I read a list today - my goodness, those are popular now - 18 struggles of modern dating. It's interesting, & for the most part, true. I suggest a read (here), especially if you are dating in this age of social media flirtation & rising "all about me" attitudes.
As anyone who has spoken with me about the perils of modern dating will know, I agree with this list almost completely. Except #7. It reminds me of something called the "Dobbler/Dahmer theory," which says basically exactly what #7 says. If the person a gesture is being performed for (Person A) finds the person who is making the gesture (Person B) to be attractive, then it is perceived as romantic, like Dobbler with the boom box in Say Anything. However, if Person B is not attractive to Person A, then that person is usually called creepy & compared with a stalker or serial killer, such as Jeffrey Dahmer.
A few of you know that during a show I was in last summer, there was some unwanted attention from a cast-mate, with whom I'd been friends for quite some time. (I won't go into the details about what went on, because it's over & I'd prefer not to be spreading things around.) I tried to brush it off & not overreact to it, hoping that maybe it would stop if I didn't pay it any undue attention. I spoke to another cast-mate about it, & she encouraged me to talk to the director. Still, not wanting to be the source of any "drama" & not wanting to be considered difficult to work with, I decided I would give it a few more days & try to ignore it. That only seemed to make matters worse. The second weekend of the show, it got to be more than I was comfortable dealing with on my own. Another couple of actors in the show had seen something that made them particularly uncomfortable, & they told me it wasn't just me overreacting & that I had a right to feel the way I did about it all. One of them even came up to me backstage, told me what they had witnessed & said, "If you don't say something, I will." I spoke with that actor & another friend (someone whom I trust very much & I feel very safe around, & who'd been told about the goings-on by another concerned friend in the cast; I wasn't just going around talking to everyone about this, contrary to what was assumed later by this particular Person B), & decided I would say something to the director the next day before the show. Well, before I had the chance to address it myself, more than one other member of the cast had gone to the director & spoken to him on my behalf, saying that everyone was now uncomfortable with the actions of this particular individual. The director came to me to discuss the goings-on, & then he spoke with our Person B. Everything stopped: the unwanted attention, the discomfort in the dressing area, my being constantly on edge backstage, & our friendship ended with it. We were still "friends" on social media, though after seeing this person post passive-aggressive & pouty statuses about how he'd been wronged & so on & so forth, I decided to hide him from my news feed. A mutual friend told me one day that I should go read something that Person B had posted. So I did. And there it was. Dobbler/Dahmer theory. None of the discomfort backstage was any fault of his; it was mine, because I didn't find him attractive. Even though people other than myself were made to feel uncomfortable by things that he did, it was my fault for not seeing all this unwanted attention - & his refusal to see it was unwanted - as romantic.
While the "Dobbler/Dahmer theory" may be popular & even true in some cases, there are certain behaviors that, no matter how attractive the person, would be perceived as creepy. (I'm sure there are some girls out there who misuse the word "creepy" in substitution for "that was nice, but I don't feel for him like that," when a guy has simply done something nice for a girl & said girl didn't want that nice thing from that particular guy. Those girls are stupid & need a larger vocabulary. But that's not the "creepy" I'm talking about here.) For the most part, I feel like the "Dobbler/Dahmer theory" is one of those things that someone who's been rejected tells him- or her-self to feel better about the rejection, laying blame to the other person & how they're made to feel, not their own behavior. I can only imagine a few cases where the truth is that Person A did not find Person B attractive & that's why Person B is perceived as "creepy," instead of Person A receiving too much unwanted attention from Person B & eventually having to do something about it.
It's a milder version of blaming the victims of sexual assaults. (i.e. - "Did you see what she was wearing? She was just asking for it, dressed like that.") But that's a whole different soapbox for a whole different time.
I just needed to get that out there. Rant over.
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