I read a particular story on Twitter the other day and I highly doubt it was true, but it kind of made me realise just how far people will go in a relationship.
A woman and a man were together, they were in love and happy, and she was particularly excited because she received ‘girlfriend allowance’.
Before I go any further, I just want to explain what girlfriend allowance is. This is a payment you receive, just because you’re dating someone. You can use it to buy whatever you want – new nails, a new hairdo, that sexy pair of shoes you saw at Aldo’s the other day, etc. According to the internet, women are supposed to receive this allowance because they do so much to make their boyfriends happy, without much in return.
OK, now on with the story: This woman would wait anxiously for her boyfriend’s payday and ball out. So one fine day, she was waiting for her boyfriend to give her the girlfriend allowance, but he said he had to settle a couple of things at his job after hours. At some point, he stopped answering the phone. This woman panicked so much that she called his friends and people he knew to make sure that he was OK. Her thoughts were that he was in a car accident, or the other excuses that people normally give. No one knew where he was.
Eventually, she called his boss and he notified the woman that her boyfriend settled everything at work. So where was he? She wondered, narrowing the issue down to either a car accident or that he was cheating on her.
To confirm her doubts, she drove over to his house and found suspicious materials, suggesting that another woman had been sleeping there… Even in the washing machine, there was a woman’s jersey which clearly wasn’t hers. At this point, our protagonist freaked out and started burning clothes in homeboy’s home. He was calling her too, but she ignored all the 50 calls. She said she got so angry that the only things left standing were the microwave and the fridge. In the end, the truth came out, there was a genuine explanation for the evidence she thought she found and he hadn’t been cheating on her at all.
Here’s my issue with this entire thing: People are making it seem like anger is something funny. That destroying someone’s house is normal behaviour that you should expect in a relationship. But it’s not. Sure, everyone wants to find some kind of release when you’re angry at someone – but destroying someone’s possessions is not it, honestly.
There’s a word in German known as ‘Schadenfreude’ which translates as harm-joy and in Arabic, it would be called ‘shatamaalah’. It refers to the phenomena when people find pleasure in someone else’s pain. It’s like watching someone slave away at their jobs to buy their belongings, just for you to destroy it and helplessly laugh as they suffer to replace everything. It only shows how incredibly narcissistic you are when you inflict pain on others – regardless of whether it is physical or emotional.
Is this not a method of torture? Is this not a method of psychologically scarring someone? Is this not a method of inflicting trauma?
It’s not cool to glamourise destruction. We have to find different and safer ways of venting that won’t create a fearful and terrifying environment. If you can do that to someone’s belongings, what would you be capable of if the person you thought wronged you was standing right in front of you?
Think about it.
I heard that couple are still together today… I hope nothing like that ever happens again.
