Lisa’s Story: Stalking

When I was about 16 or 17, a guy I dated suddenly became extremely possessive. I was so young that I was flattered by his attention which we would now called possessiveness or stalking. If he called my house and the line was busy, he would call everybody he could think of that I might be talking to – especially another young man I liked. One day after a band practice (he was in the band too) I went to another friends house (the other guy he thought I was talking to) to see where he was. He hadn’t shown up for band practice and I was concerned. I peeked around the corner and saw this other boyfriend come driving by. I had no idea that what he was doing was stalking as I was so young and at the time nobody had come up with the word “stalking.” I didn’t have a lot of self esteem so to have that kind of attention I thought was really cool. It was like “oh, he likes me.” What I should have thought was “oh, he’s a psycho; run the other way.” But like I said I was just so young and naive. I found out much later how really creepy he was and finally dumped him. It took a long time for me to realize what was going on, but I finally got rid of him. Finally!