The message is pretty clear: don’t be a stalker. You see stalkers on the news, giving some celebrity a hard time, and you feel bad for that celebrity and think the stalker is a crazy person who rides the crazy bus to crazy town. The celebrity looks good, if a little worried, as she makes her way into a nightclub. The stalker has a bad haircut and is wearing county jail orange.
Yet, like a lot of dumb ideas, there’s a lot of people trying. Sort of like how guys at my high school used to yell out the car window or honk the horn at women. Women said they hated it, hated the guys who did it, and yet it didn’t stop-- probably still hasn’t.
And when there are a lot of people persisting at something, somebody, somewhere, is going to experience success. The story about how the happy couple met gets cleaned up, of course. “He yelled ‘nice tits’ from his Mustang” is modified to “bowling”.
Stalker types have all sorts of neat toys now, too. Forget Facebook and Google; they’ve got phone apps-- or did. The one I’m thinking of was taken off the market. Still, it’s got to beat old fashioned hiding in the bushes.
I don’t have a lot of personal experience with stalking (“sure you don’t”, I bet you’re thinking). I did have a crush on a girl in sixth grade and sat on the curb across from her house. I may have been hoping she’d come out and want to play GI Joes. I felt stupid after a few minutes and wandered off.
One borderline case was someone who discovered that the inquisitive new person in a chatroom was an alternate account of somebody already well known. I call this borderline because the sock belonged to a woman. When a woman does something like that, I think she’s being careful and prudently checking if the guy is trustworthy. If it’s a guy I’m all LOL WTF CREEPER ALERT.
Anyway, know any stories of stalker-ish behavior leading to a relationship?