I fully understand that because of the way i look (jeans and a t-shirt usually with thick "I Look like A Serial Killer" glasses and a thick beard), my size (6-4,275), and my gender I seem threatening even when I am trying not to be. So the best way for me to get around the problem is to avoid any sort of conversation other than the most mundane small talk. "Hi", "How are you" is about as far as this guy goes right here.

Maybe I'm being too sensitive, perhaps not. But I don't ever want to be one of those guys who are creepy and invading some innocent woman's personal space like she's just there for me to gaze at. So I figure that it's better for me to just completely shut myself down to the bare essentials of being a human being than to worry about whether or not my compliment about somebody's blouse will be treated as creepy guy on the street.

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Thge second scenario is more interesting to me: The deli guy is just being overly friendly. Perhaps he thinks this is doing his job, building a customer base. Depending on his age and background, this may be how he thinks he's SUPPOSED to behave. Or maybe he's bored and lonely. The thing is that for many of us, this friendliness is just as bad. I don't WANT to have a relationship with my deli guy that goes beyond a smile and a comment on the weather. It feels intrusive when there's any more to the conversation. This isn't a female or male problem, but it may be a particularly New York problem. We have too many of these encounters every day to want/allow them to be too friendly. There's an unspoken code of limited interaction here that we expect will be respected. I'm not sure it's a great way to go though life, but... it's a practical one, and it would be hard for most of us to change our innate or at least well-conditioned response.

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In "The Gift of Fear" De Becker puts it well. He says ask a male friend when the last time they feared for their lives and usually they have to think a bit. Ask a woman and they'll say, 'do you mean this month or this week?'.

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If it's a woman making the comments, then trying to disengage marks you as unmanly and possibly gay.

If it's a man, it's extremely hard to acknowledge that's what's happening -- that a man might be threatening your sexual boundaries.

I'm not saying it's a problem on the scale of what women face, or that it's even a big problem at all. Just that straight men have their own unique (if smaller) issues to deal with in comparable situations. Mostly you just have to stop worrying about people calling you gay.

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There's this man in my 12-step program who is one of the group "leaders" (he starts off and ends the meetings every once in a while) so you'd think he would know better than to flirt with me, a newcomer (i.e. someone vulnerable, on shaky sober ground). But ever since I joined he's acted really creepy towards me, making a point to sit next to me on this TINY bench during our smoke breaks, leaning onto me with his body to punctuate every statement. Calling me "honey" and patting me on the back.

"How long've you been clean now, honey?" *pat pat* *body nudge* "You look SOOO good today!" *looks up and down*

Ugh.

It fills me with dread as I approach the meeting place because I'm afraid he'll be smoking outside and engage me in conversation, alone... and he ALWAYS comes and invades my personal space afterwards. Sometimes I prepare a line in my head, like "Could you not pay so much attention to me? It makes me uncomfortable." Because you'd think you could be honest and straightforward in this kind of setting, where people usually lay out their secrets and feelings... but there's no way to say it without sounding, I don't know, crazy.

After reading all your stories, though, I realize I'm not crazy.

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