Beating A Dead Horse

Not a newly discovered fetish of mine but simply the way it feels when the same things crop up again and again with no end in sight. Is being clueless at epidemic levels?

I don’t like stalkers or people who exhibit stalker-like behavior. These folks don’t just come across as clueless about their behavior because they are not. These people (mostly men but not exclusively so) know exactly what they are doing, picking their targets and then pushing to see whether they gain any headway or not. A lot of times, people like this meet resistance so they move on to the person who will offer an opening by being either trusting or naive. Certainly not all stalkers are so calculating, some are just emotionally sick people, but I think a very large number of them do what they do with a determination that borders on sociopathic if not psychopathic.

Then there are others who don’t sink to the depths of a stalker yet still exhibit behavior that’s in the same neighborhood. These folks are needy with a capital “N” — sad or depressed on some level and probably very lonely. Their behavior is more presumptuous than dangerous and are the kind of people that after knowing you for five minutes, act as if they are your long lost friend. In the vanilla world it’s the person that invites themselves over for dinner or tags along with you on a night out uninvited. They are pushy in a passive/aggressive sort of way, doing it with a smile that begs for others to take pity upon them.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make connections or win friends. Human interraction is an important need in everyone except the ardent misanthrope but even the desire for friends has rules and etiquette. I compare this behavior to someone at a club who asks someone to dance and when told “no thank you” continues to try and sell the idea in the hopes that they will wear down the other person with their pitch. Although we all have to sell ourselves in some way, acting like an overly persistant retail salesman is probably not the way to go. Salesman often make sales not because their pitch convinced the other person but because it was so annoying and insistant that the customer bought the product just to make the salesman shut up.

Whether in a clothing store or the scene, this does not seem to me a pleasant way to make people like you. Sometimes we have to learn to accept the word “no” even if it is said in a nice way rather than harshly. However, there are people for whom the harsh way is the only way they’ll understand it.