Love life: He loves you to death and you love him not

On Friday August 1, in Nakuru, a man only identified as Njuguna strangled with his belt, Wangari a woman who had turned down his advances. He then killed himself. A month before this, Martha Muthoni, a 35-year-old business woman, also in Nakuru, was stabbed to death by an ex-lover. These are just two of the frequent news reports about women getting attacked by men whose advances they rejected.

While it doesn’t always escalate to murder, this is evidence that cases of unrequited love are common.

“Loving with all your heart someone who doesn’t love you back feels like having someone breakup with you without having enjoyed the benefits of being in a relationship with them,” Joseph, a 28-year old Deejay sums up what it feels like loving a person who can’t love you back.

He has thing for a married woman who lives in the same building block as him. He calls it love but when he speaks about her, it sounds like a fixation. He constantly calls and texts her, finds every excuse to go to her house and buys things for her children.

 “There are days when I think about only her. I know we would be perfect together. If only she gave me the chance,” he says.

While it’s a harmless crush for most people, for some, like Joseph, a one sided affair can become an obsession.

To an outsider looking in, having someone love you and want to do things for you can seem like a painless, admirable even, position to be in. It’s a big cruel world, a little extra love would not hurt, right?

Well, if you’ve had an experience like the one Candice Macharia had last year, this assumption is wrong.

“I had told him my truth from the beginning but he wouldn’t hear me. He thought that if he loved me hard enough, bought me enough gifts, I would change my mind,” she pauses to think about the man she met at a house party in 2017.

In retrospect, if she could do it again, she wouldn’t accept his gifts. She reckons that accepting things and favours from him at the beginning may have given him hope.

“The final nail in the coffin for me was him showing up intoxicated at my workplace and causing a big scene. I almost lost my job. It was very embarrassing because my colleagues know my husband,” she says.

So what should a woman do?

When someone has been in your face offering you love and material things even when you have told him you don’t want them, you may find yourself walking the thin line between respecting your aspiring lover’s affection and kindness and abusing it.

“He wasn’t even my type. But when he bought me things and offered to take me places, I went. I guess I thought that when he had given me enough and I hadn’t given anything back, he would finally get the message,” Chrissy Bore, 29, shares.

The Nairobi based make-up artist recalls how this man paid her rent and bought things for her son from a previous relationship. One time, in 2018, he even took her on a weekend out of town where, without his knowledge, she invited a female relative so that she wouldn’t have to be intimate with him. He was furious.

“All this time, I was in a long distance relationship. My boyfriend at the time was working and living in Tanzania and he came home one time only for this man to confront him claiming I was his wife. They had a nasty fight and I lost both men,” she says.

The take away she got from her experience is not to lead on a man you are not interested in. So what works?

Writer O'Shea, Samara in her book Loves me…Not, writes that there is no way to reject someone without being forced into the villain role. If you find yourself being the subject of someone’s romantic fixation, she recommends being honest with them about how you feel.

The second step in all this is cutting off all contact with your aspiring lover. Checking on them after might seem like the humane thing to do but this only works to fuel the obsession.

Rejection is hard for anyone to take. For an obsessed individual, it can resort to harassment or intimidation. If you feel in any way threatened by a stalker’s actions, it is wise to seek legal action.

What to do:

DO tell them firmly that their affection is unwanted

DO keep saying it if they do not hear you the first time

DO cut off all contact with them to give them time to heal and to explore other options.

DO take measures for your safety if this obsession keeps growing.

Just because someone has not been violent in the past is no guarantee of your safety.

DON’T sugar coat a rejection as this only feeds the romance in his head.

DON'T feel the need to explain why you can’t love them back.

DON’T take advantage of their affection for your own personal gain.

DON’T opt for silence hoping that this love will die. There is a chance that it won’t.

DON’T feel the need to change aspects of yourself to make them stop loving you, it won’t work. They are in love with the version of you in their heads.