Yahoo Lifestyle "I Found Out Later That He Had To Throw Them All Out": Here Are 17 Stories From Petty Exes Who Are Living That #Noregrets Life
As we all know, the stress of a breakup tends to bring out the worst in people. Some individuals can console themselves by listening to Taylor Swift on repeat or having a self-care day — while others simply allow themselves to act on their most WILDLY petty desires...
So, the other day, when the r/pettyrevenge community was asked, "What’s the pettiest thing you've ever done after a breakup?" People were more than happy to share the sordid details of their "less-than-finest" moments. From leaving glitter in the air conditioner to destroying designer t-shirts, one thread at a time — here are 17 petty breakup stories that prove revenge truly is a dish best served cold:
1."Not my story, but rather a buddy whose longtime partner cheated on him. They had lived together for several years, but after their breakup, she decided that she and her new boyfriend (the affair partner) would move in together — meaning my buddy needed to get out of there ASAP. He was devastated but wanted to remove himself from the situation quickly, so he reluctantly agreed."
"His now ex-girlfriend went to stay with the new boyfriend for a few days while my buddy packed. A few days prior, he had found a small device on Amazon that made random noises at inconsistent intervals and bought 12 of them. As he packed, he hid them throughout the house in the most inconvenient places one could imagine — inside air conditioner vents, behind wall outlets, inside the bottom panel of the fridge, etc.
Then he moved out and never spoke to his ex again, so we never found out how she and her new boyfriend dealt with random noises going off in the house all the time. But I like to think that spending hours looking for the source of the noises drove them nuts."
2."After my girlfriend and I broke up, she claimed our towels belonged to her..."
"We owned four nice, fluffy bath towels then, and I was sad to see them go.
So, before she came to pick them up, I sprayed them with 3M Scotchgard to make them waterproof."
3."My ex was very into his looks and felt that after I had two babies back to back, I was no longer on his level. So, he started dating a model/country singer on the side..."
"At this time, our two-year-old had a serious constipation issue and was prescribed a laxative known as a 'poop bomb.' This just so happened to coincide with my ex having to leave town for work (and to visit his affair partner). In his rush to leave, he somehow ended up ingesting the 'poop bomb' in his protein smoothie.
He shit his pants in a panic in the town she lived in and drove all the way home. He threw a tantrum for a solid day but never knew who to direct his anger towards."
4."Way back in the day, my fiancé cheated on me. When I found out, I immediately began packing my stuff..."
"While I was packing, I had time to think and decided to place an ad in the newspaper that I knew his grandmother read daily with a photo of him and the girl he cheated on me with and everything I knew about the affair.
His grandmother called me to apologize after she saw the ad and called him a disgrace. Best part? I charged the ad to his credit card."
5."I was engaged to a guy for four years — only to find out that he was having an affair and had informed his affair partner that I was his 'roommate.' She had no idea we shared a bed nor that he and I were raising a child together."
"The day I left him, I poured a gallon of milk over every square inch of our bed and remade it nice and neat afterward. I then packed up every eating utensil, plate, pot, pan, and small appliance in the kitchen and took them with me. The only TV we had was one I had purchased, so I also packed that."
6."I gave my ex a rose a couple of weeks before breaking up with him (I found out shortly after that he was cheating on me with his ex-wife). At the time, though, I was sad because he had left the rose on his car dash, and it died from the heat."
"So after I found out about his affair, I burned the dead rose to a fine crisp, left its charred remains on his dash, lined his car’s air conditioner vents with ultra-fine glitter, and set the dial to high.
The next morning, I woke him up at six o'clock to break up with him. He walked out to his car and started bawling upon seeing the rose. Once he climbed in to leave, he was promptly doused in rainbow glitter."
7."My ex-girlfriend from out-of-town left a massive pile of dresses and pants at my local dry cleaner and demanded that I pick them up and mail them to her. Did she prepay? Of course not..."
"It was about $75 for a cleaning. While I was there, it occurred to me that the cleaner also offered tailoring and clothing alterations, so I had the tailor take in two inches from the waist of all of her dresses and pants and made sure that he disguised the changes as best he could. I also had him swap some buttons around so they wouldn't match. When they were ready a week or so later, I mailed the COD to her, so she had to pay the cleaning charges to get the package. After a few refused deliveries and scathing voicemail messages directed to me, she finally paid at the next delivery attempt.
I didn't hear from her for several months. It turns out that so much time had passed between her dropping the clothes off at the cleaners and me picking them up that she didn’t wear them until they came back in season the next year. But oh, boy, did I hear from her afterward! When she called, I feigned ignorance and offered other suggestions as to why her clothes no longer fit. The line went dead, and I never heard from her again. Good riddance! My friends still laugh about it 30 years later."
8."So, back in the day when we used flip phones, you could set it to show a little message every time you turned on your phone..."
"When my geeky programmer ex wasn't looking, I set his phone to display 'STARTUP ERROR 54EDGT4' (or some alphanumeric gibberish) every time he turned it on.
He spent several weeks trying to diagnose the problem."
9."I stayed friends with a few people from high school — one of whom became a repo agent. The guy I was working with and dating later on was a shady contractor. He had a habit of never paying his bills, conning people, writing bad checks, etc."
"It was a bad scene all around, but for the last year that I worked for him, he would always tell me, 'Get the truck and go park behind so and so's' or 'Take the van out to so and so's farm and put it behind the barn.'
George — my high school friend turned repo man — would then call and ask, 'Where's the truck this time?' and I'd tell him so my ex's vehicles kept getting repoed. He never figured out how the repo man knew where to find them even though it happened three times."
10."Several years ago, I got dumped about two months before Christmas..."
"As my ex and I were talking through our breakup, I was scrambling for something to say, so I told her, 'I guess I’m going to return the Christmas presents I already bought you then.'
I didn’t mean anything by the comment; I was just thinking out loud.
But then she asked me what I got her — and I said, 'No, they’re being returned, and we’re no longer together, so I’m not going to tell you.'
Anyway, I heard later from mutual friends that wondering what her gifts could have been drove her nuts for a long time.
Very small, very petty, and very unintentional revenge. But it warmed my heart to hear it made her mad."
11."My ex would use my paid football channel to watch her favorite team. So, I waited until her favorite team competed in a derby against their biggest rivals before kicking her out..."
"Despite no longer living together, she kept using my channel subscription. So, I clicked the 'log out of all accounts' button a moment before her team scored.
She had an explosive temper, so I laughed out loud while picturing her outburst at that moment."
12."My ex had broken my naive little 19-year-old heart and, a few weeks later, dared to show up with the girl he ghosted me for at the pizza place where I worked. I asked to switch from waiting tables to making subs, so I didn’t have to wait on them."
"He ordered his favorite — a hot Italian sausage sub. When I made it, I dumped a ton of hot red pepper seeds on top of it, loaded it with jalapeños, and soaked the entire thing in hot pepper juice.
While he ate, the server in the dining room gave me hilarious updates. When my ex went to pay at the register, he complained about me to the owner, who informed him that he had more customers than he could handle (which was true) and that good employees were hard to find. I was so happy."
13."My ex cheated on me and made no effort to hide it — he even went so far as to send me pictures of his affair partner wearing lingerie and cooking in the kitchen after I kicked him out for being a cheater. I guess he wanted me to feel bad?"
"Cut to a boring day at work; my BFF and I had nothing to do, so we decided to sign him up for every single email newsletter we could find — the CDC, religious organizations, used car lots, anything to clog his inbox up and make it annoying for him to find his important emails.
He’s not tech-savvy, so I knew it would be a challenge for him to unsubscribe from them all. What’s even better is that he was in the midst of looking for a new job, so he had to keep his 'spammed' email address until he heard back."
14."It was 1998, and I had been dating a rather 'quirky' guy who liked documenting everyone's address in a little day planner. One day — after we had been together for six months — he told me he would be busy for the next two weeks and that I couldn't stop by because he had family coming over."
"So I thought, 'Oh ok, no big deal.' I wouldn't have wished some of my family members on him either. Four days later, I ran into one of his friends, who immediately blurted out that my then-boyfriend was with his fiancé. She had been on an archaeology dig the entire time we were dating. At the end of the two weeks he was 'spending with family,' she would be headed back to her dig site. I broke up with him after confirming I was the 'other woman.'
A year later, my best friend and I received invitations to his wedding, along with four other couples who were originally my friends and had gotten to know him through me. His fiancé and her mother had photocopied his address book and invited EVERYONE he knew. In the invitation was a notice that they were registered at Service Merchandise."
"Service Merchandise went out of business in 2002, but the store's premise was that you'd look at the merchandise on their showroom floor and bring a ticket to the counter, pay for your item, and they would get it from the large stock room. So, my BFF and I took a little trip to the store with their wedding invitations and got a printout of their gift registry."
"She and I then walked through the useless and weird items, made notes, and got a salesperson to mark those as purchased by 'Aunt Agnes' or 'Grandma Doris,' etc. We left SO many items and a bathroom scale for the newly married couple to pick up.
It's been 25 years, and I feel sorry for the bride if she only got crappy gifts because of my friend and I."
15."My ex was obsessed with designer t-shirts and spent a fortune on them. Of course, being his 'maid,' it was my job to wash them, and they had to be done with special detergents, on delicate washes, etc. I HATED those shirts..."
"So while I was packing my stuff to leave (after discovering he cheated), I took a seam-ripper from my sewing kit and picked the seams on those shirts — one or two snipped stitches every four inches or so, not visible at all.
After a few washes, the seams would unravel, and his precious shirts would fall to pieces.
I found out six months later that he had to throw them all out."
16."My 'situationship' with a childhood friend ended because he suddenly decided I deserved better. As I later found out, it was actually because he was sleeping with other people."
"After two weeks of him ghosting me any time I would ask to come over and pick up my things from his house, he called and invited me over to watch a college football game and have one last hang out before things officially ended. I decided to go, and we ate dinner. I had been drinking that evening and fell asleep on his couch, so he invited me to stay the night.
Once he fell asleep, I snuck onto his phone — which he didn't realize I knew the password to — and deleted all the dating app profiles he had, including several that he had paid subscriptions to. I packed up all my things in the morning and left as if nothing happened. I do wonder if he'll ever figure out if it was me or if he'll just think he was hacked."
17."Not my story, but a woman who caught her husband having an affair. When she confronted him, he owned up to it, and a few days later, his affair partner moved into their house. The wife was pissed and heartbroken, for good reason. But she had to do something to stick it to him."
"So, she came up with an elaborate idea. She went to the grocery store and purchased a fish. When she came home, she slipped it into the gigantic curtain rods in the living room and went on her merry way.
A few weeks passed, and the now ex-husband and his affair partner couldn't figure out where the disgusting smell in their home was coming from. They cleaned everything in the house over and over to no avail. Then they decided to paint all the interior walls because the smell 'seemed to come from the walls.'"
"The stench was so bad they decided to sell the house. During the open house, the ex-wife came by and could still smell the horrid fish she left — despite all the efforts to eliminate the smell. Needless to say, the house stayed on the market for a while since the putrid scent was so overwhelming..."
"The ex-husband had no choice but to lower the asking price a significant amount so someone would hopefully buy the house."
Soon after the price reduction, the house was quickly purchased. By whom, you ask? THE EX WIFE! Her first order of business was to discard the damn curtain rod — and that's how she got the ultimate revenge!"
Did any of these revenge stories shock you? Have you ever exacted petty revenge on an ex? Let us know in the comments! (Or if you would prefer to stay anonymous, you can answer using this Google Form).
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
