"Wow - I'd love to say the exact same things to my ex," I responded after I read it (along with the entire dinner table). "Yes, but the difference is, you probably never would." He had a point. In the name of research, I recently dug up some old diary entries of letters I had written to an ex, but of course never had the guts to send. At the time I probably had enough sense to realise that in his mind, I probably wasn't exactly that important in the scheme of things. But considering women (and many men) are highly emotional creatures, when it comes to writing our feelings in the throes of a post-dump-rage, many of us become psychotic shadows of our former once sane selves ...For some that might not have the same self-restraint, their man's caddish ways become so dire and destructive to themselves that they resort to desperate measures.
Ways to take revenge include ...
Airing their dirty laundry
When Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, 72, was apparently frolicking about with an 18-year-old blonde bombshell (who incidentally called him "Papi"), his wife, Veronica Lario, didn't let it go quietly. Instead of dealing with things behind their giant closed doors, she told La Stampa newspaper that her marriage was over. "I can't stay with someone who cavorts with minors," she said. "I read in the papers about how he has been hanging around a minor, because he must have known her before she was 18. And how she called him 'grandpa' and about their meetings in Rome and Milan." Silvio, on the other hand, insists it was all innocent, and is now demanding an apology from his wife. Fat chance.
Telling Oprah Winfrey
When John Edwards was caught in a compromising dalliance with a mistress (who was also hiding a secret love-child by him), while his wife, Elizabeth Edwards, was suffering from cancer, she decided to go all out in the name of revenge. She wrote a tell-all book titled Resilience about her personal trials, and scored herself a coveted position on the couch of The Oprah Winfrey Show to bag on her husband in public.
"This is a really good man who really did a very, very bad thing," she told Oprah. "But if you take that piece out, I do have a perfect marriage." Could have fooled us.
Humiliating them in a public trial
Supermodel Christie Brinkley decided the best way to air her husband Peter Cook's dirty laundry when he cheated with his teenage secretary was to do it in the tabloids. Hence she made sure that their divorce trial was made public and that out came the facts that he spent around $3000 per month on pornographic websites and paid his lover $300,000 to keep it quiet. Mission accomplished.
Cutting their clothes and selling their booze
In New York, after discovering her husband's affair with Madonna, baseball star Alex Rodriguez's wife went on a $100,000 shopping spree in Paris.
In the UK, a civil engineer dug up his wife's driveway and poured cement on her car while the neighbours looked on in horror.
And Lady Sarah Graham took revenge on second husband Sir Peter Graham Moon after he moved a younger woman by snipping off the sleeves off 32 of his Savile Row suits, trashing his BMW with a can of white paint and depositing rare wines from his cellar on doorsteps around the village like a milkman. Yeouch.
Going on an online rampage
Then there's the ability to let your fingers do the revenge-taking. Visit websites like revengelady.com or dontdatehimgirl.com and you'll find a gaggle of scorned ex-lovers dishing the dirt on their philandering caddish ex-beaus, anonymously of course, and all in the name of hoping they'll never get a date again.
While these methods of taking revenge are rather masterful, I still concur with George Herbert who said 400 years ago that living well is the best revenge.
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