TL;DR: A guy I was seeing gave me herpes, treated me like shit for months, and then threatened to have me kicked out of the bar where he performed because he didn’t want me around. So I decided to become a regular, befriend practically everyone there, and completely ignore his existence. I later found out that my presence had been causing problems for him and his girlfriend the entire time. Meanwhile, I accidentally made some of the best friendships I’ve had in years.

This happened between 2024 and 2025, when I was 20/21F. It’s a bit of a long story, but I think the context is necessary to understand both the pettiness and why I felt so justified in it. In spring 2024, I met a guy on Tinder. Let’s call him Tim (then 22/23M). We hit it off pretty quickly, hooked up, and started seeing each other casually. As it turned out, we both attended (my college) and studied (my major), although he was two years ahead of me. I thought he was cool, handsome, interesting, and generally someone I wanted to get to know better. I was also pretty impressed by his work, especially since he was further along in our program. Unfortunately, about a month after we first slept together, I developed an excruciating genital herpes outbreak. Fever, horrible pain, couldn’t sit or walk comfortably, the whole nine yards. I went to urgent care, got diagnosed with HSV-1, and was prescribed what felt like half the pharmacy.

Naturally, I called Tim. He was the only person I’d slept with during the relevant period, so I was pretty confident about where it came from. His initial response was to suggest that maybe I’d given it to him. Eventually, he told me he’d also tested positive and contributed a whopping $40 (I had spent $100) toward my medical expenses, but only after his supposed diagnosis. At the time, I genuinely believed he hadn’t known he had herpes beforehand. This becomes relevant later.

The diagnosis absolutely wrecked my self-esteem. I knew logically that herpes wasn’t the end of the world, but emotionally I was having a terrible time. And because Tim supposedly had it too, I developed this unfortunate attachment to him as someone who understood what I was going through. Thus began roughly nine months of the most emotionally exhausting situationship imaginable.

Tim was incredibly hot and cold. He’d pull away, I’d establish some boundary or end things, and then he’d reappear wanting to hook up. At one point I asked for exclusivity, he declined, and I ended things. A week later, he wanted to sleep together again. I said no. Then my grandfather died, and shortly afterward Tim suddenly proposed exclusivity. The timing was so bizarre that I rejected him. However, a few days later, while I was grieving, I ended up at a bar where he regularly played music with his band. We talked, he walked me home, and spent the night comforting me without sex. It was probably the most genuinely compassionate he’d ever been toward me, and unfortunately it convinced me to give things another chance.

We tried exclusivity, I eventually admitted I had feelings for him, and he promptly decided he didn’t want exclusivity anymore. Lovely. Later, he told me he was still in love with his ex and compared the two of us, describing her as stuck-up and me as down-to-earth. Which was an interesting way to tell me I apparently tolerated more bullshit. By the end of the year, my mental health was in the gutter. I was depressed, insecure, and exhausted, and he was well aware of that.

Over winter break, Tim became increasingly distant. When we returned in January, I tried arranging a conversation with him, but he kept blowing me off. I asked whether he was interested in someone else or dealing with family problems. He told me it was family stuff. That Friday, I went to the bar where he performed (let’s call it the Dive) and, to my surprise, saw him there with another woman. We made eye contact. He knew I’d seen him. I felt physically sick.

Now, Tim and I had an established pattern of talking after his Sunday performances whenever something needed to be discussed. So that Sunday, I went to the Dive intending to have one final conversation. I wasn’t trying to get him back. I just wanted to tell him that he could’ve been honest with me instead of lying and avoiding me.

I was watching the band and chatting with a girl standing beside me when Tim approached me during a break, absolutely furious. He told me I wasn’t going to get a conversation out of him “that way” and threatened to have me kicked out of the bar. I was genuinely dumbfounded. I’d been coming there for months, knew people there, and wasn’t doing anything remotely disruptive. Later that evening, I saw him being affectionate with the woman from Friday. I went home, sent him a lengthy message about how he’d treated me, and blocked him.

About three weeks later, he contacted me through Instagram to apologize. We met up, and he explained that he’d been angry because he thought I was trying to talk to him while he was performing. Mind you, I was speaking to the girl beside me, at a volume he couldn’t even hear from the stage. Apparently, he saw my lips moving while I was looking toward the band and assumed I was addressing him. Why on earth would I try to have a conversation with someone actively performing music? I found the assumption rather self-centered, but whatever. The apology was thoroughly unsatisfying. He suggested we could be friends, and when I told him he’d actually have to demonstrate that he was capable of being one, he responded, “I have nothing to prove.” We exchanged some more unpleasant messages afterward, and I eventually blocked him for good.

But the confrontation really stuck with me. Not because I wanted him back, but because of the sheer audacity. This man had spent months treating me poorly, had apparently moved on to a happy new relationship, had graduation approaching, and was going to leave town with his life perfectly intact. Meanwhile, I was dealing with the consequences of our relationship, including a lifelong diagnosis and some genuinely awful mental health. And on top of everything, he apparently expected me to quietly disappear from a bar I already frequented because my presence made him uncomfortable.

I kept thinking, Why am I the only one who has to suffer? Why does he get to do all of this and then expect me to just go away?

So, after about three weeks of stewing, I came up with a plan. A petty one. I was going to become a regular at his favorite bar. An extremely well-liked regular. And I was going to ignore him completely.

Now, I knew this wasn’t going to be easy initially. Seeing him with his new girlfriend had made me physically nauseated, and I didn’t want to spend my evenings feeling like that. So I decided I needed to develop an iron gut. I was going to get comfortable seeing him, whether he liked it or not. I also knew he was graduating in May, so this little operation had a natural expiration date. I wasn’t planning to spend the rest of my life tormenting some mediocre man.

I started going to the Dive regularly, especially on Sundays when his band played, but also on Fridays because I genuinely enjoyed the place. I made a point of befriending the bartenders, the regulars, and people I recognized from previous visits. I already knew some of them, so it wasn’t particularly difficult. I’m a social person, and I actually really liked the crowd.

As for Tim? Nothing. No eye contact, no approaching him, no attempts to interrupt his performances. I didn’t even acknowledge his existence. I occasionally got the impression he was watching me, but I deliberately avoided trying to figure out how he felt about my presence. That was important to me. I didn’t want to spend my evenings monitoring whether my revenge was working. I wanted to enjoy myself. If he happened to be uncomfortable, wonderful, but I wasn’t going to make my happiness contingent on his reaction. A particularly funny incident occurred a couple of months into this when I was sitting on the patio and struck up a conversation with a girl who was smoking alone. We got along quite well, and eventually her friend joined us. When she asked what I studied specify that you told her I told her my major which prompted her to ask whether you knew Tim.

Turns out I had accidentally befriended his girlfriend.

I had never gotten a particularly good look at her face, so I genuinely had no idea. And now here I was, chatting with the one person Tim would probably least want me talking to. She was actually very sweet. She asked about my history with him, and after explicitly saying she was open to hearing my perspective, I told her about some of his behavior. I wasn’t trying to convince her to leave him. I told her that if he treated her well, I was genuinely happy for her, but that she shouldn’t tolerate the same treatment I’d experienced if things deteriorated. Then I realized the band was probably about to take a break. Fantastic. If Tim came outside and saw me talking to his girlfriend, he was absolutely going to think I’d orchestrated the entire interaction. And, naturally, approximately two minutes later, he appeared.

What am I supposed to do? Cower and run away??? Then that makes me look ten times more guilty. So I planted my ass there and tried to avoid interacting with him directly. Keep in mind he initiated every verbal interaction.

We exchanged an awkward hello and a few words about school. He was very affectionate with his girlfriend, which was fine by me, that stayed in my peripheral. At one point, someone suggested he give me a cigarette, and I said, “No, he wouldn’t.” He confirmed that he wouldn’t. Then, completely unprompted, he interrupted another conversation to ask whether my nails were real. They were. I have no idea why he was suddenly interested in my manicure, but that was the last time we ever spoke face-to-face.

Anyway, as the months went on, something rather lovely happened. I genuinely started enjoying myself. I became friends with the bartenders, the older regulars, people in the local music scene, and even an older couple Tim had originally introduced me to. Sometimes I’d go out and barely spend anything because people kept buying me drinks. I started running into people who knew Tim independently, and some had their own rather unflattering opinions of him. I didn’t need to persuade anyone to dislike him. I just listened.

And eventually, I stopped caring whether he was there. Initially, I’d had to steel myself just to walk into the bar. A couple of months later, I was showing up because I wanted to see my friends. Tim was becoming increasingly irrelevant to the experience.

There was even an incident at school where we were about to take the same elevator, and he apparently decided he’d rather take the stairs. Which I found hilarious. Enjoy your cardio, I guess.

May came, Tim graduated, and he left town. And I kept going to the Dive because, by that point, it had become one of my favorite places. I’d developed a genuine community there, and I wasn’t about to abandon it simply because the original motivation for going had disappeared. I assumed that was the end of the story.

But a few months later, I found out my revenge had apparently worked. That fall, I ran into someone from Tim’s old band. We started catching up, and eventually he asked whether I still spoke to Tim. Absolutely not. Then he casually mentioned that my presence at the bar had apparently been a source of considerable tension. According to him, it had affected the band’s atmosphere and even contributed to arguments between Tim and his girlfriend.

I was genuinely surprised. Not because I’d never suspected my presence bothered him. That was, after all, the original idea. But because I’d never actually tried to find out. I hadn’t been asking about him, checking on his relationship, or trying to provoke reactions. I’d just been hanging out with my friends. I did apologize to the bandmate for any discomfort the situation had caused the other musicians, because that genuinely hadn’t been my intention. But internally? I was rather delighted.

And then, because apparently this story needed one final layer of bullshit, I learned something else that fall.

Remember the herpes diagnosis? And how I’d believed Tim didn’t know he had it before we met?

Well, I’d previously posted about him on an anonymous dating-review app. When I checked it again, two women had commented. One said she’d hooked up with him while we were still involved and that he hadn’t disclosed having herpes. Another woman, who’d known him before I did, reported contracting oral herpes after being involved with him. According to her, Tim had known about his HSV status since December 2023, months before he met me.

I can’t independently verify his medical history, but hearing these accounts was infuriating. I’d spent more than a year giving him the benefit of the doubt, believing he hadn’t known. Meanwhile, when I was first diagnosed, he’d had the audacity to suggest that perhaps I’d given it to him.

I was furious all over again, but I didn’t contact him. I had nothing left to say. And honestly, I think that says quite a lot about how far I’d come.

Look, I know some people will read this and say I was obsessed or giving him too much power. And I won’t pretend I wasn’t emotionally invested at the beginning. I was angry, hurt, and frankly in a pretty terrible place mentally. I wanted him to experience some discomfort because I thought it was profoundly unfair that I was left dealing with everything while he got to move on without any apparent consequences.

But I wasn’t trying to destroy his life. I didn’t interfere with his performances, confront him, or attempt to sabotage his relationship. I simply refused to disappear from a place where I had every right to be.

And yes, I knew my presence might bother him. That was the petty part.

The funny thing is that somewhere along the way, the revenge stopped mattering. I had initially gone there to make him uncomfortable, but I ended up making myself comfortable instead. I made friends, regained some confidence, and stopped feeling physically sick at the thought of seeing him. By the time I learned that he’d apparently been bothered by my presence, I didn’t need that information to feel satisfied.

Would I do something like this now? Probably not. I’m in a much better place mentally, and I don’t think I’d feel the need to. But at the time, I was in the trenches, and I needed to do something with all that anger that wouldn’t drag me into an even darker place.

I wanted him to understand that he couldn’t treat me however he pleased and then expect me to quietly remove myself from his world for his convenience.

So I stayed. I made friends. I had a great time. And eventually, he left.

I suppose the best revenge really is living well. I just happened to do it somewhere he could see me.

I worked for a smaller business in 2020, I was an assistant the the office manager and accounts payable manager. Both were clearly 1. old 2. wanting to retire and 3. assholes.

I knew I would not be there forever because I hated interacting so closely with them both. My OM's plan was to train someone younger to eventually either replace her or help with the transition of someone new by having someone there who knew how to do what she did.

She was always ornery and always looking for problems, I got used to it. Then one day she calls me into her office and shows me this report I gave her, and she just goes off about how the numbers don't make sense and etc. As I am listening and also looking at the report I realize she's not reading it correctly. She finishes her spiel and I point to the report and explain she didn't see this part and her reply was basically "Ok, but if you HAD made that mistake it's like what even is the point of you working here.". I was so stunned. I hadn't done anything wrong but I am still useless?

I went into my office and cried, packed everything up and went home with the intention of no-showing but then decided I would be professional and give my 2 weeks. To my surprise the AP woman said she'd love to give me a reference!

I applied to jobs in a new city and reached out to the AP woman and she replied it was actually against their policy to give references. I knew it was because my OM told her not to. They didn't have HR let alone any policy on that.

Anyways, I had a retirement account with them. OM told me to roll it over or withdraw. I said I would. I never have. A year later she reached out again, please withdraw or roll over. I said I would. This has happened every year since I quit. I get a letter in the mail letting me know about their investments, that all recipients of their 401ks get, she reaches out to me asking me to please do it and I just never do.

Thinking about how overwhelmed she often was, and how many bills and letters they send out, I feel pretty good when I imagine my name coming across her desk every year for no reason other than making a little more work for her. lol