millionth lame excuse to cancel a weekend away with her. When she drove to his apartment to tell him off, she caught him sitting outside, about to take off with his friends. Her first reaction was to drive up on the sidewalk and run him over. But then she calmly drove home, gathered all his love letters, and took them to her office. She used the copy machine to enlarge them all, highlighted in yellow every mushy phrase, then scrawled YELLOW=LIE across them. She then returned and taped them up in the foyer of his building, wih his name and apartment number on each one, and sat in the parking lot laughing at his humiliation as she watched all of his friends and neighbors come in and read them. Another tactic comes from the "You always want what you can't have" school. Julie, 26, an advertising producer, got tired of her boyfriend's verbal tirades and decided to strike back. She got her revenge by acting as if she couldn't have cared less when they split. When he called to say he wanted her back, she recalls, "I was just nonchalant, but I egged him on in just the slightest way, so he thought there was a chance that I'd get back together with him. He even told me he missed the smell of my hair. I was loving it." Unfortunately for him, Julie had taken her Herbal Essences elsewhere. Once she'd had her fill of groveling, she told him -- bluntly -- to get lost. Ouch! Over-The-Top Revenge You know what they say about paybacks�Ķ When Terri, a 30-year-old Web designer, was trying to decide whether or not to move in with her boyfriend, the two of them decided to spend a week apart while they thought about it. On the very first night of their separation, he stayed with another woman. Unfortunately for him, the two women had mutual friends, who alerted Terri the next day. "He'd left most of his wardrobe at my house," she laughs. "So I packed everything up, neatly folded, into a cardboard box. And then I emptied a jug of maple syrup over everything, sealed it up, and left it at his doorstep." Over-the-top revenge ranges from the legendary (using your phone to call time and temperature in another country and leaving it off the hook) to the disgusting (hiding fresh shrimp in your heating vents while you're not home). No way can you mistake the message behind this one: your behavior has been so heinous that your ex thinks it justifies wrack, ruin and rotting prawns. After living with her boyfriend for two years, Jenn, 30, who works at a major newspaper, thought they were on their way to the altar. "He talked marriage from early on," she says. "He was all about commitment." Then one day he said he "needed his space" and abruptly moved out. Six weeks later, Mr. Commitment was living with -- and engaged to -- someone else. But he'd left behind some expensive camera equipment, on which Jenn vented her wrath. "I took the biggest lens, worth about $500 to $700, and set it on the kitchen floor," she says dryly. "I dug a screwdriver into the lens and destroyed it. That was very cathartic." Conclusion: if you're going to act like a jerk, make sure you have all of your stuff before she finds out. Even then, your safety isn't guaranteed. One of the best over-the-top stories I ever heard was from a woman who splashed bottles of Pepto-Bismol over her ex's car windshield; as he toiled at work, the pink stuff baked onto his window. She drove off and left him stranded (he couldn't see out the window) and facing a couple hundred bucks for new glass. Relax. Truth is, most women aren't going to go that far. Frankly, most of us would rather drink margaritas with our girlfriends while telling horror stories about you. Someone who calls your house ten times an hour for a month, sends her burly cousins to beat you up or threatens to kill you is not vengeful, she's insane. If that's happening to you regularly, your problem isn't spiteful ex-girlfriends; it's rotten taste. That said, realize that you can't control a woman's reaction when you call it quits. Even if you're the world champion of the gentle, sincere, direct farewell, you may push a button you didn't know was there. But the fallout shouldn't be too toxic, and it won't last forever. So what can you do to avoid a fatal reaction? There are three basic rules: Be a gentleman. If you don't cheat, lie, tell her her thighs repulse you or read her diary to your basketball buddies, you're probably 90 percent safe from any revenge when it all goes south. Remember that you can't dump someone without hurting her feelings. Breakups are, by definition, painful. Just don't make it worse by trying to soften the blow with a squishy layer of bull. A simple, respectful "This isn't working for me" should do. She'll still take it personally (as you would), but making her sad is still better than making her mad. "It's the extra stuff that pisses women off," Harris says. "Don't try to tell her you're not good enough for her. Don't patronize her. Don't go so overboard with how much you love her that you then beg the question of why you're dumping her." No matter what, don't escalate. Trying to get back at her for getting back at you won't make you more of a man, but it will feed a twisted belief of hers that you wouldn't fight back if you didn't still care. And no good can come from that. As far as I know, my lying ex, Hal, never even noticed my acts of vengeance. But I'm fine with that. I've gotten my revenge anyway -- in the words of Breakup Girl, "Nothing gets someone's goat more than wondering how you've been able to move on so gracefully." Sure, I loved the notion of doling out his comeuppance, but now my attitude toward the guy can be summed up in one word: "Whatever." Besides, he reads P.O.V. Take that, snake. Copyright 1999 by Fawn Fitter. Not to be reproduced or distributed in any way without the written permission of the author. Articles \| Home