It’s like being quasi-stalked and it’s annoying. That’s why he cares. Having an ex strolling past your house just to get your goat is a little creepy and irksome.
Honest question (not meaning to sound snarky, I swear): If the OP was female, and her ex-boyfreind kept sauntering past her home, workplace, and favorite hang-outs just to be seen as if a ghost, would that set of you “Uh-oh, creep!” alarm just a little or no?
Indifference isn’t just about not paying attention to her in the moment. It’s about sincerely and honestly not noticing that she’s there unless she trips you. And if you were doing that, you’d have forgotten she was there before you got home and got on line and wrote the post. It wouldn’t be worth writing a post over, any more than that guy who’s always in the third stool from the left.
“Ignore her” is still an act of will, and involves some amount of emotional capital. It’s what you have to do until you don’t notice her. Only when she’s nothing to you, positive, or negative, will you truly be over her.
There’s lots of exes I’m still not over, 10-15 years later. It happens. If I ran into that guy from college, he’d still make my heart go pitter pat and my stomach tie in knots. But I don’t kid myself that I’m indifferent towards him. I might ignore him, or go long stretches without thinking of him, but I’m probably never going to be totally over him.
Well, it appears to be the very thread you are using to hang on to her.
Move on with your life, and that includes expanding your social circle.
Thank you for the advice that I took months ago when I decided to distance myself from the “original” circle. I’ve been taking part in more work related things, getting back in touch with friends from years ago, focusing more of my energies on my running group, and my part-time teaching job.
I don’t know if I gave you the impression that I cry myself to sleep at night while holding pictures of her, but I assure you I’ve taken a lot of steps these past couple months to do things in my life unrelated to her.
And as silly as it sounds, part of that is my Friday at the pub, throwing back a couple of pitchers with a couple buddies who were my friends before, during, and after the Francine thing. This has been my routine for years. I am annoyed that while I’ve been taking steps to get away from her, she goes out of her way to show up where I am.
I really don’t believe this means I’m still hung up on her. I am a little bothered by it and trying to get a handle on her motives, which it seems like only Swallowed my Cellphone understands.
That’s a nice poetic thought, but he can’t physically stop her from going there. Hopefully his ignoring her will make her stop. Hopefully, it already has, so the problem may already be solved.
But I can’t blame him for being curious. If someone I’ve forgotten from my past suddenly showed up in my life where she absolutely should not be, I’d start a thread about it too.
I do too. Without intellectual curiosity, you probably would be a member here in the first place, right?
Her motives were pretty simple. She’s not over you. Who made the final decision to break up? I’m guessing it was you. Haven’t you ever wanted to “accidentally” show up somewhere you knew your ex would be, and they would take one look at you and realize what a horrible mistake they made? Unless she’s really weird, it should stop soon.
But that’s kinda the point. What do you care what her motives are? I can understand you’d rather not have her around. But you can’t do anything about it, because it’s a free country. I think posting about her on here disqualifies you from saying you’re “ignoring” her. It’s possible both these events are complete coincidences (she was jogging late one day, her date suggested that place) but just two events like this don’t even establish a pattern, much less give insight into motives. That you’re seeing something in her actions says something about your own feelings, even if you’re 100% correct about her.
Really, if you’re over her, you wouldn’t be devoting even this much mental energy to figuring her out. Give it up.
I can totally understand you being curious. Here are my guesses:
[ol]
[li]“dang, I really miss wasson, I wonder what he’s up to, lemme stalk him.”[/li][li]“hmmm, I wonder if wasson misses me, lemme give him a chance to say something.”[/li][li]“heh, why should I not walk my dog down this street/go to this bar, just because wasson might see me and think I have ulterior motives?”[/li][li]sound of chirping crickets[/li][/ol]
Without knowing the girl or how she feels about you – I would assume it is #4. I have had similar (and much creepier) things happen in my life, and a couple of them turned out to be stalkers. I ended up calling the cops on a couple of them. They were obviously stalkers, though – parking their car in my driveway (at the time, the guy involved actually lived an hour from me), following me home from work, that kind of crap. If you really want to move on from her, just smile and keep doing what you are trying to do. She may just really like that bar – I don’t know.
Other posters have a good point, though – you are letting her get to you, whether that is her goal or not. Maybe you should talk to her and ask her what she is trying to pull?
I was being stalked by a particularly violent ex-boyfriend (it ended with me running out of the house following a particularly nasty blow to my face) a few weeks back and unfortunately it did culminate in me shutting down all of my old phone numbers, emails…everything. I am still getting around to telling people my new numbers. Quite frankly-I don’t even want to at this point-I’ve only told about 3 people my new number and I’m waiting around to see if he tries to contact any of my friends he knows to try to get the new number. They can always hunt me down through my workplace/alumni associations if they really need to.
Your crazy ex doesn’t sound like she’s going to boil your bunnies or anything but I just wanted to give an opposing viewpoint to the whole “if you’re over it you won’t care”-about 99% of the time I agree with that but there’s that 1% that make you feel like you may end up in the dumpster behind your house with your throat slashed. I didn’t read a lot into his actions (we have been broken up for a long long time now) but I shut down all points of access very quickly.
How far away does she live that she’d be walking down your street? Does she normally walk by your house?
As long as you are annoyed by her presence and attempting to understand her motivation, you still haven’t cut the thread on your own. Whatever she may do, or not, belongs to her. Ignore her, don’t attempt to rationalize it, and move on.
And don’t forget that expanding your social circle also means doing things and going places outside of your comfort zone. You never know what opportunities will present themselves and occupy more than just your time and energies. In time, you won’t even “see her” because your mind will be elsewhere. Right now, it’s nowhere.
I think it’s natural to wonder about this, and I think the answer is pretty simple. We all enjoy being wanted by people even if we don’t want that person ourselves. She has had enough time to miss the attention she used to get from you and wants to reassure herself that she still has a hold over you. It sounds like you did the right thing by just laughing it off with your pals. I’m sure that once she figures out that it truly is over and you truly don’t want her back, she’ll slink away.
It seems pretty common for exes to come lurking around once they start to worry you’re actually moving on. I guess it’s that old “You want what you can’t have” thing at work.
Oh my God, are you kidding? I mean, you’re entitled to your opinion, but not when it’s completely unfounded and ridiculous.
To expand even further on what I said in my last post, in the past couple months of being away from her I’ve stepped out of my comfort zone by taking a part-time job teaching at a local college, in the hopes that I’d meet some friends there or at the very least, get myself out of the house a couple times a week. Mission accomplished. I joined a bowling league at work, to expand my circle of friends a little. I called some old friends I haven’t talked to in a long time out of the blue.
I joined a dating website to meet new people and make sure I wasn’t sitting around moping. I took some initiatives at work that mean longer hours, but I get to work with a wider variety of people. I go out socially with people from work more often than I used to.
I’ve hunted for a new job, taken an interest in a new hobby that is taking a lot of my time, started running with my old running group who has recruited a couple new members. For a long time, I was one of those annoying guys who had something scheduled every single night of the week. That’s only stopped semi-recently and I’m looking forward to a break from it.
I’m keeping my brain occupied, so don’t bother jumping to any completely wrong decisions about me.
This is very true too. Don’t even ponder WHY she is doing what she’s doing. You have to condition yourself to think “Meh, don’t care. Not my problem.” Then turn your thoughts to something else.
Don’t ask “why?”, don’t wonder “what is she doing?” Coming to the boards to ask for strategies on how to ignore her – fine. Coming to the boads to ask what her motives may be – not so fine. (Suggests you might still be thinking about her more than you should.)
Whatever she’s up to: “Meh, don’t care. Not my problem.” That is your mantra.
She shows up at your laundro-mat? “Meh, don’t care. Not my problem.” She walks her dog past your workplace? “Meh, don’t care. Not my problem.”
I totally understand how irksome it is to have an ex “haunting” you. (Doesn’t she have something better to do?) But don’t waste ANY time on her. If you do, you’re just giving in to her stupid quasi-stalkeriness. Every time she pops into you head, you have to remind yourself “Meh, don’t care, not my problem.”
As an aside, I have to disagree with you here.
Putting aside your dismissive tone, it is a distinctly observable social phenomenon that a place that is the primary hangout of party A before the relationship began, a place in which party B was seen by the management or clientele as an adjunct to party A during the relationship, which was introduced to party B by party A, or which falls squarely within the demographic of party A, is seen as the “property” of party A upon termination of the relationship.
YES, it’s a public place. YES, party B has every “right” to be there. But there’s a difference between exercising one’s rights and being insensitive.
wasson, I am not implying that this is something that’s keeping you up at night.
All I’m saying is that even the act of starting this thread is still burning too many calories on your ex. You could be surfing for YouTube videos of skateboarders doing something stupid, or reading an unfunny webcomic.
It’s not easy to let it go, and you don’t have to let it go all the way, but, since all I have to go on is the fact that you started the thread and respond similarly to my posts, that’s the evidence I’m working with.
You got a new woman. Curiosity about the old one is nice, but your curiosity isn’t all that idle once you start discussing it with some dude who’s named after a throwaway scene in a Kevin Smith movie. 
I’m taking your comments at face value in this thread. I can only go on with what I read here and nothing more. Now, if you had included links to previous threads on this topic, then perhaps one would know the depth of your expanding social circle.
I think we’re jumping the gun here on “quasi-stalker.” This isn’t setting off any stalker alarms for me at all - two incidents are still in the realm of coincidence, especially if she lives close by and it isn’t out of her way to jog there or go to that bar. Actually, re-reading what Wasson has written, it sounds a little bit like Francine is the one who doesn’t care where Wasson is. She has no obligation to change her jogging route, and she can certainly go to any bar she wants to - it looks like she might not care that Wasson will be there.
I’d give it one more incident before I’d start worrying about any stalkerish tendencies. But if she lives in the neighbourhood, all bets are off. She would naturally be around the same places then.
She lives near the OP?
I guess that the fact that she’s within running distance implies that, but I like to vary my running route and occasionally venture a lot further out than my own neighborhood for my run (my neighbourhood is ugly, so I sometimes bike to one across the river). It never occured to me that she lives close by, and I haven’t read the previous posts about this girl.
If that’s the case, then the possibility of running into her at the grocery store, bank, or vlideo store is always a possibility. I dated a girl who coincidentally lives within walking distance. The route I take to walk to my gym takes me past her building. I walked that way before I even met her, but after we stopped seeing each other, I changed my route. Then I decided that was stupid and I was just going to go about my business the way I always have.
So I’ll amend my opinion. IF she does live really close by, then two run-ins is likely coincidence. If she strolls past wasson’s office, or KEEPS turning up like a bad penny, then there’s certainly an issue.
Either way, my recommendaiton is still the same: Whenever she comes to mind “Meh, don’t care. Not my problem.”
Agreed.