Hello! I had a strange encounter with a neighbour last week which made me feel very uncomfortable. I’m sure I’m right, but my mind will always minimise things/mitigate for people so I wanted to run the situation past others and see if your thoughts support mine!
Thursday, 1pm there’s a knock on my door, I don’t answer, they knock again, this time louder. I look out the window and see that it’s a fairly new neighbour who I’ve only met once or twice in passing and never really spoken to. He lives with his girlfriend and his child. I open the door and he says he’s sorry to bother me but do I have any sugar, he’s run out and really needs a coffee. I laugh and say “are you serious” because it seemed cliche. He says yes so I say ok sure and turn to go into the house and grab him some, except he follows me in and into my kitchen. He had brought a coffee with him and then helped himself opening drawers to find himself a spoon. He then said how it’s cool that we both work from home, what time do I have my lunches usually, suggesting essentially that we could have lunches at the same time. He told me he likes to draw and saw some of my artwork, then suggested we should do some drawing together sometime. All questions after this were the type that enabled him to get close and have physical contact - I like your rings, folllowed by holding my hand and leaning in close to look at them, I like your tattoos, followed by holding my wrist and arm and running his hand over them, what size are your ears stretched to, can I have a look, followed by moving in to look closely at my ears. After a while I said sorry you need to go, I have work to do, do you want to take some sugar with you - he said no that’s fine I’ll go to the shop later - the shop which is less than a minutes walk from his house. I thought the whole thing was weird but gave him the benefit of the doubt that maybe he is very over-familiar and lacking in self-awareness, and maybe he genuinely needed some sugar.
3pm - there’s a knock at the door again, and it’s him again. I go down there, he says sorry can I grab some more sugar, I say fine and again he follows me into the house, again helping himself to a spoon. The front door has been left open, I say I need to make sure my cat hasn’t run out and he tells me I can close the door. I do this so my cat doesn’t run out and then immediately start heaping sugar into a bowl so he can take it and just get out, in the middle of doing this he says hey can I look at your tattoo again and takes hold of my wrist, runs his hand over the tattoo again and slowly up my forearm. At this point I am kind of in a corner and I panic, pull away and say I really need to get on so here’s your sugar. I then march quickly to the front door to get it open and on the way out, he says by the way - you don’t need to tell your partner I came round. I say he already knows you’ve been here.
This is all really creepy, right!?
So I tell my partner all of this and how uncomfortable I felt and he’s furious. The next day, he sees my neighbour’s partner in the street and asks her for a word, says her boyfriend made me feel very uncomfortable in our house yesterday and can we have our sugar pot back. She is baffled - why was he in our house and why does he have our pot. He explains, she goes into their house and 20 minutes later, they are both on the doorstep and he is very politely apologising for making me feel uncomfortable and asking me to explain what he did that made me feel that way. This gets my back up straight away because he knows full well, and I tell him so. He denies saying that I didn’t need to tell my partner and tells me I’m overreacting. I tell him he’s gaslighting me, and that he’s a creep. I then ask his girlfriend if they had sugar at home yesterday - she tells me yes, they did. I tell him I have no idea what his intentions were but they did not originate in a place of honesty, he had sugar at home, an open door is not an invitation in, and his behaviour in my house/towards me was unnerving. I apologised to his partner because it can’t have been nice having someone stand there and call their fella a creep.
I’m right, right!!? I’m sure I am, but I’m such an overthinker, I’m overthinking myself into thinking I’ve gone overboard..