Ask Jono: Stalky Boyfriends

Dear Jono,
This might sound like a weird question but... what do you do when your boyfriend's stalking you?

You see, my boyfriend tries to find out every single detail about my life and it's honestly getting kind of—for lack of a better word—creepy. But he's also shy around my friends. So say I'm with my friends after class, he would just be lurking around somewhere near (he memorized my schedule) without saying hello. Then later he might text me "how was hanging out with your friends after school?" And my reaction would be somewhere along the lines of holy fudgeballs, how do you know what I was doing? Then he would say "I know everything (: Muahaha." Okay I added the evil laughter but you get the point.

Now that it's summer it's getting worse (questions about everything I do, everyday). He's sensitive, so how do I ask him to tone it down/give me some closure? Or should I just break up with him? Oh btw, he's a grade higher than me so he doesn't know many of my friends.

This is one of those scenarios where I could see myself advising you either way, or at least that would be true but for the language you decided to use. "Lurking," "stalking," "creepy," "evil," "muahaha"? At this point it is impossible for me to imagine your boyfriend as anyone other than the Riddler.

Whether you want to salvage your relationship with this guy is your call. I assume there's something you like about him, like maybe he is nice or he owns a good calculator. For all I know he's awesome in every way except the stuff you listed, so I can't tell you to just definitely dump the guy, but it's pretty telling that the only positive things about him I have gleaned from your e-mail are that he is a human who knows how to use a phone and apparently has respectable detective skills.

In deciding how you want to move forward, remember this: the essential parts of someone's personality rarely change. Women in particular tend to disregard this truth. "Well sure," they think, "this guy is a crass jerk who treats me like garbage and lives at the bus station. Now. But when I'm done with him he will be the best! :D" (A smiley is the only way to communicate this variety of hopelessly cheerful optimism.) Of course, eight months later the guy's still going to suck; he's just going to have eight months more practice at it.

By and large, people stay basically how they are, and when they do change, it's not because somebody else fixed them; it's because they change on their own. You can of course get people to change some aspects of their behavior, like if you were dating a dude who was really smelly, you could keep buying him soaps and taking him to the pool and lovingly hanging air fresheners around his neck until the situation resolved itself. But at heart, he would still be kind of a lazy fella with little interest in hygiene. The same thing applies here. You might be able to alter your guy's behavior, but barring some personal development on his part, he would likely still be an essentially clingy and insecure guy.

However.

I'm not going to advise you to give him another chance, but I secretly want you to, because I was probably a lot like him in high school, too. Awkward, shy dudes are not good at giving people space or realizing that what they're doing is creepy instead of endearing. "Girls like texts," they think, "so girls will love getting sixty texts. And girls like attention, but I'm not very good at conversation, so I'll just hide in these bushes and breathe heavily!"

The only way to fix this behavior is to be blunt about it. If you try to be indirect to spare his feelings, you risk making things even worse; an awkward weird dude is bound to misunderstand your attempts to be delicate, and he will almost certainly respond in a way that is totally unpredictable ("She wants me to text her less often? She must be dyyyiiingg oh nooo!")

If there's something worth keeping in this guy, tell him that. Lead with saying you like his... nice shoes, or whatever it is he has going for him. Be very positive. Then, without going into an endless litany of the things that bug you, just give him the basic idea: you like him but you'd like him more if he gave you some space, respected your privacy, and left you to live your life from time to time.

If there isn't anything worth keeping in this guy, please go fire up your Bat-Signal because I really am not going to antagonize the Riddler right now.

Do you think this LW should give her bf another chance?

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