Festering grudges

Do I bear grudges or don't I? It depends how you define it. The dictionary says it's a feeling of persistent ill-will towards someone. But to my mind that's just an everyday feeling and nothing unusual. Surely we all feel ill-will towards certain people because they're rude or obstructive or bad-tempered or needy? So what?

I think ill-will only becomes a grudge when it turns into obsessive, irrational, all-consuming hatred, or when there's also a desire to get revenge on the person, to give them a taste of their own medicine. Then you're no longer talking about an everyday feeling but something abnormal and unhealthy.

I've often felt persistent ill-will towards somebody, but it never develops into something obsessive or magnified. Dislike is enough for me, I don't need to build it up into something huge and grotesque. For one thing, I don't the energy for such intensity. It's too exhausting.

I guess grudges are usually driven by anger, and I'm not an angry person. If someone's pissing me off, I don't get enraged, I just look for a way of dealing with their obnoxious behaviour. Or I keep away from them.

Some grudges result from a failure to get something you dearly wanted, and the conclusion that you were unfairly treated. You fail to get that prestigious job you were after, and you're convinced the interview panel was biased against you. Thus a grudge is born and lasts for decades, based solely on an unproven belief. I've never had that sort of grudge either.

I've known men with a severe grudge against a woman who wouldn't go out with them, or abruptly ended a relationship. They simply can't get over the rejection, and they're nursing a continual grudge that they didn't get what they wanted and feel slighted and scorned.

I don't need grudges. Ill-will suits me nicely.

Thanks to Chuck and Ramana for the subject.

The cold shoulder

I'm not good at dealing with rejection. Even quite trivial rejection. Even totally justified rejection. Even perhaps unintended rejection. I can't just shrug it off as one of those things. It always hurts. It always bugs me. It always saps my confidence a little.

I know it's supposed to be a sign of maturity, of being grown up, to be less bothered by rejection and not see it as a huge slap in the face, but I do. And I bet plenty of other people do, though they don't like to talk about it.

A big rejection really hurts. If I've known someone for a while and we've been on friendly terms and shared confidences and so forth, it's hard to take it on the chin when abruptly they push you away and don't want to be friends any more.

Even when I tell myself it's their choice who they want as friends and who they don't, and it's their right to edge me away if I'm becoming a turn-off, it still cuts me to the quick.

I dwell on it incessantly. Why did they suddenly push me away? What did I do wrong? What did I say? Why overnight the big frost? Have I turned into some sort of obnoxious weirdo without realising? It takes me quite a while to stop obsessing and finally be more sanguine about it.

But even minor rejections can often sting. Just someone ignoring me, or being curt with me, or looking at me distastefully, makes me feel a bit worthless and belittled. Again, I wonder what I did to cause it. Why the visible snub?

Do other people feel as hurt when I reject them - or appear to reject them? Do they obsess about it in the same way? I hope not, but doubtless some do. This over-sensitivity is a drag, but that's how some of us are made. Like a small child who's lost her teddy bear. Pathetic really.

A bit cut up

Spurned lovers consumed with anger and jealousy often retaliate in amazingly extreme ways. It's not enough to vent their feelings, they sometimes resort to physical destruction on a grand scale.

Fifty nine year old Philip Gamble was so enraged at his wife of 38 years leaving him for another man that he broke into her flat and cut up all her clothes and furnishings, causing around £5,000 worth of damage.

He cut out the crotches of her bikinis, sliced the back of all her tops, slashed her trousers and cut the zips out of her boots. He sliced curtains and poured bleach on them, damaged a mattress and duvet, and turned off the fridge-freezer.

Then just for good measure he replaced all the slashed clothes neatly in wardrobes and cupboards as if nothing had happened. It was only when Jean Gamble took some clothes out of a wardrobe that she noticed the damage.

In court on Monday he was given a three months' suspended sentence for what the judge described as "silliness".

I think if I were Jean Gamble I would have seen it as a lot more than silliness. Deeply distressing and misogynistic violence, more like. It must have simply confirmed her decision to leave him.

So what would I do, I wonder, if Jenny walked out on me after 33 years to shack up with Mr Much-More-Appealing? Would I just wallow in private agony or do something more dramatic? Would I respect her decision and wish her well or go on a wild rampage and destroy her most precious possessions?

I like to think I would take the news in a civilised way - lick my wounds, drown my sorrows in chocolates and wine and start looking for someone else. But who knows how unhinged I might get over the wreck of such a long relationship? Who knows what crazy emotions might take over? I'm not sure I could guarantee decency and understanding.

Hell hath no fury like a lover scorned.