Crowd-Sourcing Revenge Sex On Craigslist

Well, this seems like a rather bad idea.

Craigslist’s Casual Encounters section abounds with foolhardy missives from desperate souls, but perhaps the most ill-advised communiqués are those from spurned lovers hoping to even the score. Nerve rounded up a bunch of the slightly less lame ones:

“Ok, what I’m about to do is ridiculous, and not me but here it goes…”
“I never slept around or ‘sewed my wild oats’ as a teenager or young adult. I now I wish that I had.”
“I’m looking for a woman that has also been cheated on and can totally relate.”
“I’ve decided I want to record myself with another girl, then save the video onto a flash drive and disguise it as the power point presentation she is going to give at a conference this next week…”
“I am married and pissed off!”
“(age/race/shoe size don’t matter)”
“He’s a punk and she did stuff with him that she never did with me in 30 years. (he wasn’t even born when we walked down the aisle!)”
“I’ve never been with a Latin dude and now is my chance so u guys move to the front of the line :)”
“I want revenge, I want him to hurt as bad as me.”
“i’m jewish(not religious) just saying it cus i know chicks dig jewish guys.”

*For all of the above: SIC.

Cheating hurts. As someone who was once cheated on via the magnificent Craig and his Missed Connections — and as someone who still consequently finds it difficult to transit through West 4th Street station without the text of a certain m4w scrolling through my mind, which poses its own set of problems considering I live off the A (and…pause…yes, her Facebook is still set to public*), even though this is years ago we’re talking** — I get the desire for revenge. Not even the “desire”: the raw, wrathful, snarling, rictus of anguish and formless malice that wells up in the face of cheating. And that healthy people repress. Swiftly.

Does anyone think this will help? Even clearing our sample of the obvious fakers — the guys who apparently think a creative story about “revenge sex” will unlock the walled compound of NSA pussy that their more pedestrian entreaties have failed to reach, and that creep who just wants to film himself fucking a stranger — trying to cheat on the person who cheated on you just for the sake of cheating is a cheater’s ouroboros of stupid. If the cheating is relationship-ending, then your partner will likely not care one whit; your revenge play will be hollow. And if a reconciliation is in the cards, raising the stakes is self-defeating and unnecessarily embittering. Besides: Think of the emotional currency you’re squandering! You could be riding that moral high horse for years. There’s more than one way to skin a cheat.

* Craig and Mark should really get together sometime and pool their considerable talents to come up with some awesome new way of stoking all of our Internet-enabled insecurities in one fell swoop, the Killer App For Self-Control.