Why do people "stalk"?

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That was truly a remarkably insightful and concise answer. Probably the best one I've ever heard given to describe stalking and why people do it.

I somehow doubt that a sensitive person would cause so much distress and anguish to someone who never wronged them.

They are so delusional they are not aware of the problems they are causing. Some of em may of been hurt by the stalkee in the past & they sort of lost their minds

I'm sorry to hear of your experience, that must have been scary.

But I would say that a stalker is someone who persistantly crosses over boundaries to the point where it makes you uncomfortable and begins to scare you. Especially when you repeatedly tell the person that you do not want them to contact you. It doesn't have to get this serious to qualify as stalking.

I guess that depends what is motivating the stalker to do what they do to begin with. I'm uncertain that all stalkers are predatory people who are seeking those out with vulnerabilities to exploit, disempower and dominate. I think the motivations will vary quite considerably.

It's origins can vary quite considerably from outright strangers to former partners being the the stalker or the victim.

If I remember my research into this correctly, there are two distinct romantic stalkers. 1) the violent type and 2) the non-violent type.

Both can be extremely scary, and motivation does vary. However, one thing all romantic stalkers have in common is the delusion that they are in some kind of relationship with their victim.

Thank you for your concern.
I agree with you that any persistent boundary-crossing attention that makes you feel uncomfortable and begins to scare you is wrong and could be called stalking. I described the situation I was in to explain my first post in this thread where I talked about stalkers delusional thinking and the reasons causing that kind of behavior. I think "delusional thinking" doesn't always apply in "milder" cases.
However I still don't think that occasional clueless breaking of unwritten social rules should be called stalking. I was referring to Jory (he posted just above my post).

Some of them used to be in a relationship with their victim too.

Yes, and I believe those ones tend to be the violent type. Usually, it was a dysfunctional relationship to begin with.

I suppose it depends on what definition of "stalking" you're talking about - Psychopathic stalkers - by this, I mean stalkers that cause deliberate harm to the target or the target's family and/or friends - are lumped in with people who are slightly over-eager. They are miles apart.

I realised that you were refering to Jory's post about breaking unwritten social rules. That can scare people too and make them feel violated. They expect one thing to happen and then something completely different happens and they are scared because they feel that someone has crossed a line that they knew existed, but unknown to them, the other person didn't realise that this line was there.

This happend between a couple of people I know. We'll call them Alice and Lucy. They met at a party and Alice wanted to be friends with Lucy and they exchanged cell phone numbers. However Alice kept on texting Lucy throughout the next day. I suggested that she might be better off waiting for Lucy to text back before texting her again, but she didn't see why she should hold off. They had got on well the night before, so why would Lucy mind the texts? They were friends now. I later found out that after that Alice had phoned Lucy 15 times in one day. Lucy hadn't been out and had forgoten her cell phone. At the end of the day she was freaked out by the amount of missed calls she had from one person whom she had only met a few days before.

Alice didn't understand that she had broken an unwritten rule and kept trying to get in touch with Lucy not realising that her behaviour seemed obsessive and stalker like. This scared Lucy who then changed her phone number. A stalker doesn't neccesarily mean any harm, they can be a lonely, over-enthusiastic person who doesn't understand social rules. When people break the social rules it can be scary. You don't know whether they mean harm or not. You just know that you feel violated.

Some people resort to stalking because they have been rejected too many times in the past and they are lonely and have probably become desperate and needy.

I realized that it's easier to develop obsessive emotions when you are desperate and lonely because of you having been rejected in the past. After all, we all know the cruel trick our mind plays once we realize the object of our affection doesn't (and probably will never) feel the same way: we just fall in love harder with the unavailable person.

Last edited by LikeGreenAndBlue on 13 Jun 2011, 4:57 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Perhaps they have never really grown up. They have stuck to the phase where they can not yet separate themselves from the rest of the world. The other person is not really a person to them, he/she is only a part of them. They can't really understand that the object of their stalking has a mind and feelings of their own.

What gets me is these unwritten social rules and how people think what stalker behavior is.

This could be Female/ male but I'll use male to female as an example. I also don't mean to say all women are like this, but for example:

I'm interested in a girl, she has no interest in me. But I call her like 3 times in one day, leaving messages everytime. She thinks I'm a stalker and tells me to leave her alone. But if someone she likes does the exact same thing, that's ok.

I think the word stalker shouldn't be used unless the behavior is illegal or could warrant a restraining-order

Yes, that's my daughter's ex-boyfriend