I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that the woman who wrote this story on Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page didn’t stay with this guy too much longer…

And you’ll see why I think that in just a minute.

She told readers that she was dating an older guy when she was going to grad school…

Ex-BF insists I play a game he assumes he’s better at. I complied.

“A few years ago when I was in grad school, I dated a man who was several years older than me who had just finished his masters at the same school (completely different program but both in the realm of STEM) and started a company based on that work.

This guy seemed to have some jealousy issues about where he was in life…

He seemed to have a chip on his shoulder about the fact that he went back to school in his late 20s, and the fact that I was in a PhD program. I need to emphasize I did not think I was better or smarter than him in any way, and I thought and still think he is incredibly smart and his company does fascinating work.

But, he still projected this inferiority complex on me and it was one of many things that soured our relationship. He was obsessed with feeling smarter than me and bringing me down a peg. The relationship ran its course within a year and the breakup was messy, but he insisted on remaining friends despite a lot of obvious tension between us.

This guy noticed that she played Sudoku and that piqued his interest…

One day he asked me to help him pick up a moving truck he needed for work and I agreed, but when I got in the car we were kind of quiet for a couple minutes so I pulled out my phone and finished the sudoku game I had up in my browser.

For some context, I am incredibly good at sudoku relative to most people. This is because I obsessively solved sudoku puzzles as a kid and just had big books of them to solve on long bus rides to school, and it’s still my go to game to play while waiting in line, pooping, etc. I don’t really correlate this with intelligence; my brain is just trained to recognize the patterns and solving them is soothing.

He looked over and saw I was playing and asked what app I played on. I said I just play on a certain website I like and when he asked why I don’t use a sudoku app I tried to be as neutral as possible in my response and said that the website had a nice spread of difficulty and that every app I tried had either been all too easy or too hard (admittedly, it’s almost always too easy, but because of aforementioned inferiority complex I was hedging this on purpose).

So he decided to bring her down a notch…but he didn’t know what was coming next.

He had a kind of “oh really?” response and insisted I try the app he has on his phone because he was sure I would find it hard.

So, I maliciously complied.

I opened up the hardest setting of puzzle in his app and solved it in about a minute, beating the record on his phone by at least a minute and a half.

I showed it to him and he seemed alarmed and basically said I got lucky. So, I played several more times so that my times flooded the fastest times list until his were all gone.

And this guy wasn’t done yet!

What a weirdo!

His shock and frustration at this was satisfying on its own, but MANY months later when I had long forgotten about it, he randomly sent me a screenshot of his puzzle in that app with a faster time—except it was for the easiest puzzle setting.

So of course to be petty, I immediately downloaded the app, played on the easiest setting, beat his time by a significant margin again, and sent a screenshot.

Was this mean? Maybe. Was it satisfying? Yes.”

Let’s see what people had to say about this.

This person said this guy got what he deserved.

Another individual said this guy should have been working on his game instead of stewing about it.

One reader sounds like they have a pretty competitive relationship with their father.

One Reddit user had a similar issue with a co-worker.

And this individual might need to find a new partner based on this comment…

I think it’s a good thing that these two aren’t together anymore.

Clearly incompatible!