While a lot of us can watch the show and be entertained — point and laugh and call the things Joe Goldberg does “crazy” — it becomes a lot less funny when these kinds of things happen in real life.
Like this woman’s ex who had been stalking her and hiding under her bed for weeks after they broke up.
Libby Cleaves (@libbycleaves on TikTok) posted the story about her very first boyfriend and ex who ended up stalking her for weeks after their breakup. RELATED: Dad Who Killed TikTok Daughter’s Stalker Blamed For Selling His Daughter’s Selfies To The Teen Prior To The Incident Her first TikTok, which was posted a few days ago, has seen some viral success with over 230 thousand views and a lot of references to the character from “You”. It didn’t reveal a lot but covered the most important points of the timeline of their relationship. “Starts dating a ‘nice Christian guy.’ We got to church together and meet each other’s friends,” explain her subtitles. “I meet the parents and it gets serious. We start planning marriage and a future.” Everything is fine as she dances to the sound on her TikTok until the twist comes in and she reveals the part where things go very wrong for her. “Hears breathing under my bed and finds out he’s been stalking me and using my toothbrush for weeks,” she writes. Of course, this is not a TV show, but a real-life situation where a woman was dangerously stalked by a man she had broken up with — as is the truth for many women. According to the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey conducted in 2010, about 1 in 6 women have experienced stalking in their lifetimes. RELATED: The 7 Types Of Stalkers (And How To Spot Them) This statistic becomes even more alarming when it reveals that in more than 60% of the survivors’ cases, the person stalking them was a current or former partner. Naturally, the TikTokers who stumbled upon this video wanted a story, and so she explained what had happened to her in a follow-up TikTok. After about a year and a half, she had wanted to break up with her boyfriend because “emotionally, he wasn’t very intelligent” and he had also begun responding strangely to certain things, sometimes shutting her out completely. When the man’s mother found out about his girlfriend breaking up with him, she called the woman and asked her if he had been taking his medicine. “‘What medicine are you referring to?’ She was like, ‘Oh because he has bipolar 1 disorder.’ Um, didn’t know that.” Failing to mention bipolar 1 disorder after a year and a half of dating seems like a bit of a problem if that person is someone you made future marriage plans with, but maybe it’s just me. After she brought it up to him, she told him that they should not continue dating, ultimately breaking up with him, to which he simply responded, “Okay. Okay.”
She mentions feeling weird over the next couple of weeks, chalking it up to the fact that maybe it was just because he was her first serious boyfriend.
“I couldn’t sleep well, I felt like there were weird things happening in my apartment,” she continued, “but I was just like ‘this is because he’s not around anymore. This could just be all in my head.’” One night, she revealed that she had heard really loud breathing and checked her small dorm room until she moved the storage box under her bed and saw him there looking back at her. “At that point, I thought I would be screaming and freaking out but I just got really calm,” she said. After telling him to come out from under her bed, he had revealed to her that he had been hiding there for multiple weeks — spraying cologne into her room when she wasn’t there and even using her toothbrush. Unsurprisingly, she filed a restraining order against him and hasn’t heard from him since, but left people with one final message about what she learned. “Y’all, just let people prove to you who they are,” she said, “because they will show you.” RELATED: Facebook Stalking Your Ex Is Bad For Your Health, Says Study Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Follow him on Twitter here.
