Before I grew up and got a conscience I did help instigate a fight between an on-off girlfriend of mine and another girl with whom she had been feuding since the two of them were at school together. The girls were around twenty years old when this happened and I was a couple of years older.
They got into a slanging match in a pub one night, trading insults and threats, and were told by the barman to either quieten down or take it outside. I think they would probably have preferred the first option, but, egged on by myself and others, including two loud mouthed older women, they opted for the second instead.
The girl I was with, whose name was Jeanette, was bigger, but had had quite a lot to drink and ended up getting the worst of it. I must have had a bit of a conscience even then, because I was the first to jump in and break it up when the other girl got her down on the ground and started roughing her up.
Afterwards, she clung on to me like a limpet and begged me to walk her home instead of going back into the pub because her blouse had been badly torn and she was embarrassed by what had happened. She ended up spending the night at my flat instead, and the fight had a strange effect on both of us.
We had been on and off for over two years, which is a long time when you are in your early twenties, and were really just seeing each other more out of habit than anything else. But after watching her fight with another girl, then feeling her cling on to me with all the emotion the fight had stirred up in her, Jeanette, to me, seemed like the sexiest thing on two legs for months afterwards. It really did feel like I was in love with her.
As for Jeanette, she seemed to regard me as some kind of hero for rescuing her when she was in trouble and never even mentioned the role I had played in dropping her in it to begin with. Maybe it was the booze, maybe selective memory. Either way, we were very happy which each other for a while.
After a couple of months though, the catfight effect wore off, we started to get bored with one another again and soon went back to being just friends.