I had a row with my exH yesterday (whole other thread) and his parting shot to me was an accusation that I was stalking my ex boyfriend. His words were “you’re lucky no one has made a proper complaint about your stalking, I know you’re stalking (ex BF) and that you’ve taken our children to his house”.
To give context, I ended my relationship with my exBF over three years ago. We dated for a while after my marriage broke down, and he knew my exH and my exH's gf, but although he'd sometimes chat to my exH's gf he didn't get on with my exH at all and there was a fair bit of bad feeling between them. I have not attempted to contact him since, except for once trying to drunkenly friend him on FB probably around two years ago. I am now married to someone else and have moved house since exBF and I we were together, as has he, and we appear to have moved much closer in proximity to each other (about 10 miles apart). We’re in a rural location – I’m in a moderate-sized town, he’s in a smaller town, there is a lot of cross-over between the two in terms of services.
I didn’t know where he lived until relatively recently, though I guessed he lived in the general area because I saw him around my town on a few occasions; I go to a dog-training class in his town once a week, and on a couple of occasions while parking or waiting to go into class, I’ve seen his car go in and out of the parking area for a block of flats in the next street. It’s a medieval town and parking is really tight – there is a parking area outside the dog-training venue, but often that’s full as it’s market day on the day classes are held, and the only nearby street without double-yellows is the one I believe he lives on and often I park there if the carpark is full. I leave my car on that street, take the dog, go to the class for an hour, go back to my car, and drive home. That’s it.
In the past, I’ve wondered if he was trying to engineer a meeting between us, which I’ve posted about on here before. He seemed to be turning up in places I often go – joining the gym I am a member of and running classes I’ve done there. I’ve had a random invitation from another gym to attend a workshop he was running, he turned up at a couple of social events he knows I often go to etc. But then we live in fairly close proximity to each other so some kind of overlap is bound to happen.
I’ve had no actual communication with him in three years. I park near his flat maybe once or twice a month when there’s no other spaces to park in so I can go to dog class, and I’ve seen him round town on a few occasions (when I have, I either ignore him or go in a different direction). Am I being delusional to think that this does not qualify as either stalking or as “taking our children to his house”? In rural locations like this it would be impossible for there not to be some kind of cross-over; we could well be using the same supermarket etc etc – it’s just inevitable. I thought I was just living my life as I usually would, but am I breaking some kind of code of conduct here?
What’s also weird about this is that it implies that not only has my exBF interpreted these things as me stalking him, but has CONTACTED MY EX-H ABOUT IT. AIBU to be a bit freaked out by this alone?