So lately I've been trying to focus on dropping the male orbiters out of my life. I know I should have done this a long time ago, but like any big change in life, it's been scary. Before you ask why I don't just block and delete this particular guy, it's because he knows where I live, he's local, he's weird, and I feel like the safest thing to do is to gradually back away until we move, which we will soon.

I've known this guy for a long time. Well, he messaged me out of the blue maybe half a year ago. Basic "how've you been, what have you been up to" type questions. He does this randomly sometimes, then disappears for awhile.

I realized that the randomness in when he would message me wasn't random at all, he was looking for somebody to be his therapist, somebody to make him feel better about himself, and to "shoot his shot" every now and then, to see if I'd gotten desperate enough to give him a chance yet. I wasn't a friend, I was somebdoy he could leech emotional labor off of when nobody else would talk to him.

A couple examples of how this has become crystal clear to me:

  • Constantly seeking validation every time he talks to me. He very obviously wants me to pat him on the back and congratulate him even though he's done nothing to warrant it.

Ex: He started to learn a language very similar to the one I'm learning. The thing is, when he saw how much more progress I was making than him, he gave up on the app. When I spoke the language to him, he would criticize my pronunciation, despite it being near perfect (I'm in a language sharing Discord server). Whenever he would talk in the language, all he did was quickly mumble through the words in an attempt to sound fluent. I know a lot more than him, and could tell what he was doing.

  • I told him flat out multiple times I wasn't interested, and that I'm not sure we could really be friends if he was going to be weird about it. He said it was cool and he was over it. He was not.

Ex: He kept making weird comments, and when I'd remind him I wasn't into him, he'd say things like like "It's okay, I wait for (my name)". Speaking in the third person was so fucking cringe, and he does it a lot. He clearly intends to "wait me out", and has told on himself multiple times.

  • He tries to make me jealous, even though I have less than zero interest in him. It's so desperate and gross, this is really what opened my eyes.

Ex: He started talking to a girl on OLD, showed me pictures of her, ect. Just by looking at her, I knew that wasn't happening. He's a "multiple messages in a row over the course of several days" type of guy. Anyways, he stopped talking to me for a month or two. Then, "randomly" came back, with zero mention of her, who he had bragged about being so serious with before. My conclusion is she finally blocked him, and he needed another woman to pester.

  • He only talks about himself, and is a MAJOR sympathy fisherman. Think emo teen that grew up physically, but not at all emotionally.

Ex: He will deadass message me completely out of the blue, and say something like, "Awful day, yours was probably better than mine", and nothing else. Past me might have asked "oh what happened??". But current me realizes that he never extends the same courtesy back my way, so I refuse to do it for him. Last time I literally responded with something like, "Probably is, I had a pretty good day". Naturally, he ignored it completely, tried once more to get me to ask about his day, but I played dumb and dodged it. After that, it was very suddenly "time for him to sleep".

Basically, this dude is awful, and I really wish I could just block and delete and be done with it. I regret ever letting him know where I live. He's completely low value in every single possible way. Bad looks, bad hygiene, bad social skills, bad personality, bad physique, bad skillset (or lack of), bad job/education, ect. There is literally nothing appealing about this guy.

The thing is, most of those things he can change, but he's just a lazy person. I have no sympathy for him, and I hope that being short and boring with him and not really engaging will cause him to eventually lose interest and go find somebody else to pester. As I've gradually distanced myself, it feels freeing to not have somebody leeching emotional energy out of me.

Thanks for listening to my rant. Do you guys have any similar stories of desperate orbiters that used to hang around, or even still do? Do you have any tips for safely cutting them out? Feel free to rant with me.