I Ignored My Intuition. You’ll Never Guess What Happened Next…

A few years back, I had a short and scary relationship with a man who has some profound issues. Not being a diagnostic specialist, I don’t know exactly which diagnoses he qualifies for, but I could tell you in detail how he operates, and what it’s like to be in a relationship with him. I’m not going to do that here because I’ve worked so hard to leave the details behind me. What is important to this post, though, is that the relationship scared me and it made my daughters feel unsafe in their bodies, for good reason. I did a good bit of research into breaking up with people who have the same characteristics this man does, and I followed that advice when I ended my relationship with this man. It all seemed to work at first. My daughters and I were able to move on without any physical or sexual violence directed at us, and I felt like the world was a good place once again. It’s the only relationship break-up I’ve been through that left me giddy, that made me smile for days, that had me waking up happy, the only one I never shed a single tear during.

Until this man started to show up in a growing number of places around our small town, standing too close, stomping back and forth in front of me, standing always in my line of sight and staring, contacting my close friends and family to talk about me, joking with my house-sitter about sleeping in my bed while I was away, watching my daughter in the school playground (where his child is also a student) and parking lot, contacting me via email and social media. And then he continued these behaviors for a year after I asked him in writing not to initiate any sort of contact with me or my children. When he tracked my ex-husband down to invite him out for a beer, I looked the other way. But when he cornered me at a school festival, putting his body well within my personal space after I told him my festival station was closed, when he said, “I know, I’m just here to watch,” and when this interaction prompted yet another email contact, one that accused me of inciting drama and that spoke longingly of how much he’d like to sit down and share a piece of cake and talk with me, and when my lack of response to that brought him to block the narrow hallway inside my daughter’s school the next morning, where I was meeting with her teacher, I finally caved. I did what the local police had urged me to do a year before and what the YWCA Domestic Violence volunteer told me I met the standard for – I filed a motion to request a Domestic Violence Order of Protection to end the stalking  of myself and my daughters.

And when this man hired an attorney at the last minute and filed for a continuance that put the full hearing onto the docket of a pro tem judge whose regular day job is as a land use attorney, I knew I was in trouble but I didn’t see any other option. I wanted to regain my freedom of movement in my small community, I wanted to know that I’d be able to schedule a meeting at a coffee shop without fearing that he’d disrupt it, that I’d be able to go see some live music without having to bring a group of friends willing to form a living shield around me, that my daughter would be able to play at school without his gaze upon her. And since I was telling the whole truth in my statements to the court, I needed to stand and ask that my truth be heard and weighed.

And, this being how these things frequently go, I lost.

And, this being how these things frequently go, he didn’t change his behavior. He continues to attempt third party contact with me and he seemed happy to block my daughter at the school gate, so that she had to brush up against him to get past.

I expected all of this and I know I have to live with it. At this point, the only thing I can hope for is that he stops of his own accord (something that hasn’t happened yet in the 3 years since I ended our short relationship, but it’s always possible) or that he escalates his behavior to do something so obviously threatening that a judge of any caliber will recognize it as reasonably threatening. He’s smart enough to know how to stick right on the boundary, so this is what I expect for years to come and I am learning to live with it.

What I hadn’t expected was that my attempt to protect my daughters and myself from a person who scares us is that I was earning myself a label as “crazy” and “vindictive” and “unbalanced” and whatever else he has convinced his friends I am. These are educated guesses, based on how he described his ex-partners to me and I know how easily his charisma convinced me that he was telling the truth. I’m sure the people he talks to now believe what he says about me. And in this “he said, she said” scenario, there is no way for me to successfully address any of this picture of me. All I can do is carry on, bringing my true self to my friendships and counting on time to allow the full truth to emerge. The thing is, I live in a small, geographically-isolated community, and truth has a funny way of hiding here. People love drama, and people love to believe bad things about each other. And sadly, when it comes to this particular sort of situation, it’s a lot more comforting to believe that a woman is a crazy, vindictive ex than to believe that the man sitting across from you telling you the story really is a stalker. Crazy exes are easier to live around than creepy men.

I look back at this  now and I don’t see anything I could have done differently except at the very beginning. I could have paid attention to my intuition, the bells going off in my head that said, “something about this isn’t right.” I muted them in deference to my friends and family who kept telling me, “just get out there and date, go on – give people a second chance, don’t be too fast to judge, it’s weird to date at this age, everyone has baggage…” But it was my choice to ignore my intuition, and that choice has me here now, with a label that further constricts my already small community into an even smaller group of friends who are willing to overlook it, hopefully because they know it to be a falsehood.

And now that I’ve been through this life experience that I share with too many women, I don’t have any good advice other than this: Trust your intuition. Because if you find yourself in a relationship with someone who scares you, there is no guarantee that you’ll get relief. You may have to learn to live with it, counting yourself lucky to be living and learning how to hide in plain sight in your hometown.