I'm not married yet, but I would be lying if I said the thought of having monster-in-laws isn't a factor playing into my relationship status. It's complicated when the one you love has a terrible mother, father, sibling or even cousin you have to deal with. In most cases, people grin and bear it. Good for them, but I'm not here to be walked over and neither are these fed up spouses! Here are the best petty revenge stories on the in-laws. Enjoy.
Content has been edited for clarity.
She Was Russian… To The Bathroom
“My mother in law lives in a small Russian village and is the opposite of the word ‘worldly.’ She has never been exposed to anything outside of her village aside from what her TV tells her.
She is hateful, narcissistic, pessimistic, judgmental, ignorant and devoid of all that is good in the world. Every interaction with her makes me hate living. Example: I brought my newborn son to visit her. She had been laying the guilt on heavy that she hadn’t met her new grandson. We rode in a bus for 4 hours in the heat and got in at night. My child was very upset for obvious reasons. When he was inconsolably crying, she yelled at both of us, ‘I WISH I HAD NEVER INVITED YOU.’
During my stay there, I found bacon for sale. Actual thin sliced bacon. I was going to cook it for her to introduce her to America’s favorite food. She criticized me for how I was going to prepare it and said I don’t know how to cook. And she thought you’re supposed to eat it raw. I tried arguing with her. But I couldn’t think of how to explain in Russian that it’s not safe and it’s meant to be cooked. Then I realized she wouldn’t listen anyway. So I watched her eat a whole pack of bacon raw. I listened all night to the consequences in the bathroom.
The next morning she said she was right, the raw bacon was delicious.”
At Least She Got Out Early
“I had just turned 18 when I ran off and married my high school sweetheart. It was really against everyone’s wishes but our own- and rightfully so. It was truly a horrible decision, but we were young and in love. It was much to his mother’s dismay, as well, that it happened. She was a very young mother and he was her only son. She must have felt like I was taking him away from her. I would, time and time again, receive emails from her describing how great of a wife she was to his father, and how I could never live up to that. She would say insensitive things to me, and even subtly imply that I was not good enough for her son. Needless to say, I never really had a rapport with her at all.
And yes, our marriage went downhill, and we split. The divorce was painful and rocky for both of us. It was a mutual decision because the stress of rushing into adulthood was too much on our relationship. I didn’t hear from his mother much anymore, and started to get over him while we were going through our divorce. This is when I found out from a mutual friend that while we were married, my ex husband had an affair- with a child on the way!
This really made things much harder to cope with, as the divorce was nearly over, and I was almost done with the whole ‘mourning’ process of it all.
To top it all off, my ex husband’s mother found out where I worked, and would show up about once a week, pretending that she was there for ‘business’ reasons, when she would just sneer at me while otherwise pretending not to know me.
Turns out, she knew nothing of the little ray of sunshine my ex husband had created with his bang buddy, which set up a lovely retort when she finally chose to speak to me. She finally approached me, and stated, as if to clarify, ‘So I heard it was my son who decided to divorce you.’
And although my stomach twisted into a million knots, and I felt like I could toss a whole slew of angry word vomit her way, I simply stated, ‘I heard it was your son who decided to make you a grandmother.’ Her expression- and the silence- oh, it was golden.”
There Was No Way To Play This Off
“My in-laws are staying with us for the holidays. My mother-in-law is the most obnoxious, whiney, loud adult I have ever met. She’s like a toddler, but 6’1”. It’s awful.
Little backstory – our bathroom has issues. Like, $10,000 we don’t have worth of issues. There is a leak somewhere, and we get a strong smell of sewage every so often when conditions are just right. We’ve been living with this for awhile, and we know the distinctive smell. It will linger as long as it wants – the fan doesn’t seem to touch it.
Two nights ago, father-in-law finished up in the bathroom and mother-in-law was up next. She smelled ‘the smell’ and instantly lays into her husband with ‘OH GAAAAAAHD! What did you eat?!’
He replies, ‘Nothing, I was just brushing my teeth!’ She doesn’t believe him. My husband and I jump in and tell them that it does that sometimes, it’s a known issue, sorry but we can’t afford to fix it right now, etc. and she is having NONE. OF. IT. She insists on making fun of her husband for stinking and getting mad at us for being on his ‘side’ and my husband finally has to yell at her to let it go. Which she grudgingly does.
Fast forward to last night. We’d all had a crazy busy day, and it was about an hour before everyone’s usual bedtime. Mother-in-law heads for the bathroom as soon as we get home, and spends about 20 minutes in there. She comes out and my husband asks if she’s going to bed, or if everyone wants to stay up and watch something. She says she wants to go to bed and still needs to get ready, but instead she starts playing with the cat. I go in there because I want to get ready for bed, and it REEKS. Not the distinctive bathroom smell I’m used to – no. It smells like whatever the heck she ate and spent 20 minutes in there creating. I immediately ducked back out of the bathroom, but left the loud fan on and the door wide open, then suddenly decided to do some laundry. My husband asked me if I was using the bathroom and I gave a loud, enthusiastic, ‘NOPE! Just letting it air out!’
I know she knows it was her stench. I hope she feels as bad as she made her husband feel the previous night!”
What Goes Around Comes Around
“My mother in law did absolutely nothing to help with our wedding. They did nothing because I wanted to plan it and execute it my way and not do exactly what they wanted. Things were extremely difficult the entire time leading up to and during our wedding because of my mother in law. I asked both sets of our family and any friends if they could help clean up after our wedding only because we were in a hall and needed to be out by a certain time and my husband and I needed to leave to catch our honeymoon flight, otherwise we would clean ourselves. Everyone was super supportive and got it done. My in laws sat there and did absolutely nothing. My best friend recorded them sitting while everyone cleaned up around them. That was almost 5 years ago. Today my husband’s side of the family gathered to celebrate my MIL’s 60th birthday and I sat quietly while all the guests left and things wound down. She came and asked me, ‘Oh Sweetie, can you get up and help the family clean? Everyone is doing their part.’
I politely looked at her and my husband and said, ‘I can’t because I don’t want to.’ They all looked at me in shock. Only my husband knows why I refused to help, but it doesn’t matter to me because I got my revenge.”
Enjoy The Unwelcome Visit
“Last year, my wife and I had our first child. It was by far the happiest day of my life. When my son was born, I took a week off of work to help out at home, and spend time with the new baby, of course. My wife and I had asked both sides of our families that we would like to have no visitors for at least the first couple of weeks, and especially the first week since I had taken time off of work specifically to spend time with my child.
Low and behold, guess who shows up… My mother-in-law and sister-and-law, along my SIL’s less than well behaved-child. They had taken a flight out the day after my son was born and shown up at our doorstep. They wanted to come ‘help.’
They were no help at all. Now, I had to deal with the new baby, helping my wife, trying to get some quality time in with my son, and the guests. Provide entertainment for sister-in-law’s kid who makes a mess everywhere, and the sister-in-law does nothing but park her butt on the couch all day. Mother-in-law helped out a little more, but not much. It was twice as much work, and even more stress than you could imagine.
What really ticked me off is that we asked them to give us some space for a while and they deliberately came despite our request.
So now the revenge…It’s been a few months, and sister-in-law had her new baby yesterday. The sister-in-law requested no visitors for the first month as she wants to bond with her new baby. I booked a flight for my wife to go over and visit. She leaves tomorrow morning.
Enjoy the visit.”
What A Doll!
“My mother in law has always hated me, even before she met me. I did nothing to this woman other than love her son. If I listed all the things she said about me behind my back and the things she put my husband and I through over the years, you would be reading this all day. Just trust me when I say she’s a hypocritical narcissist with a complete and utter lack of empathy, and I am not the only one she treats like this, so it’s not me that has the problem.
Long story short, after putting up with her for our first two years of marriage, she and I finally had a falling out because I stood up to her in regards to our infant daughter’s safety. My husband insisted on it. I wrote her a harsh but civil email telling her how I felt. She never responded to me. She only wrote back to my husband in a fit of rage and refused to ever talk to me or see me again. She refused to even be in the same room as me to see her granddaughter. After many attempts at reconciliation, we have now cut her off for good. My husband is no contact with her.
So anyway, in the two year period we ‘got along,’ she gave me a beautiful porcelain doll as a wedding present. Trust me, it wasn’t because she cared, it was a bribe to get me to bend to her will, and if I didn’t she could hold it against me that she showered me with gifts and this is the thanks she gets.
After she disowned me, I couldn’t stand to look at the doll, so I put it in storage. When it became apparent this woman would no longer be part of our lives ever again, I decided I would sell the dang thing. I couldn’t find how much it was worth, and similar dolls were pretty cheap, so it really wasn’t worth the effort. I figured I’d just have fun smashing it, but then I got a better idea.
I’m not much of an artist, but I am creative, and enjoy doing art projects from time to time. My husband and I love dark, morbid things, so I decided to make some alterations to the doll. I darkened the makeup with some acrylic paint, and added two little red dots on her neck along with some blood dripping out of the corner of mer mouth. She was already pale as ever and very elegant, so she made a perfect vampire.
I now love the doll knowing how upset it would make my MIL to see what I have done to her generous gift. I also now have a new hobby of buying dolls at antique stores and making them creepy. Thanks MIL!”
Even Cousins-In-Law Are The Worst
“This happened over Labor Day weekend this year. My in-laws are very selfish. They treat each other terribly yet still get together for every holiday. Because I have no real say in telling my wife her family can’t come and visit us, my wife’s sister and her kids came down to stay with us over the Labor Day weekend. That weekend was a record temp for our area with temps reaching over 100 degrees. The plan was to let all the kids stay in our travel trailer, parked in our driveway, while the rest of us stayed in the house. I have three daughters and the middle one is the typical introvert that just wants to be part of the group. My two nieces that accompanied my sister in law are basically butt heads that tell their mom what to do and are never disciplined. Well, as kids typically act, tribes were determined and kids were singled out. My sister-in-law’s kids decided they would take control of my camper and leave my middle kid out. Of course, this ticked me off and also broke my heart. My daughter is so kind hearted and simply wanted to hang out with her cousins. Instead, they told her she should just sleep inside the house and they were going to take all the beds in the trailer (it sleeps 9). Just before bed, my sister-in-law decided to head to Walmart to get some snacks and conveniently left without my daughter, saying there just wasn’t enough room for her (there was…). This was the last straw. My camper is really nice and has air conditioning, tv, radio, kitchen, everything. I snuck into the camper when everyone wasn’t looking and yanked out the fuse for the air conditioner. I replaced it with a bad fuse and went back into the house. I went on acting like everything was good and told my daughter that her cousins weren’t very nice and she could sleep in our room with us. I told her when they left, I would get her ice cream to make up for them being mean. Then, I waited. The cousins went into the camper and went to bed. Within an hour, they came inside and said it was really hot and the air conditioner wasn’t working. I went outside and looked around like I could fix it and turned to them and told them it was busted and I needed to turn the camper in for repair. Told them they should pack up and sleep on the living room floor. They all had to cram on the floor and were mad that they had to sleep in the house instead of the camper away from everyone else.
I let my kids sleep in it the next day when everyone left. I took two days before I fessed up to the wife what I had done. She laughed and said they deserved it.”
Family Sure Does Stick Together
So my sister in law is getting a divorce. My brother in law is a huge d-bag. He is super selfish, he let’s his kids starve while he eats out, he wears designer labels while they wear clothes from a discount store or stuff we got them from garage sales. This was before they were even separated. He even went so far as to get his eyebrows waxed instead of taking care of his 14 year old daughters first, I took her the next day, he told my S.I.L. that is what his child support money was for and he would never pay extra. This is really just the tip of the iceberg with this jerk, he is a class 9 butthead. I would love to pound his face into pudding, but I don’t want my S.I.L to suffer any repercussions, tonight I found my petty revenge. My S.I.L. is using his SUV this week and when I got in I saw my chance. His sterling silver smoke case was in there, with 3 expensive smokes ( of course, he buys $20 smokes while his children eat ramen, why should he suffer). I went straight into the bathroom and rubbed one off into a tissue. Then went outside and basted his stoogies in billions of my unborn children… Hope you enjoy that nice full bodied smoke there, D-bag!!
Revenge Five Years In The Making
“Let me preface this by saying that I hate fishing and I think it’s boring, and I would never dream taking my family into poverty because of an insistence on spending 50 grand on a fishing boat and tens of thousands of dollars on fishing poles and tackle. Meanwhile the children need braces and aren’t getting any because the money was spent on more fishing. That’s basically the story of my ex brother-in-law, a selfish guy with a dream to be a premier bass-master at the cost of his entire family and eventual divorce.
So, I entered a competition, which I know he takes very seriously every year. I have my buddy with his scuba gear go underwater at a remote part of the lake with 3 extra oxygen tanks, I row out to that spot in a shoddy rowboat, my diver has a water filled bag with containing my giant growth hormone bass that I cultivated at home for the last 5 years. I cast out over his head and one at a time, he manually hooks up my mutant fish, which I reel in, while my buddy films my good fortune from above in the boat. I win the fishing competition using a Snoopy Charlie Brown pole and a cheap rowboat to spite my ex brother in law who can’t spend money on child support but has dropped almost $100 grand in fishing gear.
This was a con five years in the making. My uncle raises fish for fish markets, he’s got an elaborate green house that keeps things a certain temperature and sells live fish to Japanese markets. I borrowed synthetic growth hormone from him and had my brother bring home all his biggest bass for the last five years to our giant tank. 10 years ago, I was into fish tanks and had a shark, it was a dumb idea but I still had all the gear. I began using this tank to hold and store my brother’s bass catches from 2013 onward. These bass were fed a VERY healthy diet of the pellets my uncle uses and synthetic growth hormones. Keep in mind, these competitions don’t require the biggest bass, the winner needs the most pounds pulled in.
My best friend is a certified scuba diver, we enter 2 local competitions on the down-low (and lose pitifully) just to learn the spots of the lake that no fisherman goes to. This is important because I can’t have my scuba diver on a popular side of the lake getting run over by other bass boats. On the west side of the lake, it’s exposed to direct sunlight and there’s no grass and apparently it’s a trash place to fish. We decide that’s going to be our spot. We begin practicing at my pond and learn its actually really hard to throw your lure to a scuba diver and the scuba diver to find your lure. So through experimentation, I got better at casting and find a bright enough lure for him to see in the murky water. I learned that if he doesn’t give me three tugs within 1 minute of casting, then he can’t find it and I need to cast again. I mounted a cheap device on the bottom of my rowboat with a wireless button that emits an underwater pulse sound. If I sound it three times that means all is clear and he need to put his hand above the water so I can see where the heck he is in case I lose track of where I need to be casting. We learned the best way to hold 50lbs of bass is to put them all in a clear bladder filled with water, he can reach in grab one at a time and then hook them to my lure.
Keep in mind this sounds like a lot of work, but for some reason it was so hilarious and ridiculous to us that we were actually having a blast coming up with creative solutions to this problem.
We then learned that many fisherman are nutty, obsessed and slightly insane. We thought we’d be able to show up an hour before competition and get my scuba diver into position with his giant bag of winning fish. Turns out lots of fisherman are out scouting spots and it’s going to be hard to sneak a scuba diver into the water with a 50lbs+ bag of live bass. Thankfully my man is strong and can hold the weight of 3 tanks and his bag, this means he could get in the water 4 am at night, 2 hours before competition, and wait for me. Three tanks buys him 4 hours and 15 minutes. Also during the 2 hours of waiting, he could wait in standing water and breathe for free until he starts spotting people and boats before he goes dark, so really we had about 5 hours.
If I remember right there was 72 fisherman registered and 66 showed up, I was 12th to launch, I start rowing to the west side immediately with my heart pounding through my chest because we have no communication, I just have to trust he’s sitting there in the f’ing water at the right spot. I get into position about 40 minutes from the start of competition, he’s been here almost 3 hours. I hit my pulse 3 times and don’t see a hand rise above water, I start to panic and circle around hitting the button, pretending to cast while moving position. It was only 5 minutes later but it felt like an eternity, his hand rises above the water with a thumbs up, he heard the pulse, he knows im here. ITS ON!
Keep in mind I have to pretend to cast and pretend to find a spot, because I have another guy with me filming because I need proof of legitimacy. He is conveniently not filming the water as I find my spot and find his hand gesture. We begin our routine and I pull most of his fish bag in the boat with my Snoopy pole and load up 2 buckets of bass with lots of enthusiasm and laughter with my camera man. In 2 hours we pulled in more than the rest of the fisherman did in 12 hours. Won the competition, 1st place by 14lbs over 2nd place. Immediately claims of bull were dismissed thanks to the evidence of my camera man. Lots of crossed arms and long stares at the sight of my lame row boat and snoopy pole. But thankfully I had a history of showing up to these with the same trash gear before (when we scouted the right spot). My sister began posting all over social media what an amazing fisherman I am, making sure my brother in law saw it, and got lots of praise from the community, and I’ve made a shrine to the trophy surrounded by candles, which I’ve texted to my brother in law about a dozen times over the last year, with my snoopy pole next to it and a reminder that he needs to catch up on his child support.”
One Smart Cookie
“This story was told to me by a woman I knew from work several years ago; she’s a very sweet nurse.
‘Nurse’ graduated from nursing school and decided with her friend to move to one of the cities that was listed as having ‘the most eligible bachelors’ from some publication. She moves and starts dating her future husband.
Future Husband’s mother is a viper and decides Nurse is not good enough for her family. The happy couple eventually get engaged and future mother-in-law is having none of it. She tries for several months to break them up; tries to convince Nurse to go back where she came from and simultaneously tries to gently convince her precious son that Nurse may not be good for him.
To add some more context to this situation, this MIL is pretty nasty to Nurse but hides it well to other people, always making sure she’s super (fake) sweet to everyone when others are around.
Finally, wedding plans are set so MIL gets desperate. She gets Nurse alone with a ‘generous’ offer: leave her fiancé and never come back in exchange for $10,000 (note: this was almost 30 years ago, so I guess it was kind of a crap ton of money for most).
Nurse is so sick of this woman’s crap and is incredibly insulted. However, she’s intelligent and maintains her composure. Nurse accepts the offer.
Nurse takes the money, does not leave, and gets married anyway. Nobody else knows about this. MIL cannot say or do anything about it without exposing herself to her family as a horrible person. Nurse and husband are still happily married; their kids are grown; husband still has no idea this went down.
MIL has suffered silently for almost 30 years.”
Going “Hands Off” Worked Out Better Than She Imagined
“I met my husband when we were 17. We got married several years later and just celebrated our 20th anniversary. I know this man, I have seen how much he remembers things.
My relationship with his father was always tense. With his mother, it seemed we were close but about 7 years ago, I realized she had never and would never consider me part of the family (this was at the point my husband and I had spent half our lives together, with a great future foreseen). I acknowledged the issue and tried to move ahead in a positive way to support my husband and allow my children to have access to their grandparents.
Last Christmas, there was a HUGE blow-up at the in-laws’ house. His father started in on me, then his sister and finally his mom. When my hubby walked out of the room to pack our things and go home early (a 2-hour drive), his mother took a moment to say some of the most horrible things about me I have ever heard. Things about my personality, my parenting skills, my friendships, even my mother and sisters.
I admit, I responded with one very unladylike sentence.
Since that day, I have not contacted her nor communicated with her. The revenge, though, has been sweet: the boy she raised, who married me and has become an amazing man, is now in charge of the relationship with his parents. This means he (not I) sets up visits, buys and sends birthday cards, calls them every week or two.
Or not.
Because you see, this wonderful man is extremely forgetful and doesn’t plan ahead well. ADHD can be difficult that way. Every few weeks for 9 months, I have heard him say things like, ‘Oh shoot, last week was their anniversary, wasn’t it? I forgot to send them a card.’ Or, ‘Man, I haven’t called my mom in a couple of months. Oh well, maybe tomorrow.’
I am not keeping him from anything. I would not have a problem with him taking our children for a visit – they have seen their paternal grandparents twice in 9 months (my parents live in the same town we do, so my kids have a good, strong relationship with their maternal grandparents). But I know him, I know me, and I know how our relationship has worked since we were 17.
I have received a few emails asking if we are coming for a visit. This week we again received a card in the mail ‘reaching out.’ They have called him a few times to try to set something up, but (as I could have told them) in our relationship, I am the one who finalizes most plans and whoops! Hands off for me!”