Dating : Getting Stalked in Public Pushed Me Away From Dating

Have you ever felt your sense of security just disappear in a split second?

You go from being happy and enjoying the moment to putting up an impenetrable guard that you’ve been using for years to keep people out. You’ve gotten used to it as a mechanism of self-preservation from years of people thinking they have a right to your mind, body, or soul.

I might be being dramatic, but hear me out.

I was out getting a drink with some friends from work. I just moved to a new city and was living by myself for the first time and I wanted to make friends to create a support system. We had the corner of the bar to ourselves and enjoying relating to funny work moments and struggles that come from dealing with bosses.

I glanced past Terry’s shoulder and saw a guy at the bar staring at me.

Avoid eye contact. You’re being paranoid.

At the end of the night, we were ready to leave and trying to find the waiter for our checks when the man at the bar approached. He said, “Oh, do you work at *insert my new company name here*”.

Red flag. Or is it a red flag? Maybe we were talking really loudly. You’re being paranoid.

He asked our names and told us that he thought we worked in *insert name of our departments*. The girls at the table all got quiet while Terry kept some friendly banter going.

We’re being rude. You’re being paranoid. He’s just being friendly.

Chrissy went to go find our waiter. No luck. After an eternity of extended small talk that included a tris into how ethnic I looked and where I’m really from, we finally tracked down our waiter to get our checks and leave.

As we briskly walked away from the bar, I wondered, how did he know where we worked and what departments we were in?

Terry mentioned he had gone to the bathroom and the guy had caught him mid-stream to ask about us. He said he worked at the same company so Terry had mentioned the departments we were in.

Men. Amirite?

We had been talking about how we were single earlier in the night and Terry said, he seemed like a nice guy and was tall so sounded like a great catch (with sarcasm dripping off of each word).

When I got home, I checked my work email to find an email from the guy at the bar with the title “You’re Gorgeous.” In the body of the email was a proposition to get a meal together.

First of all, how did he find my work email?

Second of all, am I paranoid? Or were the walls built from years of experiences getting stalked and having my sense of self constantly threatened?

Some people will say, “You’re being rude, he was just trying to be nice.”

These are the same people who haven’t had this happen repeatedly. It’s not just some guy at a bar trying to make a move. It’s a guy who stared at you through the night, waited for the opportunity to catch a friend of yours to get information about you, and then looked you up online to find a way to contact you. It’s a pattern of not respecting your personal space and privacy and assuming that they deserve those parts of your life because they like the way you look.

It’s not about just this one time where someone “hit on” you.

It’s how last week while walking with my mask on, someone stopped me to tell me I was beautiful.

It’s how months ago, I was sitting at a restaurant with a friend by the window and a security guard stopped on the sidewalk to stare at me for an hour during the meal, waiting for me, even though I kept avoiding eye contact and could see it from the corner of my eye.

It’s about how before that, I was in an Uber going home and the driver asked if I was single and told me I was beautiful and he would love to take me home.

And before that, the security guard at my workplace who kept asking me to go out with him every morning he saw me and told me I was breaking his heart.

And the guy at the bakery who checked that I was over 18 years old before telling me he “loves my body” and would “show me a good time” while I was buying a birthday cake for a friend.

Or the time I was on a train with my parents in a foreign country and while I was asleep, a man woke me up to try to get me to go away with him.

But more than each of the many many instances of public harassment, it’s about how people will still say that I’m paranoid. They will tell me to just “Give the guy a chance” and tell me that my stories are exaggerated.

When I was on the train with my parents, the man had tapped on my foot and felt up to my knee to wake me up. I woke up and tried to tell him to go away but was so tired and could barely speak from fatigue and fear. My mom woke up and yelled at him to leave us alone. Despite her witnessing the event, my dad told me that I was lying and I was safe because nothing like that could ever happen.

I’m not looking for pity, I’m looking for understanding. For anyone who can relate to the feeling of being so scared because someone can find out information about where you live and find your work email so easily from a conversation.

People say we build walls to keep others out, but it’s also to keep yourself inside and safe.

Being open and vulnerable in a relationship takes a level of trust that I don’t think I have right now. With friends and family, it’s different since the expectations aren’t based on attraction.

Why can’t relationships be similar? Why is attraction the starting point in figuring out whether you want to date someone?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. The different instances of harassment have made me so much more tired of dating and men. Each of my relationships started from knowing each other in person and mutual trust and enjoyment of our personalities. When someone compliments my looks, my survival instinct now kicks into gear because I have associated it so heavily with instances of public harassment.

For those of you who are about to say the way we look is supposed to be complimented, please check yourself.

Our genetics and the way we look are in small part due to our own influence and so largely pre-determined. Instead, get to know us as people and not objects to collect. Make us feel like humans who have the ability to say no and have our opinions respected. Give us space to deal with the years of trust issues and boundaries we have formed to survive.

Don’t try to step in to save the day because we need to fight our battles ourselves and not feel like we need a savior in our lives. But mostly, listen to the years of hurt that have formed us. That’s what I want. I don’t want the stranger who tries to take me off a train, follows me home, or finds where I work.

I want to get back to dating someday. But right now, I’m working on holding my pepper spray a little less tight at night.