Revenge Romance

Alice has some long-standing grudge with Bob, or they have just had a very acrimonious breakup. Alice then strikes up an intimate relationship with Charlie, a close friend or relative of Bob's, not because she has sincere feelings for Charlie, but to get back at Bob.

This becomes Operation: Jealousy if Alice is trying to manipulate Bob back towards loving her.

Examples of Revenge Romance include:

Anime

• Happened at least twice in Detective Conan:
  • One was the case of a young man who, on his wedding-day, poisons his bride - the daughter of the local Chief of Police - in revenge for said Chief causing the death of the young man's mother through carelessness years before. Indeed, he had started a relationship with her and proposed marriage, just to get his revenge on the man who left him an orphan. What he doesn't know is that the daughter is his childhood sweetheart.
  • In another case, the (highly unpleasant) patriarch of a wealthy Zaibatsu family is murdered on a cruise-ship, on his way home from his granddaughter's wedding. It soon turns out that the groom is secretly the son of a man who committed suicide after said patriarch ruined his business. The man even admits that he initially started the relationship in order to get closer to the man, so he could find a way to get revenge - but adamantly insists that he eventually came to genuinely love her, and that he has nothing to do with the murder. What's more, they decide to renounce the family estate and lived Happily Ever After.
• This is an important, not to say central, plot element of the Tsukigomori drama and its remake 'Cloudy Moon,' which the main characters spent a lot of Skip Beat! filming. Ren's character, the lead, is engaged to Kyouko's character's older sister (even though he actually likes the abused foster-sister) as part of a long-term plan to avenge himself on the family. Because fiancee-Meiyou's father was responsible for murdering Katsuki's whole family when he was a kid and disguising it as one of those car-over-a-cliff suicides. He has to keep her believing he loves her madly, or his whole scheme will collapse.
  • This scenario is modeled closely on a fusion of two real famous classic Japanese dramas. The second Conan example is a subversion Homage.
  • It also mirrors Ren's situation with Kyoko to an amusing degree—not the fake romance, but the need to maintain the reinvented identity and therefore to stay apart from the girl he likes. Hell, she's even similar, with the Cinderella angle.

Film

• In The Bad Sleep Well, the revenge seeker marries the daughter of a Corrupt Corporate Executive, one of the people who murdered his father, as part of his plan.
• In Wayne's World, the titular character's ex tries this with him. It fails horribly.

Literature

• In Petals on the Wind, Cathy starts up an affair with her mother's second husband to get back at her for locking her children up in an attic and then trying to kill them.

Live-Action TV

• In Arrested Development, it is stated that Lindsay married Tobias only to get back at her parents.

Theatre

• In Bayard Veiller's play Within the Law, Mary Turner was sentenced to three years in prison for a theft from Edward Gilder's Emporium she didn't commit because Gilder was determined to make an example of her. After serving her sentence, Mary marries Gilder's son Dick, and not out of love:

"I served every minute of my time: three full, whole years. Do you wonder I want to get even--that someone has got to pay? Four years ago you took away my name and gave me a number. Now I've given up that number and I've got your name."