My friend and I were walking from her workplace to a restaurant for lunch when we heard a man behind us call out to us. We turned around and watched as he ran the last few steps up to us. We are both gregarious by nature and didn’t assume immediately that the guy was a creep, but then he opened his mouth to tell us how he had been following us for a block and a half trying to get our attention.

He then went on to extol the virtues of my friend’s beauty, while completely ignoring me except to add an off hand comment about how I “looked nice too.” He did most of the talking, with my friend giving one word responses to any questions asked. He was never overtly rude or crass. I’m pretty sure he thought he was being nice. We didn’t want to seem rude ourselves, but we were giving him every signal we knew that we wanted to back away from the conversation. At one point I actually stepped a few feet back. The guy was either unable to read these signs, or was ignoring them.

Eventually my friend told him that we needed to get going, at which point he asked for her number. She lied and told him she was married. We both thought this would end the nonsense.

We thought wrong.

He then started in on how lucky her husband must be and how he hoped he appreciated her (with the not so subtle intonation that if her husband didn’t, he’d be happy to step in). We had to forcefully tell him goodbye and start walking away before he shut up.

By the time we had gotten to the restaurant we were both laughing about the “idiot creep.” However the whole experience was really uncomfortable, and not one I would care to repeat.

– S.V.

Location: Detroit, Michigan

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