He left a message on my answering machine a few days after we met (I'm not returning the call!) and knows where I’m a volunteer. I refrained from attending an event there because I had told him about it and he seemed interested. He needs a therapist, and it’s not my job. I have a theory that he may be psychotic, since I’ve noticed insane people giving off creep vibes.
The situation has certainly confirmed that I’m still conditioned to be nice and polite to bullies—probably conditioned by relatives more than anything else, though our patriarchal society generally teaches girls to practice self-negation and be nice and polite in any situation. While a part of me is concerned, I have to protect myself. In my early childhood, relatives conditioned me to have unquestioning loyalty to them and to their side of the family, simultaneously demonizing my dad and his side of the family. But these relatives are also verbally abusive toward me, so I don’t think I’d be exaggerating to say that they conditioned me to be on their side against me. Weird, I know, but it’s probably not unusual. After I went off to college, if someone bullied me in a way similar to that of relatives, I had an unfortunate tendency to be in denial that I had a problem with this bully. Since then I’ve analyzed my relatives and intellectually reject bullies, the emotional conditioning isn’t completely gone. It takes a long time to completely purge crap from your childhood.
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