Stalking

We've all heard about celebrity stalkers, but stalking affects an estimated 1.5 million ordinary men, women, and children in our country each year.Though more and more states are passing anti-stalking laws, many statutes define stalking as the "willful, malicious, and repeated following and harassing of another person" and add that an imminent threat of violence must be made for law enforcement to take action.

Rarely will someone march up to you and verbally threaten to do bodily harm, but stalking always has an implied threat of violence. Stalking is often much more sinister and insidious than a stated threat. So that you can take steps to protect yourself, you need to understand what goes on inside the stalker's head.

Remember the movie Fatal Attraction, in which Glenn Close plays a gorgeous, sexy, smart, available woman who was willing to be the Michael Douglas character's love slave for a weekend? You can just see him thinking, "This is just too good to be true."

Someone who is overly attentive, overwhelmingly thoughtful, and wants to be with you all the time - especially in these days when people seem to fear commitment - may seem terrific, but there may be a dark side. Believe me, if someone is too good to be true, believe it: it's not true.

A person who is not attentive can be rationalized as a product of a match made in heaven, someone who finally appreciates the real us, but it's breeding grounds for a stalker. A stalker is someone who craves that closeness in an addictive sense and whose own sense of self is so fragile the instant bonding with another is the only way they can quell the loneliness. With most stalkers, the seeds of the trouble are there from the beginning but since all of us want to be loved, we're willing to write the initial clinginess off as infatuation that is engendered by our wonderfulness.

Understand that the unbelievable instant closeness is just that - unbelievable. Obsession is not love. It is need, and the project of the obsession is nearly irrelevant. You make yourself safer from a stalker by not letting things get started, because once a stalker gets started, he or she is really hard to stop.