For two years Chantel (not her real name) has been feeling like singing the blues from the church choir as she deals with a fellow parishioner who has decided that she is going to be in a relationship with him whether she wants to or not.
“He came up to me one Sunday after church and told me how beautiful my singing is and stuff like that,” Chantel said. “Then he came up another Sunday and told me his name and how old he was and asked what my name was. He asked was I dating anyone. I told him that I was – but that didn’t nip it in the bud.”
She has let him down easy. She has told him that she’s just not that into him. She even created an imaginary boyfriend in the hopes that it would keep him out of her face. It didn’t.
She has done everything short of sending a note from an anonymous concerned church member, but still has been consistently harassed by a passive-aggressive stalker.
“He gave me a card for my birthday,” Chantel said. “ Every Sunday after church he moves quickly to come up and say something to me, asking me to dinner, then asking my mom why don’t we all go out.”
The fact that he knows her birthday, considering the “hi and bye” nature of their strictly cordial church member relationship, had her feeling some sort of way, but dragging her mother in the mix took it to the next level.
“My mom is more straightforward than I am,” Chantel said. “She was like, ‘I know those fine women that raised you taught you that no means no.’”
Wrong!
When her mother didn’t take the bait, he enlisted his own mother to serve as some sort of tired “wing woman.”
His mother went so far as to get Chantel’s number and call her asking for Chantel to meet up with her over lunch or coffee to chat about something – though she didn’t say exactly what. Help.
“I don’t know why she wants to work on his behalf and thinks that I would want to date a man who doesn’t pay attention when you say ‘no.’ Or a man who sends his mama to try and work out his dating life for him,” Chantel said. “It’s really strange. I think everyone has had a kind of semi-stalker every now and again, but getting mama involved is something really new to me.”
Chantel never responded to the mother’s voicemail. Which seems to have made the mack daddy and his mama back down a bit from hemming her up after service – but it hasn’t stopped him from creeping her out with an uninterrupted gaze.
“I can’t even look a certain direction when I’m in the choir because I know when I accidently make eye contact with him he’s going to stare at me for the rest of the service,” Chantel said.
“He’s made me feel uncomfortable at a church that I’ve been a part of for literally the past 20 years – a place that has felt like home to me.”
She has tried everything to let this man know that his persistence has actually had the opposite effect. He clearly doesn’t see that reading into body language and church member solidarity just makes matters worse.
“It’s frustrating, too, because I feel like at some point you should be able to get the clue,” Chantel said.
“All the time he has spent on someone who is not interested, he’s missing out on somebody who might be interested in him for real. He’s wasting his time and getting on my nerves.”
