Having a crush is awkward as hell, and most of us have at least one embarrassing memory of a time we tragically failed at confessing our feelings. In those moments, it's easy to feel like there is nothing more humiliating than bombing in front of your crush. But alas, the world is complex and sometimes secondhand embarrassment burns your spirit even worse.
In fact, at times the only thing worse than being a creep to a crush, is being the crush whose creeped on. How do you kindly reject someone who is baring their soul to you in deeply awkward ways? What is the protocol for setting boundaries with someone who has crossed the line from admirer to stalker?
In a popular Reddit thread, people shared the most awkward exchanges they've had with people who were crushing on them.
When it comes to cringe, the solar system is the limit.
1. OP kicked it off:
I'll give an example to clarify the title.
I've been working in an insurance agency for about 2.5 months. For about 2 months now my boss has bee acting very "affectionate" towards me. By that, I mean she'll call me a dork in a flirtatious manner, one time she told me that if I stayed late she'd buy me dinner, she'll slap me playfully when I say something mildly witty, when I show her something on my computer she'll kinda lean on the table but lean on me also a bit at the same time, and she's recently started a habit of affectionately punching my arm. It's making me feel really awkward and I don't know what to do about it. But it's okay, as long as the fact that she could be crushing on me means that I have an easier time at work.
I was part of a very awkward love triangle in grade 6.
I had a crush on a certain girl. So did the kid with Down's Syndrome.
In June of that year, there was an overnight school trip to a summer camp. Down's Syndrome kid thought girl and I were dating, so he forged a break-up note from her to me and left it in my bunk.
I was not fooled.
When I was around 14, a girl with a pretty severe physical deformity that resulted in bulging eyes and arms that didn't really extend, started very obviously hitting on me, in front of all of my friends. I didn't know what to do; she was a really nice girl but I was just not attracted to her at all. I quickly asked some other girl to be my girlfriend, and let her find out about that. She was upset.
I felt really bad, because due to her deformity I had seen her as a child, and I realized for the first time that she was my age and had the same teenage desires, and how I was just the first of a long line of guys who would reject her because of the way she was, and how it was just so unfair.
I don't like thinking about this.
My friend's (at the time) fiancee was a little bit in love with me. That was an awkward period of time...
My friend's mom used to get drunk when we were hanging out there and try and sleep with me.
There was a cool, smart, and hot as f*ck girl that was into me for a while. How embarrassing that must have been for her.
My brother had a really unattractive girl after him through high school, I was like 11 and would always answer the phone. I made up increasingly ridiculous excuses and tales of where he was, partying, doing cocaine, heading to a major drug deal, on vacation in Japan, training to be an assassin, it was fun at first but it got annoying pretty fast. He still doesn't know how she got our number.
Not me, but a friend - in high school, there was a kid who sat behind her in math class. He would play with her hair, and whenever a hair would fall out, he'd keep it and stow it away in the battery compartment of his calculator until he had a little ball of girl hair.
Then the year after, he got a pretty drastic haircut, saved all the hair in a bag, and presented it to her for Christmas. Good times.
I was in high school, sitting in art class when this guy walks over. I didn't particularly like him or not like him. I didn't know him that well. He stops at my table and casually asks for my phone number. I say "Sure!" and he pulls out a piece of notebook paper filled with phone numbers...all suspiciously the numbers of nearly every girl in our grade.
It was too late to say no and I got a phone call from him at least a dozen times a week for a month. The fact that no one ever picked up (save for the first time....boy was that an awkward phone conversation) never stopped him. I just pictured him calling down that list every day.
My best friend came out as gay and then proceeded to tell me how much he liked me. He knew I was straight, but decided it would be appropriate to straddle me whenever I sat down around him. Still waiting for it to stop.
In eighth grade I was stalked for several months by a girl one year younger than me.
At first it was rather benign, we ate lunch together in our group of friends and hung out a few times after school. She seemed rather interesting if a little odd.
Then it started getting more creepy. She decided to read me some of her short stories which involved me tearing off her dress and raping her. I was called into the principal's office because she decided to share one of them with her English class.
After that I decided I wanted nothing more to do with her but it just got worse. She started calling my home at all hours of the night and even stood in my front lawn from around midnight until 3 a few times. She just stared at my house. I can't exaggerate how creepy it was.
She started writing hate mail to all my female friends saying they were c*nts etc and we got seriously worried she would do something to one girl in particular (this girl wasn't actually one of my friends, she was just dating a boy with the same first name as me).
It all ended once I went to high school but she did the same thing to several other people before she was expelled. I don't know what has happened to her since.
I had a stalker. Not even kidding, or well...as much as you can call someone a stalker in High School. I always treated my "stalker" with respect (even though it was weird), she would follow me around school, give me these love letters, draw pictures of us together, make me these home made bracelets and necklaces, call me up at the most random times she even had my private email address. I tried to let her down easily multiple times but she didn't give up.
One time she appeared at my house crying, I had to take her in and stop her from crying. She would occasionally call up crying and I'd have to talk for hours on end to try and calm her down. One day I just had enough, so I told her as directly as possible (while still trying to be nice), "I'm sorry, but I'm not interested okay...?" She disappeared about a month later, moved country, school etc. Two years later she came back, I added her on Facebook and she told me she was sorry, talked to her a while and she seemed to have lost her craziness, she now has a boyfriend.
My cousin had one for a few years. I pretended not to know.
This girl had a crush on me once, I told her I wasn't a lesbian and she didn't think that was a good enough reason.
Lunatic customer started stalking me. Really. I had a helluva time keeping her away since I had to deal with her professionally. Years later, someone lent me some books on astrology, and for a laugh, I made my chart.
Turns out, according to astrology, I'm a sexual T-Rex. God's Gift To Women: ME! I don't mean some measly top 2% Mensa sh*t, I'm talking one in hundreds-of-thousands. And that's when I realized that the point in time when that crazy b**ch started stalking me, that was just after she'd asked me when and where I was born — I particularly found it odd that she asked what exact hour and minute (I ended up calling my mother to find out).
Astrology. People are f*cking insane.
(And oh yeah, I am NOT a sexual T-Rex. I'm sort of a walking, talking, living bit of evidence that astrology is hokum. Although I do admit, while I don't believe in astrology, I believe in chicks who believe in astrology.)
In high school there was a mentally disabled guy I befriended just to be nice. Turns out he liked me (I'm a dude too) because he mailed me a picture of himself with a note that said "hi derp, I love you, you are my baby" So yeah that was the end of my interaction with him...a better person than myself might have overlooked it but it was too weird for me.
My boss proposed to me - twice - back when I was living in Japan. I quit the second time.
This is my first response to a thread like this...I feel like I've never really had a good story to contribute. That is, until now.
It was in my junior year of high school (less than two years ago). I was invited by a friend to attend a local dance at an all-girls school nearby. I had nothing else to do that Friday night, and I figured nothing bad could happen. Boy, was I wrong.
During the night, this girl 'glombed' onto me, as my friends like to say. She was not in the least bit attractive. She obviously was very into me, and I, the socially awkward penguin that I am, decided to try to talk to her outside instead. I figured if I got to know her a bit better maybe I'd somehow find some attraction. I didn't want to be a guy who would write her off immediately, because I believe every person has some type of beauty to them. As an average Redditor, I'm not exactly a ladies man, so I figured as a beggar, I couldn't be a chooser. We exchange numbers, I figure if I'm not attracted to her I can find a new friendship of some sort.
She asks to hang out, and I make it a double-date sort of deal with a friend of mine who had met a girl at the dance as well. I realized here that me and this girl had nothing in common, and that her physical appearance was simply too off-putting for me to deal with. I gave it a shot, and I wasn't interested. So, I didn't make an effort to ask her out again. She however, was waiting for me to ask her out, as she thought everything was going great. This left a huge elephant in the room, so to speak. Eventually, I had to tell her I wasn't interested, because her friends were telling me to ask her out.
I called her and said I wasn't interested. After this, she goes and tells her friends that she's going to 'cut my balls off' among various other colorful phrases.
Fast forward a couple of weeks. Through some casual observance on Facebook, my friend discovered that this girl had written stories about me on her Fanfiction website profile. He said I 'had to read them for myself.' I did. Turns out they were about me having EXTREMELY graphic gay sex with another man. We're talking about descriptions of prec*m, and my rape at the hands of another guy. In these stories I found out that my body did things I didn't think were possible. We discover she also had a fetish for Harry Potter fan fiction, including stories about Remus and Sirius going at it (while transformed, nonetheless). NEVER AGAIN. I still get sh*t about her. She scared me away from dealing with girls until college, and here I am.
TL;DR: Girl attaches herself to me, I reject her, she almost gets violent, writes graphic gay-sex erotica stories about me (including some rape ones).
This one girl in high school faked a seizure because I told her I already had a girlfriend. The gym teacher called 911 and when the paramedics got there she just got up and ran off...I guess she got in some pretty big trouble for doing that.
I was 17 and working at a summer camp with the "seniors" age group (between 10-14). At that age the girls have a crush on you no matter what you look like, just because you are their counselor. Anyways this one was more.. assertive about it than the others. She asked for my phone number many times and tried to add me on Facebook many times as well. On the last day of the summer her mom comes up to me and tells me that she had a crush on me. I said I know and she said you don't understand.. I caught her masturbating to a picture of you two she took last week.
Couldn't look at her that day, luckily it was the last day.