There is a particular kind of aftermath that comes after two 'sisters' tear into each other and one of them decides to keep the fight alive in public. Call it social flogging: the habit of dragging an old conflict back into view, again and again, long after the original argument has ended.
It solves almost nothing. The flogging usually sets off a fresh explosion, then pulls in older, unresolved grievances. Each round stacks on the last. When people ask me about this pattern, I usually say they have two options: learn how to end it in one move, or end the relationship. That is easier said than done. Many people cannot simply walk away from a relationship, especially when they share friends, when the fight has already been witnessed in different settings, and when the whole thing has turned into a contest over dignity, love, and belonging. The question becomes who gets to win.
I am not trying to turn this into men versus women. But there is a difference in how conflicts are often restored. Men, in my observation, tend to try to bring the relationship back into 'balance' right there and then. A man who has been humiliated for a long time may wait for a chance to retaliate; even grabbing the other man by the collar and making him say 'I was wrong, Dad' is a direct way of restoring the balance.
Once the situation involves women—or more precisely, traits coded as feminine—the surface often has to stay unbroken. People still need support, witnesses, and sides taken, but not openly. Feminine traits tend to avoid open conflict first because those traits are tied to sexual appeal; many people still treat elegance as an important quality in a partner. That is a tangent, though.
Flogging never gets anywhere because the traits coded as feminine can know exactly where the key issue is and still slip away from it. No one wants to be the one who pulls the loose thread and drags every old debt into the open. Sometimes the entanglement itself becomes a way of proving one's existence. After a breakup, one person may monitor the other's every move and connect everything back to themselves: he is still ordering the milk tea I used to order for him; why did he deliberately take that photo, that is the place we went together; he posted a photo holding someone else's hand, so I will post something even better.
If the relationship has not returned to 'balance,' it will keep producing a scissor-gap of invisible resentment. This is especially true when the person causing harm has no awareness of the damage they have done. Having lost temporarily, they redouble their efforts to prove that they are still winning.
If social flogging has a cost, then the 'weaker' party who cleverly uses weakness to win attention and sympathy should also pay a cost. Of course they should. That is the adult game.
I should warn you here: what follows involves the logic of making a 'weaker' person unable to get back up. If your sense of justice insists that whoever is weaker is automatically right, this is not for you.
Flogging cannot solve the actual problem. The discomfort and hurt already caused will not disappear because of one public rehash. It only creates more old grudges and new ones. If the people involved genuinely want to deal with the secondary damage, they need a way to restore 'balance' in one go. The key word is genuinely: they have to be tired of the relationship and no longer want to keep entangled. For some people, this love-hate drama is actually the point, the thing that feels good.
Here is the background. After two 'sisters' fell out, the 'weaker' party had her first birthday without her 'good sister.' In the past, if the good sister did not send a greeting on time, she would be resented for a long time; she might even be interrogated to prove how important she was in the other person's heart. The 'weaker' party unconsciously used mutual friends to prove that she was doing well, and Moments became a useful relay station. At first I predicted she would post twice: one sentimental post about growing another year older, and one proving that everyone loved her—gifts, a cake, that sort of thing.
Instead, she posted sentimental text and then, over several days, more than six posts built on the same foundation: everyone loves me. There were gifts. There were quarrels with people whose gifts had not landed on the right spot. The content and format did not matter. The underlying logic was always the same: everyone loves me.
I have a weakness for stirring things up. The relationship had never returned to 'balance,' and after the last fight the contrast between strong and weak had become too obvious. The 'weaker' party could not keep enjoying that scissor-gap identity forever. After several days of her tedious feed, the 'stronger' party posted something mocking people who go crazy in Moments. That did not constitute real damage. It could not restore balance. The 'stronger' party was my wife's and my assistant; I could not exactly side against our own. So it was necessary to restore the balance.
The next day was my assistant's wedding anniversary, and mutual friends had flown in from far away to spend the weekend with us. We went with it. Five people, from five different angles, posted about taking part in the 'stronger' party's anniversary.
One person posting five times 'everyone loves me' versus five people posting five times 'we all love her.' That contrast was enough to cause internal injury for some time. The killing is not done by direct attack. It is done by finding the precise point that makes the other person attack themselves. When someone has the upper hand and will not let go, they tend to reveal what they care about most. If a birthday sets off several days of posts whose hidden premise is 'everyone loves me,' then that is the thing she cares about most. Hit the snake seven inches from the head.
This is an extremely low-down move. I never said I was a gentleman. It is Cao Cao's open stratagem.
To put the pattern plainly: first find what the other person cares about most. You can see it when they feel wronged, when people throw dirt at them, even in a few phrases they let slip. That point is where the internal attack can land.
The technique is not to strike that point head-on. It is to devalue it by inversion. Rather than telling someone 'you are not well liked,' prove to them that 'other people are much better liked than you.'
You can use this move on other people, but you will pay a price for it. As for how not to be attacked this way, I have said it in earlier writing: 'sunbathing.'