How to ask an editor to exclude a reviewer when the reasons are personal I am submitting a manuscript to a journal. I wish to exclude a colleague from being the reviewer of the manuscript. The journal has a single blind review: authors are known, reviewers are anonymous.

Question in short: The reason for this exclusion request are personal (see below), and I'm not sure I want to expose those reasons. What is the most effective ways to exclude a reviewer whom you don't trust to make a fair judgement?

Personal reasons for exclusion request::


We had a couple of harsh interactions. She had criticized me personally, and  had short arguments about our different attitudes
towards publishing, writing and research.   
I believe she has already wrote a "reject" review on my manuscript (for a different venue).
To my judgment, she has standards that are uncommon in my research community, and so would judge my work on unconventional higher
standards.
Her personality, in my view, is harsh and critical (and unpleasant) and so each of her judgments are prone to be more negative than
others, on average.
She is related to the area of my manuscript (I have cited her manuscript and given her full credit for the work she did), and from
her point of view me publishing the manuscript would, psychologically,
be a personal disappointment, because her related work has not been
published. 


Questions:
1. Can I ask the editor not to send it to her review? 


Should I ask the editor for this? Would it benefit me?
How can I explain my request, and should I explain it?


Notes:  i) I don't want to write any of the reasons I listed
above! Because they are mostly personal! And would put me in a
very unpleasant situation psychologically at least.

ii) I believe that the review process in general is very
subjective, and so there is always a way to consider the same work in two opposite perspectives: positive and negative. I believe the
reviewer I want to exclude would highlight the negatives, and diminish
the positives. And recommend a rejection.



This question is different from:
 Sound reasons for excluding a reviewer,
 because the current question asks how to exclude a reviewer
 irrespective of the justifications of this exclusion. In other words, I'm not asking what are "sound reasons to exclude a reviewer",
 but rather HOW to exclude her, independent from the existence of sound reasons.

More details of the difference:

In Sound reasons for excluding a reviewer the term "sound" is probably meant to be an objective term. However I claim that the reviewing process is not an objective process at all. Thus, there are at least three different interpretations of Sound reasons for excluding a reviewer:


What kind of reason would be regarded as sound by the editor of the journal?


Or


Is there a set of objective reasons that the scientific community views as legitimate to exclude a reviewer?


Or


What can I, as an author do, to exclude a reviewer, if I think he/she has a grudge against me, irrespective of the objective reality, or the justifications of this act of excluding the reviewer?


The OP has not clarified whether he/she means 1, 2, 3 or another question.
These are all different questions.
I'm asking 3.

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I cannot merge my account with I am a guest (which is also me) because I don't remember the email I used for "I am a guest".
There is often a standard statement/option on submission which offers the opportunity to declare possible "Conflict of interest." (CoI); not only for yourself, but also reviewers who might have some with you. To my knowledge this formulation intentionally leaves open whether the CoI derives from possible favouritism, antagonism, competing funding/research interests or other.

In my opinion as editor, I prefer actually not to know what the precise nature of the CoI is. As long as the author doesn't exclude a larger number of people this way, declaring isolated CoIs are perfectly in the remit of a typical researcher's career and should not count against you.

In rare cases, the editor might not have a choice but to take that reviewer on board, in which case they must take the CoI flag into account - sometimes you see reviews which are clearly not objective (biased in one or the other direction, doesn't matter); the review may still be informative, if that baseline bias is taken into account. 

However, I think an isolated CoI should, if at all possible, be taken into account by a serious editor, because many things can be at stake, such as funding, priority, plagiarism accusations and more. If they do not want to do that (for inscrutable reasons), you might consider changing publishing venue.