How not to be a stalker

I don't want to go giving out actual names this time, because there are privacy issues, but I'll use initial letters of names instead.

I met E online in the late '90s and she became a very good friend. We really seemed to care for each other a lot. We had long 'phone calls some nights, although these were rare because neither of us could afford the bills.

She got pregnant in (she said) a one-night-stand. I tried to be supportive throughout the pregnancy, because she said she was on her own and she really seemed to rely on what little moral support could be provided by a 'phone line and an internet connection. She would sometimes call me up in the middle of the night - this being a pre-arranged message. If the 'phone rang and then rung off, I would go to the internet and talk to her. It was a message like that, that let me talk to her on the night her dad died.

I started to work on raising some money to get a plane ticket to fly out there, because I really wanted to be there in time for the birth and to meet my friend for the first time. I had just about managed to raise the cash and was just a day away from booking the flight, when I got an email from her. It was bitter and angry. It listed all my faults - every last one of them - and threw in a few extra just to make sure all the ground had been covered. I was actually pretty shocked. In fact, I reacted with a typical AS manner and sort of shut down a bit. I sat in the middle of my room for a few hours while it got darker and darker and didn't move for a long, long time.

Later, I got very concerned about her and the baby, so I tried calling her. A man answered, told me not to call her again and hung up on me. A fresh shock. I tried to email her because I was very concerned about the identity of this man. It was him who answered my email and he essentially gave me the very same message to back off. And now, suddenly, the only two avenues of communication between my friend and I were closed to me - they'd been infiltrated by this strange man. Who was he?

I fretted about this for days and couldn't settle down. Eventually, I resorted to subterfuge and stalker tactics. I got a female friend to call her. This friend pretended to be another friend to the both E and I - one who was deaf and clearly couldn't make a 'phone call. She got the man, spoke to him for a couple of minutes and then told me she could hear E and a baby in the background. So... OK... I accepted I was going to get no more contact and no more information. Unless E responded to the fact that it was clearly me who was behind the call.

Which she duly did. For the first time in a fortnight, I got an email from E. It was very angry. She told me she wasn't stupid and she knew it was me who had been behind the 'phone call. She asked how I could have hoped to get away with such a stupid trick. She said I should never have gone snooping for information on her in such a devious way and she told me she felt violated by my actions. And she told me that if I had just been patient, she would have got in touch with me when she was ready.

Since I had read the email as soon as it had been sent, I wrote back right away. I said I hadn't expected to get away with what I had done. The use of our friend's name had been a sort of message to her. I told her about the man's messages to me. I explained how this meant that I had no other way of getting in touch with her. And I told her how this meant that I had no guarantee - given her last message to me - that I was ever going to hear from her again. I explained that I had become concerned for her safety. And I said that I would never have done this if I had not cared for so much for my friend.

Yeah, I know - classic stalker justification. I'm cringing even as I write it.

Anyway, she sort of softened after that. She identified the man as S - an ex-boyfriend who had returned to help her out. He had apparently been over-protective. (Actually, I had heard about him before - he had also been abusive.) We started talking again. However, it just wasn't the same any more. There was animosity and bitterness now, where there had once been comfort and closeness. And the animosity wasn't coming from her - it was coming from me. It took me a while to recognise it for what it was, but eventually I realised I just didn't trust her any more. I felt like she'd gutted me and I knew that if she'd done it once, then she might well do it again. Also... even worse... I felt that her actions hadn't been those of a proper friend and now there was resentment there as well.

(When I attended some classes on AS last year, we were told that people on the spectrum often have rigid definitions of what constitutes a friend. Break the code and that person can never be a friend again. For some people, the rules are more rigid than others, but it always seems to be there. Now, I didn't know I had Asperger's when I knew E, so I wasn't aware of any of this. But when I learned all that stuff, it was her that I was thinking about and I knew that our friendship hit the profile that was being described in this class.)

There were clues that I just wasn't picking up on at the time. At one point, E and I seemed to be getting on again and were having a 'phone conversation, but she got disconnected. I tried calling her back, but S answered. He told me that if I ever called his house again "at this time of night", then he was going to send some leg breakers to my house. He knew where I lived and he had friends in Ireland who would be only too happy to help out. I liked this man even less than ever, but kept calm. I said "OK", I waited until he had finished talking and then when he was satisfied he had delivered his message, we hung up. In hindsight, I suspect that S hadn't known I was still talking to E and had returned home in the middle of our conversation. She had hung up, I had called back and he had answered; under the impression that I had just spontaneously called up.

Round about this time, my little sister was dealing with some stuff. Bad stuff. She came out of the closet to me, then to the rest of the family. That was cool. But then she started talking about other stuff and then she had a suicide attempt. Now, it's unusual for me to feel the need to look for any support, but perhaps I was feeling a bit off-balance in general at this point, because I tried to talk about it during one memorable conversation with E. She told me I was depressing her and asked me to change the subject. This was so breathtakingly heartless that I was astonished. I no longer recognised this person.

We limped painfully along a little longer, but then one day she just stopped writing. I wrote more emails, but they were ignored. I left a couple of messages on her answering machine, but they were ignored. Weeks and - I'm not exaggerating - months passed. Nothing. My attempts at contact started to dwindle, but I wasn't able to rest. I felt sick. One night, I did the most monumentally stupid thing.

I got the number of a local police station and asked them to go to her house and see if she was OK. They did and when I called them again a few hours later and got a very cold response. The gist of what I was told... E and S were happy with each other, but I was a malevolent little presence in the background who was not accepting that I had no place there. E had been asked if she wanted to press charges against me, but had declined.

And that was it. Until...

In a postscript to the story, last year - seven years on from then - I thought I would try to mend some bridges and I sent an email to E in the hopes that we could talk again. And, in fact, it actually seemed to be going well for a while. We had a couple of differences of opinion about a couple of issues and she called me a hypocrite at one point. But on the whole, we were polite and civil with each other. She claimed to feel guilty about her previous actions and she told me there had been times when she really had felt like she could have used my emotional support during certain events. I told her I felt bad about being such a stalker, but... to be honest... I felt like I had no other choice. I couldn't never have simply let it all go without knowing if she was safe or not. Sending the police to her home had been a desperate attempt to find out if she was OK.

I started to hope that I might actually get my friend back. We were talking and that was a start. We were ironing out our differences and if I had to compromise and accept that she thought I was a hypocrite, then fine... I could do that. We spoke about the point where I tried to talk about my little sister and she told me that she was in a seriously black mood at that point and had been contemplating suicide, so my own crisis had been ill-timed. I realised that things had been bad for her, but I didn't realise that they were that bad.

(On a side note - people with AS are often said to have no sense of empathy. This is not true. My empathic skills are almost cripplingly high, sometimes, so I have to actually try to disconnect myself from them in order to protect myself. So... a disconnected empathy versus none at all... sounds like pretty much the same thing, I suppose. And I'm not really sure what the difference is. What I don't have, though, is much of a sense of sensitivity. So if I appear to be oblivious to another person's suffering, it's because I often am oblivious. This, however, is not the same as empathy.)

I was disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that she was still married to and living with S.  I remembered something she had told me about him - something that some people would consider to be strong enough grounds to end a relationship, press assault charges and impose a restraining order.  And I reminded her about it.  "Didn't he try to strangle you once?" I asked.  "Yes, but he stopped when I kicked him in the balls," she said.  So that's all right, then.

I've got to point out that on the whole, she seemed well-balanced, intelligent and articulate.  This posting in general - and that last paragraph in particular - make her sound like a very different person.  I saw the occasional moment of spite in her, while we were still friends, but that was fairly rare when things were going well.  When they started to deteriorate, however, they became much more frequent.  But I always remembered the intelligent, funny, clever person that I had become friends with and that was the person I really wanted to talk to again.

We spoke, after a while, about friends. This came about as part of an ongoing conversation running through a few emails about how we were being very polite with each other, but that was about it. And I think this is where I made my big mistake. I gave her my proper definition of "friendship".

As far as I'm concerned, there are people I know that I like. But I don't generally use the word "friend" in reference to them. I'm more comfortable using words like mates, or buddies, or pals. Or if I do use the word friend casually, I'll preface it with another word. As in "internet friends". More relaxed and comfortable terms. If I call someone a friend, however, that's a more serious term. One that's been earned in some vaguely defined way. It's hard to become my friend and easy to stop being one. "Friend" is not a casual word for me - it comes loaded with lots of other assumptions.

I said all this in the spirit of being open, being honest and not being a hypocrite. I told her that there was a time I considered us to be friends. I said we weren't friends any more... not right at this moment. And I said that unless we could progress beyond these occasional emails and actually talk on the 'phone again, or on Skype... unless we could actually laugh together again and be comfortable again... unless all of that, then we weren't going to be friends again in the true sense.

I got an email from her very shortly after that. It was in October of last year and it was just one line that I can quote verbatim from memory. She said "Do not email me again."

And that's the last I heard from her.