h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

And how do you know you have?

If it involves the two of you sharing a place where you both have a right and a reason to be - ie, a university campus perhaps - then this is tricky.

What are your motives? Are you there because your own degree is important to you, or are you thinking in deluded terms of wanting to be where she is? Has the "wanting to be where she is" bit taken over from, and feels more important and pressing, than "I am attending this university because I have a course of study which is important to me" bit?

Then it isn't an unfortunate coincidence, your motives make it clear that you're stalking.

Are you changing your habits to hang around pubs or clubs or parts of town where she goes? Then you're not "doing different", you're actively pursuing a woman who's already made it clear she wants nothing to do with you.

Do you have a conviction that one day she'll change her opinion of you and allow you to get closer, all you need do is hang on in there?

Then you're stalking.

Have you agonised to friends about her and seeing her with another guy? Then you're stalking.

Do you obsessively compare yourself with the other guy and wonder wehat she seees in him? Then you're stalking.

Have you visualised, for instance, his falling under the London train late night at the railway station? Then you're getting dangerous.

Has she crossed the road to avoid you or turned round and walked in the other direction? Have you felt crushed and low and rejected by this? Do you want to run afer her when this happens and try to explain you're a normal guy, she should not be afraid? You're stalking.

Have you no interest at all or attraction to any other woman you see? Is the feeling like a blue-white incandescent flame for this one woman?
You're stalking.

Do your feelings for her vary from romantic desire, to abject desair at her rejection of you, to fits of barely containable rage and frustration at the whole stupid situation?

Have you lost a lot of weight, developed a drinking problem or insomnia?

Have you even considered "magickal" rites out of the pages of Aleistar Crowley to try and win her?

Have you had vivid and upsetting dreams where you are isolated and cut off from the rest of the world, say by being trapped inside a soundproof clear glass cage through which you can watch her go about her everyday life?

This, my friend, is stalking, and the very worst kind is the sort you do inside your own head because most of the time this has the most destructive results.

I shudder to say I've been there and I recognmise most of the above because they happened to me. (At the end of a long-term relationship, when I was feeling vulnerable and hurt and lost, I fixated on a woman who suddenly became the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen... she lived on the floor above me at the same hall of residence, so we were around the same places a lot. Alas, she soom let her opinion of me be known and it wasn't reciprocal. Instead of accepting this I agonised about it and took it to heart and lived through a very painful year. Fortunately there was just enough of a sane core in there for me to realise there was only one way to cure it. She still had time to do at uni. I'd graduated. Therefore it wasn't rocket science: the best thing for me was to leave town (Norwich) and put myself where she wasn't. It hurt like a lost limb and it took a year ro two to fade, but fade it did.

Nearly twenty years on I looked her up on the Internet.

Result: she lives in Southampton. I'm in Manchester. And her face on her website has changed. She is not the woman I obsessed with all those years ago. It's over: the illness is dead. So I can say to other guys in my position - it takes time but it dies, in the end, if you make a decision to seperate yourself and walk away.

And Siobhan - I wish you well and hope we never meet again. Thank you.

Hmm, maybe I should write the Guide entry on Stalking, from the point of view of the stalker...

I'm aware this is going to make me sound like some flaky loser with mental health issues, and this is likely to have been an accurate judgement of me in the years 1988-90.

In my defence:- these things happened nearly twenty years ago. The last time I saw the lady I was fixated upon would have been sometime around 1993.

Even while it was happening there was a tiny little core of sanity, deep down inside, that was capable of seeing things clearly and preventing me from doing anything really stupid.

I guess I was also lucky in that at the time - the late 1980's - "stalking" was not even a new word, it had yet to be coined. Nobody knew very much about it and it hadn't had the degree of press and TV attention the phenomenon later attracted.

(If I'd done what I did in 1998 - who knows?)

But I can't believe, now, the insanely exposed position I put myself in. For one thing, in the winter of 1988 there was a series of sexual assaults on women students in the part of town where she lived*... a temporarily unhinged male known to have a fixation on a woman living in the area might today be one of the first people pulled in for investigation, or a handy plant to fit up for the crime (a la Colin Stagg). Indeed, what if the assault had been worse, or even murder?

Shudders. Still, it's all over now... but a big motivation for my writing this, and dredging up an episode where I did not cover myself with glory, might be to chart how an otherwise normal bloke could go off at a tangent like that and how it took a few yers to get my sanity back.

Could this happen to any bloke or just a deviant few of us? I've thought about it - I consider any man could easily go rogue and stalk if the circumstances were right.

Feedback, please, as this would not be a psychologically easy project...


*Not guilty.

I'm sure it could happen to anyone of us, I know I've oddly impulsive, compulsive and any other '*****slive' about many ex-partners in the past.

However, if you'd asked me about them dumping me before the event, of being 'unduely dumped' I would have shrugged, and grinned my head off, as I started to mentally plan an almighty 'Sex-fest' with a whole host of fantasy women that I knew in my life.

This where the reality of 'being dumped' differs from the ficticious version of it in a chaps mind.

The reality means you're going to have to go through that whole routine of 'Chatting up', being what you want them to think you are and much worse, saying, "I can take or leave sex." and making yourself look senistive and caring.

Stalking and all other odd habits that may lead to making up with an ex-partner could be, infact the lazy version of dealing with loneliness of losing a partner through 'being dumped'.....All perfectly natural and wholesome if done sensitively, descreetly and discarded once you have been found out.

Anything beyond this could be considered 'illness'. And it is recommended that Medical advice should be carefully considered, if you are able to cafefully consider. By comparison, the 'Prozac set' is a much better place to be rather than drooling up a tree outside your ex's new flat.

Thanks!

I've never done Prozac, although I had a good time on beta-blockers (which weren't prescribed for me, but this little detail didn't stop me)

On BB's, I was on a mellow even "float" for three days straight. No sleep, just feeling totally relaxed for the first time in ages... did me the world of good!

You could, as a suggestion only, make you're own Prozac. My own recipe.

But you could never get enough Hendricks Gin and Chocolate ice cream into your system before you become violently ill, or in some cases just violent.

I've seldom get past the manufacturing stage and can be frequently found on the kitchen floor with an empty bottle of Hendricks Gin, with an amazingly friendly grin on my chocolate ice cream stained visage, singing, "She's goooooonnneeee, goooooooonneee, She's Goooonnnnnee...." over and over.

Nobody can stalk in that state, nor would want to. Further, the song is also a bit of a giveaway whilst hidden in the bushier parts of her garden Hawthorn tree. Assuming you can climb up there, drunk and full of chocolate ice cream.

I was dumped last night after dating a girl since November. I was very much in love with her. Things got sort of tense over the last few weeks. I just wish she'd given me a bit more of a chance. Last night she told me I'm perfect and the whole "it's not you it's me" thing. I would love to just throw myself in front of a train at this point. I know I will have to go to a psychiatrist for this. Meds have really helped in the past. I just hate the feeling of emptiness... It feels so pathetic. I'm a good looking guy, I've got money, I know how to have a good time. I would have done anything for this girl. I don't want to stalk her so I don't know why I replied to this particular thread. I guess I would stak her if I felt that she would somehow respond positively to that.

The feeling of unfairness at being unceremoniously 'dumped' may actually lead some to stalk, to somehow punish the ex-object of their affections. It's never a pastime that will ever have a positive outcome.

I find putting your head down and soldiering on regardless, then onward to normality. Keeping yourself busy, not stalking, not wondering 'why?' and doing what you like to do. Keep away from alcohol and your mobile phone!

Never look for sympathy from your ex. It won't happen. You will only get pseudo-sympathy to appease their own feelings of guilt, thus giving you false hope of a reconciliation. This will not happen, unless they come to you.

I've just turned fifty, I'm sitting here with a glass of good Scotch reflecting on the past, and I remembered I started this thread a few years ago. Having just revisited my God-awful mess of a final year at university and sensing my attempt at being conciliatory and offering a much belated apology has been conclusively rebuffed by two people who were there at the time (as is their right). Thought I'd check in here and see if anyone else has added to the discussion. Won't be rushing to offer apology to Siobhan - maybe some things are better left undisturbed - and I'm not sure of how deeply I sffected her, anyway. i had the brains to get out and not make a bad situation worse, anyway. You never know, I might write that article On Having Been A Stalker... some people won't think any better of me for it, but what the hell, at least I tried.