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China Elevator Stories
Erotomania: The Mental Illness Behind Many Stalkers
It is extremely challenging to handle a stalker because of the delusions they believe about you.
04/11/2025
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
Erotomania is a true mental illness, and it is psychologically very taxing for a victim of an erotomanic stalker to deal with. One of the main reasons a stalker may target someone is that he is suffering from erotomania—which is, in short, the delusional belief that a woman is in love with him.
Often, these individuals also have traits of narcissism, and the worse the erotomania, the worse the narcissism. I have experienced narcissists at an all-time high level of egotism, selfishness, arrogance, and a superiority complex so extreme it would make me sick to my stomach.
This means that such a person is constantly marketing themselves to you and constantly putting what is up down and what is down up. For example: if you are an attractive woman, they may call you ugly. If they are an unattractive man, they may insist that you are into him because he is so attractive. Even if you say, “No, that’s not what I believe or just said; I don’t find you attractive at all, actually, I find you quite ugly,” they will keep repeating what they supposedly believe about you, as though you are not able to think for yourself and not able to voice your own opinion without them telling you otherwise.
If you are intelligent, he will paint you as dumb. If he is dumb, he will constantly tell you how intelligent he is, how he is the most intelligent of all men who ever walked the earth, and that you need to constantly praise him for his intelligence while putting yourself down for not being as intelligent. This kind of behavior usually shows that a man who says such things about himself isn’t intelligent at all, since true intelligence is demonstrated in daily actions and behavior, not in claims about what one possesses. Though this manipulative tactic may work on people who aren’t intelligent enough to see through deception, it won’t work on someone who is intelligent, because they can see through lies—and the stalker proves he isn’t intelligent enough to discern your intelligence or to see through manipulations and lies.
Erotomania may also show in the stalker projecting other men being in love with you. You may have simply crossed paths with a man who looked at you for two seconds, and the stalker starts an extreme campaign of revenge because, in his head, he is already imagining that you and that person are together, dating, or in bed. In his mind, you have already betrayed him by “cheating” on him, even though he is a stranger you were never with, and yet he projects all kinds of crazy scenarios onto you.
So, erotomania is a delusional disorder where a man constantly projects onto you, and usually also onto himself. In more severe cases, he may also constantly and paranoidly project onto others, then tell you what other people think or do—that you are into other men as well, even when you were giving no hints or signals of interest. In his mind, life constantly revolves around this: not real-life matters, but the superficial pursuit of relationships, the shallow and constant “having to look for a man who gives you recognition as a woman” if you’re single. And if you aren’t running after a man—and for certain, you are the one who has to run after men, because you can’t possibly be attractive enough for men to like you on their own—you are somehow failing in life.
If you tell him to leave you alone with all this fake relationship talk and his wrong perception of what truly matters in life, he will still keep talking about how attractive and good-looking he is, how superior he is in intelligence, and that you need to go shopping to become more attractive to men. This is because you don’t fall into bed with any man who crosses your path—particularly very “attractive” erotomanic stalkers like him, whom you simply ran away from instead of sleeping with. Some people have healthy boundaries; others take whatever crosses their path because they are either too afraid of being single, or they believe a single woman is somehow flawed or “not good enough” for any man to take, or there is some other illness they feel they need to fix.
The “fixing of you” may get so intense that there’s no way to stop it. You may be pointing out the truth to him, only for him to gaslight you even more, to make even less sense of reality, and to turn every word you say around to mean the exact opposite of what you intended.
No real communication is possible with such a person, and using words is a waste of time. But when you ignore him—because it is your birthright to do so—he will say you are antisocial, that you don’t understand how to be nice, and that’s why you’re single and can’t get any man.
Then, when a man looks at you or flirts with you, he will suddenly start telling you how great and attractive you are—for two seconds in a year—when every other day he told you how disgusting, ugly, and totally beneath him you are, and that’s why you need to “take him,” because supposedly you don’t have any better men in line to take as your boyfriend.
Oh, boy! The sicknesses I’ve been dealing with. If you are dealing with such deranged people, please share your experience in the comments. I have been dealing with masses of mentally sick men, not just one, which is part of why I am staying single, as well as a mentally sick stalker (a famous singer) who has been harassing and stalking me. He is also erotomanic, has been ruining my life every day, and has threatened to kill me—naturally, in a way where others wouldn’t know, since he doesn’t want to be found out.
He goes berserk when he learns that another man has looked at me (even if it was just a normal glance), and then blames me for “flirting with men.” I am not with him, I don’t like him, and I don’t want to be with him, so why would he have the right to tell me what to do or interfere when a man looks at me? But yes, his behavior is so extreme that I can be blamed for having “left him” when a man looked at me, because in his mind, any male attention automatically means I was flirting, being with that man, or already in bed with him. Paranoia, anyone?
When you tell him to stop his sick behavior, he pretends he didn’t hear you, claims nothing is wrong with him, or insists he is “just being loving” by pointing out your flaws—one of which is not being sensitive enough to his intense jealousy, and not keeping him in mind enough so he won’t feel jealous in the first place.
Yikes!
How did I attract one of Germany’s most famous singers into my life? Well, he read my blog! (So, if you want to attract famous people into your life, that’s the only thing you need to do—just kidding. It has been a ride in a hell so extreme that I just want him to leave me alone.)
He wrote me many songs, which are lovely (some of them, not all), but his daily behavior is so horrific that I have told him time and time again to leave me alone and stop wasting my time. I want to live my life, not chase after a man who is too selfish and egotistic to care for another human being—let alone leave me and my children alone.
Have you ever dealt with delusional people?