Some women get so gaslighted, beaten down, that they truly do doubt their own perceptions, especially if they’ve been raised to “be nice”, to be people pleasers. Which is a personality that abusers like to go after because those women are perfect candidates for their games.
I just helped someone with an experience straight out of Am I Overreacting. I’ll save you the pain of Reddit wall of text, and I’ll use punctuation and stuff, but here is what that post would look like:
I (28F) think some guy has been stalking me. He lives in my complex and is always coming up to me and telling me the same too personal things. It really creeps me out, and I get a bad vibe. Today he followed me for almost a mile while I was walking my dog. I got scared and called the police. Am I over reacting?
Edit: People in the comments said I should edit the post to mention that he asked me out once, and I said no, and that night my car was vandalized.
Anyway, the OP is safe, has a plan to stay that way, and absolutely is not overreacting.
Point being, it would be easy to write this leaving out the violent behavior, or poorly enough that it doesn’t ring true. Then there would be the people who think that trying to start a conversation with someone every time they are coming or going is a perfect fine way to hit on them.
Can’t find the link, but many years ago the FBI did an investigation of men deemed “habitual offenders.” As an aside, almost as an afterthought, but out of bureaucratic thoroughness, they interviewed the women with whom these men shared their outside-of-prison lives. The testimony was sickening, and I feel no need to encapsulate it here.
The internet is a great expander of horizons. But then, earlier in human history, so was the horse. There’s a story from the Great War of the Australian light horseman in Egypt who rode out one night under the full moon to beg of the Sphinx for the wisdom of the ages. The answer came “don’t expect too much.”
For us, the answer might now be “need more information.”
I assume AITA and spinoff subs are all fake stories unless proven otherwise. Someone wants to build karma for their account for innocuous or malicious reasons, get experience creative writing, create outrage, or possibly even bots testing their algorithms. I don’t look at these specific subs too much, but reddit has lots of bots.
Reddit also has a problem with non-creative writing in some subreddits, especially AITA, AIO and other advice categories, where the posts are just written by AI to try to farm engagement or something.
Here’s a fairly decent analysis of it:
