But you forget! She has that mystical magical mumbo-jumbo called “Wymyn’s Intuition” working for her. It’s absolutely infallible! She KNOWS he’s a dangerous stalker! Which means that Security should beat the crap out of him, call the Police, have him arrested, and smear his name all over the evening news as the dangerous women-killing psychopath that he really is!
Her refusal to answer WHY she feels this way means one of two things, each at polar opposite ends of the spectrum. A> He really did do something, such as cop a feel, and she’s too embarassed to say something; or B> Like my psycho ex, she knows damned well that she’s making shit up and if she had to tell anyone the truth, it’d amount to nothing at all but some nonsense out of her own head - like she dreamt he did something or some damned thing like that. So she won’t say anything at all, because that will lead her supportive friends to assume the worst and feed her need for sympathy.
I’m kinda liking this conjecture. I had a friend whose husband was insanely jealous, and would try to “test her” by watching her whenever other men talked to her…and we were military wives, so there were a lot of social situations with men around. She was fairly rude to the guys, hung out with us girls all the time, and always was in a hurry to leave as soon as possible after the “official” part of our get-togethers was over.
You said her husband is possessive…is she ever friendly to other guys she knows better? And isn’t her husband walking out to the car with her?
Why stop there. Why not have ALL security guards be women. That way security, using infallible “Wymyn’s Inuition”, can immediately alert the police to dangerous stalkers.
You think that’s bad… I was at the grocery store the other day, and I was minding my own business, and some creep with a badge asked if I “needed help finding anything”. Right away, I knew… STALKER.
Thank god I managed to ram him with my cart and run to another aisle!
I hurried to pay and get out of the store, but before the cashier handed me my receipt, she looked at it to see what I bought, and said, “Thank you, Mr. Daffyd” to me… What a disgusting pig!
And when I was trying to get away from pig-girl, the guy who was bagging my groceries asked me if I “wanted help to my car”. I know what he really wanted! I couldn’t take it any more, threw my food on the ground and ran before they could follow me and see what kind of car I drive!
Given the incredibly bad decisions women are wont to make about appropriate men, and given the fact they often tend to make those bad decisions over and over, I think that claims about the reliability of “women’s intuition” is a risky bet the large majority of the time.
Your friends behavior is extraordinarily rude and irrational. Schizophrenia and associated paranoid behavior disorders really take off in a person’s early to mid twenties to early thirties. Your friend might need a check up from the neck up.
I am concerned about many of the responses above. I don’t think we have anywhere near the necessary information. I am very aware of the overreaction of some women (I can say that, I am one) and the many false accusations against men. I can also tell you of how a stalker wrecked years of my life.
In my case, he was a teacher at the same school as me, and the scenario runs much like that above. He was married. I knew his wife. He knew my husband. He seemed to be very very friendly. I was spooked, but couldn’t pinpoint it enough to make a case. I could write screeds, but the details don’t matter now. Eventually, I was so freaked out, I changed schools. I ran away. He booked his kids into my new school and asked that one be specifically placed in my home group. At both schools, management asked that he stay away from me, but there was always an innocent reason why he just happened to end up where I was.
Long story later, when the police got involved, it seems that I was second in the string of women he stalked and made life inexplicably scary. The third got to criminal damage level, the fourth got the evidence. Her husband set up photographic trip lines and caught him peering in windows and destroying her property. We’d all reported it. We’d all got the “you’re nuts” reaction. We’d all ended up really freaked out. You can’t imagine how miserable life is when you keep seeing someone being very friendly, yet you know he isn’t and everyone thinks you are nuts. I ended up so isolated - with only my husband believing every word I said.
When the police finally laid charges (2 women later than me in his victim list) and got the full background, turns out there were lots of acts he’d done that we knew nothing about. ‘Friends’ are still apologizing to me many years later for things they did on his advice, as ‘jokes’, without realizing what he was really doing. They also apologize for not believing me - when I was struggling to believe it myself. I really believed I was going mad.
I have no idea if this is true in the case I the OP. I am just warning you how damaging the ‘she’s nuts’ reaction is when you don’t know the full circumstances.
And a lot of men could post anecdotes about how their life was made miserable by someone falsely accusing them of something. We’re just warning about how damaging the “he’s a stalker” reaction can be when you don’t know the full circumstances.
Agree fully, Turek. I don’t think this is a male/female thing. Women stalk men, too. Both probably stalk the same sex. Women get falsely accused. I imagine it would be even harder for men being stalked to get people to realize it is serious than it was for me. I have massive sympathy for the men whose lives were ruined by false memory syndrome accusations. Glad you emphasized this point.
We have to be very careful about any such claims from both sides - which makes it all really hard.
Why hard? The problem here is is that her stalking claims appear to have no rational basis other than than she thinks he’s glancing at her inappropriately, and has not averted his gaze sufficiently after her freakish demands. The man she’s accusing appears, by the purported victims own description, to have done nothing inappropriate. People being overly credulous about absurd accusations is how the McMartin Daycare fiasco unfolded. Nothing this woman has described is in the universe of stalking.
Hard, because of the risk of overreactions! All I said was that you can’t assume she is a nutter on second hand information, in brief, on a public board. I have in no way suggested anything like the McMartin situation. As a published author on skepticism - you are talking to someone who is publicly highly skeptical of all sorts of claims of satanic rites, and any wild overreactions.
Having been there, though, I think she has the right to be listened to. I suggest that if her friend is really a friend, he will just say to the guy that she is probably imagining it, but to save everyone fuss, could this guy just pretend that she doesn’t exist? If he persists in speaking to her, you have to ask why. If he is just looking her way in a public space, then she doesn’t have anything to object to. Maybe she is just being a prat. I don’t know. I don’t think you can, either.
Of course she has the right to be listened to. But when her friend (the OP) attempts to listen to her, the only rationalization she gets is “He just is!” If you can’t even tell one of your friends exactly what bothers you about a guy you want to turn in for stalking, that’s just industrial strength crazy.
If the OP’s friend was saying something like this, it would go a long way toward making me sympathize with her. I think that people often know they are being stalked through intuition (that is, by picking up on tiny signals that are difficult to articulate or describe) but her insistence that this guy’s behavior is OBVIOUSLY inappropriate makes her seem like the irrational one.
I am far, far more likely to listen to someone who says “It’s hard to describe, but I get a weird vibe from that person, even when the conversation seems normal on the surface.” Just acknowledge that the feelings don’t necessarily match the behavior.
The whole husband thing is adding another layer of weirdness to the mix. It would raise flags with me if a friend wanted to alert me to a bad/dangerous situation, but had no interest in telling her husband (unless of course, the husband was the cause of the situation).
Me too. If you genuinely believed you were the victim of a stalking, wouldn’t you want your husband to know? Not necessarily to lay down a smack down or anything like that–I just mean to share with him because it’s a scary situation and generally we share scary situations with family members/loved ones. That makes me think something is up that she’s not telling you. Like the “he’s testing me”/is overprotective theory. Or she and overfriendly guy are having an affair or something. It certainly doesn’t sound like stalking.
This seems strange already. By mentioning he has a girlfriend, he’s letting her know that he isn’t hitting on her. There may be a small exception there, e.g. he’s looking for a threesome, but the mention of church seems to negate a lot of possibilities, as does the mention of her husband. The mention of him hints at the possibility the two men have already spoken. For all she knows, the two guys became fast friends.
If she’d said, “No thank you,” and walked away, I would have thought that was possibly ok, like if she was having a bad day or didn’t think he was on the level. No sense being rude or overreacting. Naturally she would check with her husband later.
Reverse the roles. A strange woman comes up to a man etc. and he says that. Later, talking to his wife, maybe she says, ‘Hey, I was making a friend and you act like that? Thanks a lot!’
“Don’t talk to me ever again” is so pre-emptive, I had to read the description leading up to it three times. What has he already “done” that is so awful that she acted that way?
Wow. “Don’t talk to him again”? “We’re not interested”? (Underlining mine) Imagine if a man said, to another woman, “Don’t talk to my wife again”! Is she in control of his life?
If we really have all the salient points of the situation, I think she has an agenda. Say for instance she feels that her husband is ignoring her. Fabricating a stalker = other men are interested in me, you have to protect me, you have to show me that you really love me, etc. Or say she thinks her husband doesn’t spend enough time at home. Adding new friends, bad. So she’s as cold as possible to discourage that.
Women like her really and truly scare me because I know people are going to err on the side of caution, assume that she wouldn’t make a scene unless she were truly uncomfortable, women’s intuition and all that.
Once you tell a lie, it takes two lies to cover that lie, and then four lies to cover those lies, and so on. It has all the makings of a Lifetime movie, except for the “possibly rooted in some semblance of reality” part.
It’s also understandable as the behaviour of a man who isn’t quite sure what he did to upset the lady the first time they spoke but is trying to show that he’s a nice, harmless guy and that she needn’t be afraid of him.
I agree with the comments above, and that the story doesn’t give much to say that he’s a stalker - almost none at all. What I find concerning is that she has never behaved like this before.The sort of women who take offense at every man and see every act as one of threat usually show that reaction to others. If she was a seriously deranged as some of you seem to suggest, surely that would have shown in her behaviour at some other time?
If the above are all the facts, then her behaviour is irrational and rude. But the OP says that this is out of character and is freaking him out. So I suspect it is far from all the facts.
I agree with all of you, if the case is exactly as written and there is nothing more to it, then she is rude and irrational and the nice guy is best off without her friendship.
I just got back to this after the weekend (wasn’t able to log on). Thanks for all the responses.
I agree that it’s weird that my friend won’t talk to her husband about it. I asked her why and she said that her husband once found out that she’d reconnected with an ex on IM just as friends and became really insecure, asking her if she was cheating. The ex had apparently found her and she’d responded civilly (and plationically) and her husband happened to log on to her computer and found the window open and read through the IM record.
She and her husband have an odd dynamic. They initially married because he pressured her to do so even though she was hesitant to make such a commitment. He actually had his family pressure her, too, and convinced her own mother to encourage it, so she caved, even though she wasn’t 100% sure she wanted to be with this person forever. To my knowledge, she’s never cheated on him. He travels most of the time for his job while she works a standard 9-to-5. Perhaps all the travel, combined with her feelings for him, is making him paranoid or maybe he has a reason to be paranoid that I’m not aware of. Either way, his reaction to her IM’ing an ex really discouraged her from ever talking to him about interactions with other guys.
I’ve known Kristin for about five years, but only recently became aware of what her relationship with her husband was like (from her side, anyway; I’m sure his perpsective is different). We used to hang out primarily at work where we met, but started hanging out outside of work once I left that company about a year ago.
Anyway, I think what I’m going to do is just stay out of it unless she brings it up again. Since it’s summer, she’s been working out at the track more often than at the gym anyway. If she asks for advice, I’ll tell her that I think she’s overreacting and that she should do her best to ignore it unless he actually tries to talk to her or she notices that he is otherwise actively pursuing her.
Alright, let’s assume for a minute the OPs friend is not some rude crazy bitch.
It is entirely possible that this guy just gave off “the vibe”. I remember a few years ago I’m in my gym (I’m a dude by the way in case you didn’t know). So this guy is there who I’ve never seen before and he is going around talking to people in that hyper-animated way usually reserved for salesmen and people on drugs. It was weird. He kept talking to me about some shit or another all the way out to the parking lot. Now if you had read a transcript of the conversation it probably wouldn’t seem that out of the ordinary, but the fact that he was so insistant on talking to me for no apparent reason was freakin weird.
I never did see him again though.
What I suspect is that while the OP is sumarizing the conversation, ‘Larry’ may have been talking her ear off for 10 minutes and not taking the subtle and non-subtle clues that she was not interested. That usually triggers red flags in people.
The fact that he is insistant on inviting her to something when he doesn’t know her and has not yet made a mutual connection also triggers flags in people.
So my GF and I are hanging out with one of her single friends this weekend. Apparently there is a huge pool of socially retarded men (and women out there). While I assume most are probably harmless, there was that shooting in a PA gym a few weeks ago. So there is always a chance that you can encounter one of these guys who has so much pent-up sexual rage over his inability to connect to people that he can become violent.
See the problem is that women are generally pretty complex. While “no means no” rarely do they give off signals that are so clear cut. For example if a girl seems to give you shit because you are “hitting on her” even though you are just having a normal conversation, she could either a) be out of her mind b) actually like you and trying to test to see if you are , in fact, hitting on her or c) not interested. Although "don’t ever speak to me again is a pretty good indicator of a) or c).
