Unrequited (19 page)

THE DARK SIDE
of the urge to pursue, no matter which gender is doing the chasing, is its potential for harm. Romantic pursuit, as we’ve seen, falls along a continuum. At one end are courtship initiatives, with the risks, pleasures, and privileges of being the one who takes the lead. At the other is criminal stalking, which can ruin lives.

H. Colleen Sinclair, a psychology professor at Mississippi State University, has done extensive research on this continuum. For her, the movement from courtship to stalking is clear, no matter who is the perpetrator. At one end of the continuum are everyday efforts—flirting, attentive emails and texts, phone calls—to form a relationship or reconcile one. Then there are surveillance and monitoring behaviors, when pursuers’ motivations are a blend of love and anger. All along the way, frequency and degree matter: Is it one text a day or a hundred? A dozen roses or a roomful of them? Then there are the most extreme measures: trespassing, threats, harassment, coercion, and violence. At this point, “there’s no romance,” she said. “They are doing this to hurt. Once they move from surveillance to aggression, the line isn’t blurry.”

Pursuers may tell themselves that their stalking is a form of love or courtship, she allowed, but that’s “just like we used to talk about a rapist as the guy who is overwhelmed with passion.” Today we have a similar myth about stalking. “People think it’s about being so in love, you’re not able to control yourself,” Sinclair explained. “But you’re driven by retaliation and obsession rather than love and
idealization. Once you’re aggressive, you’re not idealizing. You’re not in love. All that’s left is the obsession.”

Stalking is commonly seen as a crime against women, and for good reason. According to a 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence (NIPSV) survey,
women are three times more likely than men to have been stalked. That still means plenty of male stalking victims. One in nineteen men have been stalked, and about half reported their stalkers were female. The definition of criminal stalking varies somewhat from state to state, but the three main criteria for the crime are repeated, unwanted, and intrusive behaviors; implicit or explicit threats; and causing fear. The NIPSV study surveyed self-identified victims and was based on a definition of stalking that led them to feel “very fearful” or
believe that they or someone in their life would be harmed or killed as a result.

But intent and fear are often not clear in the complex dynamics of unwanted romantic and sexual pursuit. Targets may not feel the level of alarm the NIPSV study assessed. They may not perceive themselves as victims, even when they feel harassed and afraid. Pursuers may not see themselves as wanting to cause harm. If we set aside these questions and again turn our focus to a softer definition of stalking,
the gender disparity markedly diminishes.

Sinclair began to see this pattern emerge during her graduate studies in the 1990s, a time when anti-stalking laws were new. She’d gotten into the field out of an interest in what she had been calling “violence against women.” She had done stints volunteering at a battered women’s shelter and on a rape-crisis hotline. Yet the research she was working on, along with studies on
other forms of relationship violence and abuse, was showing again and again that there were plenty of female aggressors and male victims, too many to see as aberrations. The idea that stalking was purely a matter of “patriarchal terrorism” didn’t hold up. “It was a change in
perspective,” she said. “I don’t refer to it as violence against women anymore. It’s interpersonal violence or relationship aggression. Before, it had always been seen as a women’s issue.”

Several peer-reviewed studies conducted since 2000 scrutinize the question of gender and unwanted pursuit. The results show that women are just as likely as men to engage in a number of stalking tactics—and even
more
likely to resort to certain kinds. In one study, approximately one third of women reported using “mild aggression”—including threats, verbal abuse, and physical abuse—after a breakup,
compared to about a quarter of men. In another set of findings on obsessive relational intrusion,
the rate of women who stole or damaged property was twice the rate of men—and the rate of women who caused physical harm was almost three times higher.
Female pursuers were just as likely as male pursuers to resort to severe violence, such as kicking and choking. Criminology researcher Carleen M. Thompson pinpointed one possible reason that the level of female-perpetrated relationship pursuit violence is so high:
a sociocultural attitude that is more disapproving of male violence against women than female violence against men.

Women, the research suggests, are giving themselves the gender pass. They may be more likely to feel they have a right to their behavior, while men, with the “chivalry norm” that stigmatizes violence against women, are more likely to know that, at least in principle, they shouldn’t be getting out of hand. Researcher Leila Dutton at the University of New Haven has considered the possibility that one reason the rates of female stalking behaviors are so high is that women may feel less defensive about what they are doing. That makes them more comfortable than men are about reporting their pursuit behaviors in a survey, even though their identity remains anonymous. “It’s much less socially acceptable for a
man to hit a woman,” she said. “We don’t take women’s violence as seriously, so women can get away with it.”

This assumption is compounded by the widespread impression that female stalkers of male targets don’t cause real harm. Research into perceptions of stalking scenarios finds that respondents view female stalkers as less dangerous and problematic than male stalkers. Male victims of female stalkers are seen as better able to defend themselves than female victims. It’s not hard to guess why the perceived scariness of male stalkers might overshadow the impact of female stalkers. “Given that men have more privilege, power, size, and muscle, there’s greater fear associated with their pursuit activities,” said Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling, a clinical psychology professor at the University of South Alabama who studies relationship violence. “But when we don’t view female aggression as serious or noteworthy, women don’t get feedback that their behavior is not okay.” As several experts pointed out, the “privilege, power, size, muscle” rationale only goes so far once gender-neutral tools of the stalking trade enter the picture. How much weight a stalker can bench-press doesn’t matter in cyberspace or once she has a pistol in her hand.

My own behavior with B. was never violent or threatening. But I was invasive. When he opened his front door in response to my compulsive knocking, the tight, guarded look on his face and the sharp tone in his voice surprised me. I had become something he felt he needed to defend himself against. It took me a long time to admit that my pursuit of B. could have been harmful. I saw what I was doing mainly as self-destructive. If I used the word “stalking” to describe my actions, it was always with some irony. It was only when I gender-flipped my experience that I could come to terms with what I did. When I envisioned a man acting as I had, I saw a creepy stalker, with nothing ironic about him.

In my discussions with researchers and clinical psychologists, I discovered that they found gender-flipping a persuasive tool in getting women and girls to face the implications of female stalking. In one of H. Colleen Sinclair’s psychology classes, her students insisted that Tiger Woods’s ex-wife, Elin Nordegren, was justified in allegedly chasing him out of the house with a golf club and causing his SUV to crash—until Sinclair asked them to consider how they’d feel if Tiger had been the one wielding a golf club in a jealous fury. In a relationship violence-prevention program run by Langhinrichsen-Rohling and colleagues for low-income pregnant teens in Mobile, Alabama, several girls told stories of aggressively tracking and confronting the fathers of their children. The girls defended their behavior on the grounds that they suspected the fathers were cheating on them or had new girlfriends. The others in the group agreed with this reasoning. They tended to see female vengeance as exciting. “They thought, ‘Yeah, she was really taking it to him!’” Langhinrichsen-Rohling said. She countered by asking what they would think if they were listening to males telling the same stories. “Over and over I would pose hypotheticals and switch the gender, and we’d see perceptions change.”

In my interviews with women whose pursuit crossed The Line between courtship and harassment, I found that their focus, like Patricia’s, was usually on how they’d been wronged. They were seeking love, the truth, rightful retribution. They couldn’t be hurting their beloved—he was the one hurting
them
. Psychotherapist Rhonda Findling, the author of
Don’t Text That Man
, said, “They’re so fixated on the other person, they don’t even care about him. They don’t care what he’s saying.” This narcissistic trance isn’t unique to women. Yet while men fall into this trance despite strong social messages that warn them not be aggressive, women don’t
have these cautions. They may even use the stereotype of the male aggressor as a weapon in their pursuit.

LUKE, A FIFTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD
marketing director, first described Dara to me as “the porch diver.” She had become a family joke, a story he hauled out regularly. “I look at the whole thing with mild amusement. It’s funny. It’s a party story.”

He met Dara through an online dating service. They went out for margaritas. She told him that she had recently gone through a rough divorce. Her husband, she told Luke, had served her with papers when she was in the hospital, recovering from a serious accident.

At the end of the evening, Luke said in the noncommittal parlance of Internet dating that it had been nice to meet her. She replied with a question: “If you could ask me anything to do next, anything at all, what would you ask?”

“I’m a guy, and she’s an attractive woman,” he told me somewhat sheepishly. “So I said, ‘Well, come home with me and go to bed with me.’”

She came home with him, went to bed with him, and didn’t leave. She immediately assumed “all the trappings of a girlfriend,” Luke said. She was possessive and insisted he get off the dating sites he frequented. She wanted him to stop talking to other women, even his friends. After two weeks, he told her she needed to go home.

She called him several times a day. He didn’t pick up when he saw her caller ID, but sometimes she’d get to him through the office staff at work. “She’d be really hostile,” he said. “Like, ‘What are you doing, ducking my calls? You don’t want to speak to me? Is that how little I meant to you?’” Luke’s son played in a band, and Dara regularly showed up in the audience with her friends.

She came to his house early one morning to get some of her things. She pulled from his closet a few shirts she had bought him and grabbed some shirts that she hadn’t.

“Some of those are mine,” he said. “I’d like to keep them.”

“They’re all mine,” she said. “You’re not getting them.”

He followed her out to his front porch, trying to get his shirts back. She started to scream. Then she threw herself down, face-first, on the tiled concrete porch floor. She stood up, her nose bleeding. “You hit me, you knocked me down!” she yelled. “I’m calling the cops.” She dialed 911.

Two squad cars arrived. Luke and Dara gave their contradictory statements. He tried to stay calm, reasoning that the more rattled he acted, the more he’d seem like a domestic abuser. “I was pretty sure I was going to go to jail,” he said. “I felt like you do when you’re in traffic and someone smacks into your car.”

The police were getting ready to take Luke in when a couple of his neighbors came out and told them they’d seen Dara hurl herself to the floor. The police offered Luke the opportunity to press charges against her for making a false report. Luke gave her the gender pass instead. “No,” he said. “I just want her out of here.”

He has since learned from Facebook (he didn’t dare unfriend her) that she was seeing someone else, though she occasionally dropped hints in a status or a comment that she was still interested in him. Near the end of our conversation, he told me that he was in a new relationship, too. “I’m off the deep end with this one,” he said. “I’m hoping she’s the last love of my life.” He confessed that he lived with a steady fear that what happened with Dara could happen again. “It’s deeply affected me, even though I have a calm demeanor and try to take everything calmly.”

What happened with Dara, then, was much more than a party story Luke could pull out for laughs. Dara and the hazard she
represented was an ongoing source of worry, shaping his emotional landscape. The freewheeling divorcé’s existence that he’d been living suddenly seemed treacherous.

The contrast between Luke’s initial persona, of a laid-back guy who could brush off a one-night stand gone awry, and that of a man transformed by fear is emblematic of the contradictory state of the male stalking victim. A review of research on male victims of relationship-related stalking published in the
International Journal of Men’s Health
in 2009 shows these men not only feel that they are less likely to be taken seriously, they also tend to take themselves less seriously. Men will describe stalking acts as frustrating or annoying rather than threatening or frightening. They are less likely to call themselves victims, and they are less likely to contact the police. Yet they confess to being changed by the experience. They may become more cautious and paranoid, or
suffer from anxiety and shifts in their attitudes and personality. In these ways, male targets of female stalking are victims—but if no one wants to see them as such, they become invisible, even to themselves.

Langhinrichsen-Rohling has described several reasons why this is so. Men are generally less likely to get involved with the legal system for a relationship-related problem. Men may feel humiliated if they’re afraid of a woman, who is usually smaller and perceived as less dangerous. Certain acts, such as raising a clenched fist, are viewed as dangerous when the aggressor is male and the target female,
yet may be considered laughable when the roles are reversed.