Revenge: Another
Side Of Romance
by Jovan Tahale
When I saw my best friend slip my fiance a note at a party one night from across the room, my stomach jumped in anger. But I rationalized that it had something to do with surprising me for my upcoming birthday. I was turning the big 30, and I guessed that my friends were all conspiring to throw me a birthday party. I watched as he put it in his jacket pocket and gave her a big grin.
Later that night, when he brought me home, I offered to hang up his jacket and quickly snatched the note out of his pocket on my way to the closet. The note read, “What a stud you are. My bed will never be the same.” It was not signed. Within the one minute it took me to walk back into the bedroom where he lay sprawled across my bed, I hatched a plan for revenge.
I went into the bathroom and stayed for a strategic ten minutes. When I came out, I pretended to have a sudden upset stomach and asked him to leave, in the sickest voice I could muster. The next morning I called off the wedding and mailed the note to him and her hot-tempered boyfriend detailing what happened. I knew he would recognize her very distinctive handwriting and he did. She ended up with a black eye, and no man, and I ended up with no man and no best friend. Ironically, I never felt the satisfaction of revenge. I felt hurt, anger and betrayal only…and I still do.
Sandy fell hard for a gorgeous guy who told her upfront he was a free spirit and a “polygamist dater” but she felt she could “tame” him. For a while, she was doing well with monopolizing his time, until she walked into a high-end restaurant one night and caught him having a cozy candlelit dinner with her cousin. She confronted them and threw a glass of red wine in his face. Two nights later at three in the morning, she drove to his house and smashed all his car windows.
When Karen found out that her fiance’s “important” business trip to New York turned out to be a week-long pleasure trip to Cancun, Mexico with an ex-girlfriend, she freaked. She found out by accident one morning when she was sitting in his car waiting for him to come out of a store. The sun was shining brightly in the car when she pulled down both sun visors to block out the sun, and a photo fell out. It was a picture of him and his ex-girlfriend in bathing suits. At first, she thought it was perhaps an old photo until she turned it over and saw the date and the handwritten words on the back. “Be sure to remember this week in Cancun on your wedding night.” She put the photo back under the visor and got out of the car. She decided to take a cab home. Though she was scorched in anger, she believed it was Fate. She knew she had to get revenge in a way that would knock him off his feet. As she rode home in the cab, she devised a plan of revenge.
She decided not to let him know that she knew what he had done. She sat down and wrote him a “dear John” letter and called the wedding off with the explanation that she had met someone else, and she asked for his forgiveness. She knew with his huge ego and his heart issues, that such an act would practically put him in the hospital…and it did, to her regret. He survived but the relationship didn’t.
As these cases show, it’s apparent that vengeance can be, and often is, a double-edged sword sometimes dangerous for the recipient and the perpetrator.