On Creeps

Let’s talk creepy, shall we?

So here’s the thing: everyone can be creepy. It’s not just a dude thing. But, I do have to admit that usually if someone is being creepy toward me, it’s a person who identifies as male. I’m not trying to be a fat/ugly/unshaven/man-hating kinda feminist…I’m just saying. You dig? Cool.

Back to creepy: it’s not an adjective with which you want to be described! Right? Right. So let’s talk about a hypothetical situation of something you should not do:

Let’s say you happen to be on JDate, or OKCupid, or any such fabulously awkward dating site for the forward thinking sexually frustrated romantically cynical millennials that we are. Great! You’re probably having an awesome time browsing through all those cute profiles, trying to figure out who you should message and what you should say. Finally, you pick someone! You IM her, and she answers! OMG! You guys totally hit it off online. But it doesn’t stop there––you sign back on the next night, and have another great conversation with the same girl! High five! So then, let’s say you gather up all your courage, and ask her for her full name, so you guys can be Facebook friends. Granted, from the experience I now have, I have to admit she’s kind of a fucking idiot to oblige this request before you two have formally met in person, but presuming she’s still in this naive stage of the online dating world, she gives you the info. Dude, you are so in. She’s practically said yes to the future marriage proposal! You guys have hit it off so well, and you are absolutely getting some when you finally meet! SCORE!

Okay, so continuing on with this totally hypothetical situation. You exchange phone numbers and set a time to meet in person. You’re both actually pretty psyched. Day of the meeting comes, you recognize each other at Starbucks on the Upper West Side, you sit down over two cups of chai tea and…ugh. I’m sorry to break it to you, bro, but she is just so not into you. I know, because in this completely made up and hypothetical situation, the girl is called Vanessa and guess what SHE’S ME! So yeah, I promise she’s not into you. It’s not your fault––there are just no sparks. The witty banter that seemed so great online is totally stale and cliche in person, you are being awkwardly touchy for the first official date, and your lips are covered with a weird coating of saliva (don’t judge my superficial complaint, assholes––you all have certain superficial standards for the people you plan to date/fuck, too!) So yeah. I’m just gonna say it, soon-to-be creepy dude––there is no way this is going anywhere. Hypothetically.

So right, back to this totally made up situation. Let’s pretend the girl is polite on the date and doesn’t run away screaming when she realizes you don’t click, and you actually walk to the subway platform together. You’re going uptown and she’s going downtown; you make small talk until her train comes. She politely declines to make future plans, but does not overtly tell you not to call her.

What is the appropriate course of action to take after this dud of a date, you may ask? Well, I’m so glad you did! Let me first tell you what is not appropriate in these hypothetical circumstances:

1. Not appropriate to send 4 text messages within one hour of saying goodbye, even when she does not respond to any of them. Definitely not appropriate for 2 of the 4 texts to be sexually explicit. Absolutely not appropriate to get obviously angry in the last text and demand a response immediately. Hint: that’s all creepy.

2. Not appropriate to call the girl three times after the text-debacle. Not appropriate to sound really entitled to a second date, and really not appropriate to demand a reason why she has no interest in dating you. Look, I’ve been there, and we all want to know why we are undesirable to certain people we find very desirable. Those types of soul-searching heart-wrenching spirit-killing cry-fest conversations are sometimes okay to have; say, for example, you’re in love with your best friend of four years, and you try to kiss him one night, and then he says he doesn’t love you like that, and you sob hysterically and leave his house and drive away into the night playing Jack Johnson loudly on the stereo and probably waking up your suburban neighbors…I mean that’s a hypothetical situation too, obviously. But whatever. What I’m saying is, as a random girl you met online through a dating site who agreed to go on one single coffee date with you that lasted 30 minutes at most, I owe you nothing. So yes, you guessed it: the actions described here fall under the category of creepy!

3. Not appropriate to sulk on the phone after you both establish there will not be a second date. Also not appropriate to message the girl via the online dating site the next day to ask if she really hasn’t changed her mind. CREEPY.

4. Not appropriate to send a Facebook message to the girl, after she deletes you off her Friends list because she seriously regrets ever letting you add her in the first place, that reads: “WHY?” Super creepy.

5. And guess what? It’s not appropriate to keep friending the girl on Facebook for months after this whole stupid hypothetical theoretical interaction, like, trying every few weeks or so, because you know, she still doesn’t want to date you, and you were never friends, and you’ve proved yourself to be such a fucking creep that do you understand why every time my Blackberry buzzes and I see a Facebook notification that says “XXXX XXXXX has requested to add your as a friend” I want to hurl my fucking phone against a wall because what the fuck dude, you are so fucking creepy, can you just stop already?! Jeez!

I mean not that this hypothetical situation is true or anything. Or that #5 happened today for the 6th time since this hypothetical incident, which occurred in July, by the way. Obviously this is just hypothetical.

But, were this to happen, I would be really fucking pissed off that this guy has clearly decided he has some sort of right to a date with me, or at the very least, a chance to fuck me. I’d be so aggravated that he interpreted some flirty chats online as a ticket to something more. I’d tell him that I owe him nothing, that I don’t owe anyone anything inherently, and that he is harassing me and I wish we’d never met, not even for 30 minutes in Starbucks. I’d tell him his persistence isn’t sexy, and actually it’s creepy. I’d tell him I don’t need any help feeling threatened or intimidated by men. I’d tell him to fuck off.

I don’t want to engage, though, because clearly engaging would be viewed as encouragement. So instead I keep hitting “Ignore” when the friend requests come through, and I wrote an angry blog post about it. Now I have to go write a manifesto against rape for one of my last college assignments. I think I have worked up the appropriate amount of rage to accomplish that in an appropriate manner.

Tags: anecdote, fucked up, hypothetically, i'm not always angry but right now i am