Crystal asks: There’s a man who has been crazy in Love with me for about five years. I don’t feel anything for him, and I don’t want to. He is good at studying and can say is a good guy, but he is not my type. He is one year my senior and we are in same grade in high school. He is poor and we have different religions. Furthermore, he said he can’t stop this and thinks he’ll feel it forever. Whenever he sends a message to me, I have always ignored it because I’m getting bored with this. What should I do?
Hi Crystal –
This is very hard for me to say, because I am a hugely romantic-minded dog, and love the idea of forever-romance. But the fact is, this guy is wrong. His feelings for you will not last forever.
Look, I’m a dog, and no one loves stronger and more passionately than we do. But if we like someone who consistently ignores or rejects, or even lashes out, at us, we’ll eventually stop being interested in them. And similarly, if we have an owner we love enormously, who sells or gives us away to someone else, we’ll learn to love those new owners in just that way (though it might take a long time), and kind of forget our first ones.
Now humans have much bigger brains than we do, which makes you smarter and more stubborn! So I’m not saying that getting this guy to move on in his life will be as easy as it would be if he were a Schnauzer. But the truth is, he will move on.
Your job is to find ways to make it happen sooner.
So here are a few suggestions.
1) Next time he sends you a message, instead of just ignoring it (which clearly isn’t working), try sending back a cold but direct response: “Please stop sending me messages like this.” Don’t express any heightened emotion, just be coolly dismissive.
2) If he phones you, just say “I haven’t liked the messages you’ve been sending me, so I don’t want to speak with you.”
3) And if he approaches you in person, look him straight in the eyes and say, “I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in you. Please leave me alone.”
Now, if he’s truly an innocent guy in love, then these should do the trick big-time. He may feel hurt, or even resentful, but you’ve let him get away with his behaviors for five years! It’s time to change!
And if he doesn’t? Well, then he’s not the guy he pretends to be. Handsome once dated a woman who seemed very nice, and eventually he decided to break things off with her. For the next year, his phone would ring in the middle of the night, almost every night, and hang up (this is before the days of Caller ID, so he never had proof it was her), and he eventually found that she had spread mean rumors about him to many of their mutual friends, telling them that he had been cruel to her. She was NOT the nice person everyone thought, clearly! He felt bad about her hurt feelings, and so had no idea how to stop all this, until one day, he suddenly realized – and he called her up and told her to stop it. And it worked! She was so shocked at his confronting her that she was suddenly scared of what he might say or do!
But of course, it could have been worse. Maybe she wouldn’t have stopped even then. So what to do with someone like that? Well, I do have an answer for you, about how I dealt with a suitor who couldn’t understand the word “no.” For that one, go onto my website (AskShirelle.com) and put “HarrietteS” into the search box. You will LOVE the story it tells!
Simply put, Crystal, five years of your accepting this is about four years and nine months too long. I have nothing against people who fall in love and really try to make it work, but after a while, it becomes something else, with unromantic words like “Stalking” and “Abuse.” Most likely, this guy is better than that, and all you have to do is make him see your boundaries more clearly. But if not… well, check out that posting on my website!
And remember, in the end, this is a compliment. There’s something about you that’s made this fellow act like a complete fool, and you should be flattered that he has had this obsession. After all, the only guy who, I imagine, has ever thought of me that much for that long is Handsome – and his affections have always been returned!
Good Luck!
Shirelle
