There is a type of obsessive behavior that is different from the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that we’re familiar with: stalker behavior.

While stalkers can exhibit OCD traits, this behavior is dangerous to many.

According to officer.com, one in 12 women and one in 45 men are stalked in their lifetime.

Stalking is common in college campuses. Sometimes the victim may not even know for a long time. With social media, it’s easier for stalkers to obtain information on their victim.

 It’s important to always stay up to date on the constantly changing privacy settings on sites like Facebook.

“Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov is a great example of the nature of stalking. Main character Humbert Humbert has an obsession with young girls. 

His fixation is traced back to when he was a 13-year-old boy in love with 12-year-old Annabel Leigh. Annabel Leigh dies a few months later and this haunts Humbert for the rest of his life.

It’s a traumatic thing to lose someone close to you as a child. It’s even more traumatic when that someone was also a child. Sometimes this is how obsessions and phobias can manifest inside a person.

 All it takes is one awful experience with to turn someone off something. Or in this case, turn on.

In his adult life, Humbert is obsessed with sexually aware young girls that remind him of Annabel until he meets Dolores Haze, or as he privately calls her Lolita, the 12-year-old daughter of the woman whose home he rented a room in.

Humbert constantly watches and follows Lolita, flirting with her and believing that she is flirting back. He writes about her in his journal and comes to despise her mother. Humbert even fantasizes about killing Lolita’s mother.

Eventually he marries Lolita’s mother just to be closer to his “true love.”

Long story short, Humbert ends up taking Lolita on the run around the country after an accident occurs. He becomes convinced that she is the one who has seduced him and is paranoid that this child is unfaithful to him.

Then in an ironic turn of events, another man becomes obsessed with Lolita and Humbert accuses her of conspiring with “their stalker.”

Humbert is a strong case of the unreliable narrator. He seems like a good guy. He’s witty and intelligent. A beautiful writer. But he’s a mentally disturbed stalker (and pedophile). 

This is how many stalkers seem in the beginning: harmless. A stalker can seem like a good person with no ill intentions. Until they act on their delusions and their victim doesn’t return the affection.

Humbert grew increasingly obsessed with Lolita and eventually paranoid about her actions. He saw behavior in her that wasn’t there. He believed almost everything that happened was her doing. She was the seducer. She was wrong one.

She was a child with no parents to protect her. The fictional foreword introduced Dr. John Ray who states that Humbert’s tale will be a favorite in the psychiatric world and encourage parents to raise their children better.

Humbert seems like a cross between a Love Obsession Stalker and an Erotomanic Stalker. Just like an Erotomanic, he keeps his obsession private at first. He doesn’t speak of it and while he does have contact with Lolita, most of his fixation on her is from afar.

Until he gets found out. Humbert then desperately wants a relationship with Lolita and acts on extremes to achieve it.

This can happen to anyone. it’s imporant to always be aware of your surroundings and the people in it. If you believe you or a friend are being stalked, act now. Don’t think it’s all in your head. It’s all in your stalker’s head.

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Religion can be spoken about freely, yet we tread softly when publically mentioning it.

But, the hardest idea to grasp is that having the right to spread religious awareness is certainly not the same as pushing beliefs on others. 

While people reserve the right to practice religious freedom and to speak without restraint about any faith they choose, forcing others to listen isn’t freedom of speech; it’s harassment.  

There are over 127 major religions and seven billion people on earth with seven billion different views of God. Some love Him, some fear Him, some question His existence and some are still searching for Him.

Some will decide that God plays no role in the trials and tribulations of life, while others will find faith the moment they see their newborn child take the first breath of being. 

Whether we discover where we spiritually belong in a pew on Sunday morning or on a lonely drive with no destination, the journey to finding or forgetting God is what determines our views. We can’t be told what and who to believe in, or to even believe in anything at all.

What we learn, who we meet and the challenges we face are what we remember when we stand before Him, not the church members that knock on our front doors, or the people that stand in the quad condemning us all to hell.

And if the church goer at your front door changes your perspective, let them. Be baptized in one church, change your mind, and be baptized in another. Let what you learned in biology class make you question evolution and the powers above. 

Learning from life experiences and questioning God’s ways isn’t sin; it’s human. It’s human to change emotionally, mentally, and spiritually when physical surroundings change. It’s human to simply be curious and indecisive.

Faith only exists because there are people that believe strongly enough in it to make it a reality and a way of life. Without doubters and differences, the strength of religion would never have anything to be measured against. 

Because of that, religion without true belief is weak. 

Never practice out of habit, don’t follow just because your parents or friends do, and don’t ever think one religion is superior to another. In a time that seems to have the explanation for everything in a test tube or on a database, people believing in any God at all is a miracle in itself.