Hate

I don't understand hate. It has to be one of the most illogical things in the world. And yet there are times where we all have to deal with it. For the last two years I have been hated. What makes it even more illogical is that I did not really meet the person who hates me until several months after she started hating me.

C is obsessed with HP. She has basically stalked him for several years now. Any girl that he has shown interest in she has become friends with and either convinced them that he was moving too fast or that he wasn't good enough. Someone actually admitted to me that she was afraid to talk to HP for fear of what C would do to her.

The first conversation I ever had with her she basically threatened me. And during our second conversation a month later she tried to point out what she thought were his oddities and faults as well as tried to get me to dish to her what I knew of him. What she didn't realize where that those "oddities" and "faults" were some of the things I found attractive in him and shared myself. Because HP had told me about her by then, I didn't tell her anything I knew.

Because I wouldn't give in to her tactics, she hated me more. She flat out ignored my existence. Having a conversation with her present was laughably awkward as she would freely converse with anyone else present, but would basically turn her back on me and not acknowledge me, even if the other person was talking to me. There was tension there from her, and it all came to a head towards the end of last year when she finally acknowledged me enough to disrupt a church class to yell at me and storm out and slam the door. After the class she told me to never talk to her again and I have had no problem with that as I had never really talked to her to begin with. At that point she admitted that she had hated me because of HP before but by then it wasn't because of that, but she wouldn't say why she hated me so.

By the beginning of this year I had even less involvement with her, and it worked well. The less she sees of me the less agitated she gets, it seems. And I don't want to purposefully upset her. But I'm also not going to let her dictate my life for her comfort.

The way she acts, she feels like the whole world is against her and is attacking her, and so her strategy is to attack first. And in this way she feels she's making other people miserable, but what is really happening is she's making her own life miserable and making her impossible to get close to. But explaining that to her gets you nowhere. She insists on seeing the world through her warped lenses.

And her hate just isn't going away. At the beginning of this year she told HP that she doesn't hate me, but if he were to marry me she'd hold a grudge against me for the rest of her life. I'm not entirely sure what the difference between hate and a life long grudge is, but apparently she sees one. And two weeks ago, on finding out that HP and I were engaged, she actually had the nerve to tell him that our marriage will only last five years before he'll discover how mean I am and divorce me.

Very little she does upsets me. I know she's not dealing with a full deck and so I try to give her some leeway, but this crossed the line for me. How dare she!

Fortunately, HP also sees how crazy she is. He's tried to cut her off several times. He's tried telling her how her actions are perceived by others and that she's only hurting her self. But she can't see it. In her mind she's hurting everyone else, me especially. Her actions, the rumors she starts about me, are supposedly tearing me down and building her up. It is probably very frustrating to her that I'm still enjoying my life and progressing.

This crossed the line for HP too though, and he could see how upset it made me. He's told me that if she ever starts saying things like that again that he's going to tell her that if she can't be civil towards him or his wife, then the conversation is over.

Of course it would ultimately be easiest if she realized what her hate was doing to her, that it was eating her and making her beautiful features ugly. But it doesn't look like that will happen any time soon. So I'll continue to give her the room I can, but I'm not going to let her dictate what I do with my life and how I choose to love.