Is revenge ever a good option?

"Revenge! Revenge! Revenge!" To an embittered and deceived lover, few words roll as easily off the tongue. And there are so many ways for the smarting, scheming mind to take it. According to Canadian researchers, these are a few of the most common (beware, all are likely to end up with you facing either criminal prosecution or a personal injury compensation claim):

Keying the cheater's car.

Placing some kind of itchy substance in his or her underwear.

Bringing compromising photographs into the public domain.

If you are woman, letting friends and relatives in on the less than impressive size of your ex's dishonourable member.

If you are a man, spreading rumours of your ex's infection with virulent STDs.

Sleeping with his or her best friend.

Phoning an adult conversation hotline then leaving it off the hook all night, lumping him or her with an embarrassing bill that can run up to thousands of pounds.

Burning all possessions belonging to the heartless offender of the heart.

I, personally, can think of numerous others. On the few occasions when I have suffered the soul-aching grievances of infidelity, I must admit that I have been tempted. I once spent weeks fantasising about replacing my erstwhile sweethearts basil tinctured shampoo with witch-green hair dye.

My alternate fantasy, while far more criminal and consequently less realistic, gave me greater pleasure. It was to find some way of secreting vast quantities of testosterone supplement into her already foul-tasting ginko-balboa health drink so that she would sprout a beard of an opulence to make Brian Blessed feel like a baby-faced eunuch.

However, my good Christian upbringing has always curbed me at the last minute. I suppose that it is not that I have taken the noble and dignified option, more that I have relied on the karma and vengeance of God to do my dirty work for me. No revenge I can take will ever quite be able to match the torture of eternal hellfire (Hello, Josie, I'm still thinking of you).

My atheistic friends are not so fortunate as to be able to rely on divine intervention. One, let's call him Alan, split from his fiance last year after he discovered that her night classes at a local college had got rather more extra-curricular than he had ever imagined. He returned early from a business trip to find a trouserless lecturer in his kitchen, smoking a cigarette and pouring two glasses of wine from one of his most aged and most cherished bottles. This lecturing lecher was even wearing my mate's Dior shirt.

"Don't worry mate," I said. "I know its hard now, but trust me, you'll get through it and the pair of them will get their karma."

He was not convinced.

Knowing that his intended father-in-law had once been cuckolded and had never forgiven his cheating ex-wife nor for that matter all of the female gender for her infidelity, Alan resolved to forge a cunning plan. Feigning forgiveness, he remained at home for a time saying that he might still be able to proceed with the marriage. Then, on a visit to the prospective father-in-law's house, still sure that his Jenny was conducting her illicit liaison, he stole her dad's mobile telephone. But not before he had switched the numbers on his fiance's phone. Naturally, this meant that any messages she meant for her lover would go straight to her dad. You get the picture.

After a couple of days he placed the phone in the old man's pocket. He is, apparently, an absent-minded fellow who is accustomed to losing these things. The next morning all hell broke loose as Jenny's dad found that his phone was inundated with text and voice messages from his daughter. Let's just say that practically all of them were characterised by heavy breathing, copulative sounding and four letter words of obvious Germanic descent.

Within about 24 hours Jenny had been both disowned and disinherited.

Alan felt jubilant, well at first anyway. Within a month he was beginning to feel pretty guilty, questioning whether his neglect of Jenny had led to her infidelity in the first place. Jenny, was devastated to have lost the two most important men in her life and within five months her and Alan were together again the marriage back on. Strangely, she did not suspect Alan of tampering with the phones, instead believing it to be a result of her own lack of technological sophistication.

Later that year, Jenny's dad died. Right until the end, father and daughter had remained completely unreconciled. Alan was, and still is, completely beside himself. If they had been provided for in the will, neither of them would ever have needed to work again. They even spent a fortune on lawyer's fees trying to get his last will invalidated. As it is, several million pounds were bequeathed to a care home for the elderly and the infirm, while poor Alan envisages himself continuing to sell insurance for the next fifty years.

Good luck Alan! I know you disregarded my sober advice at the time, but something tells me you might just believe in karma by now.

This article may be published on another website free of charge, on the condition that a link is provided from this article to our website: http://www.youclaim.co.uk/Personal-injury/Personal-injury.htm