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RantGender: Unsolicited Male Advice
I’m getting so sick of unsolicited male advice and boundary pushing. I have one former colleague who has become extremely clingy and has told me that his marriage to his wife is basically over. He now keeps asking me extremely creepy questions, e.g. ‘Can sexual orientation ever change?’ and rings me on an almost nightly basis to pick a fight about my ‘negativity’ and things that I’m doing ‘wrong’ in my life, such as not renting a house where he wants me to, not negotiating with my landlord over rent, not choosing the job that he wants me to (saying that he didn’t want me to move as I wouldn’t be around to meet him). Even if I am not making a negative statement, everything is twisted into one. I have trouble with my neutral or even positive statements coming across as negative but I feel as though he uses this to provoke a fight.
He rang me in the middle of work a week ago to admit that he tried to influence/sabotage me in trying to get me to accept a job near my home town and not move away. I think that he criticises me in an effort to keep me arguing and on the phone for longer.
I struggle with boundaries and always have and it’s got to the point where I have to turn my phone off as I will get constant calls and texts (I left my phone in the car a few days ago and came back to 4 missed calls and multiple texts spaced out over the afternoon). I feel like this is peak female socialisation (be nice and accommodating) vs male socialisation. But every time that I try to assert my boundaries, he just steamrollers them and then also guilt trips me if I am not constantly talking to him or even if I am going on a date with a woman (considering that I have always been open about being a lesbian, he should have taken the hint).
Between this and other recent situations where unsolicited male advice features heavily, I’m dreading it every time they roll out that line ‘Can I just tell you something?’. I often point out to these men that I don’t go around offering ‘advice’, so why do they feel the need to do it to others? Often it is about things that are the symptoms of my autism so the ‘advice’ just serves to make me feel more anxious about them, therefore making it worse.
I just needed to let it out somewhere as it’s affecting my work and social life due to the amount of time he spends ringing me, and I feel as though he often does it when he knows that I have social events to either make me late and/or make me too exhausted to go after he starts another fight.
Edit: right on cue, one hour after this post, I got another phone call just now during work, which I duly ignored.
Edit 2: I then got an email to my current workplace 1.5 h later with some insult 'Actually doing some work are you?', duly deleted it as it's again, trying to cause conflict to get a reaction. He won't be getting a reply even if he goes through different methods of trying to communicate with me
Edit 3: There is another dimension to this that I haven't added. Whenever we were meeting in person, he would constantly be trying to push me to drink alcohol, so much so that I vomited on public transport for the first time in my life after a night out with him. I stopped drinking alcohol around him and he kept buying me drinks and basically demanding that I had 'just one', etc, quite literally pushing a can of beer into my hand or saying 'I paid X amount for this, you have to drink it'. or constantly questioning and trying to make me justify why I wasn't drinking. Aside from not feeling comfortable around him, the main reason that I am not really drinking is that I can't afford it and also that I am working to improve my health - it feels like he is trying to sabotage my new healthy lifestyle when it's taken me years to get a handle on what I'm eating and drinking.