There is a quiet epidemic, digital and delicate, of women checking in on other women.

An unmistakable sense that yet another girl I don't know, but who somehow knows a man I’ve merely had a conversation with, has found her way into my online world.

It’s become almost comical at this point. Every single girl the men in my life have ever known seems to stalk me. The exes, almosts, girls they met at uni, the ones they only vaguely remember from school. They all arrive eventually, scrolling through my page, only caught when they accidentally like a post from 2018. And every time I catch it, I think the same thing.

I don’t want your man. Truly. I barely even want the attention of the men I do like, let alone the ones I don’t.

But the internet dissolves intention. It blurs boundaries, and invites strangers into rooms you never asked them to enter.

and the irony of it all is that I’ve been on the other side, too

I used to be the girl on the other side of the screen, silently tracking someone else. I’ve stalked a girl before. His girl. The ex who came before me. I thought I was checking in out of insecurity, searching for reasons he wasn’t with her anymore, or convincing myself of reasons he should be with me instead. But the more I looked, the truth came to light. I admired her outfits and her funny stories. I wanted to know her, not compete with her. I wanted to borrow her energy the way you borrow a jumper from someone whose style you can't get enough of.

no envy, but admiration suffocated by curiosity

But that kind of stalking feels almost normal, like a weird, universal rite of passage. We all do it. Even if we pretend we don’t. Because there is logic behind it: an ex carries relevance. They are part of the story you’ve stepped into, a chapter you’re trying to understand, a past that lingers in your present.

What’s harder to understand is when it comes from women who have absolutely nothing to do with your story at all. The friend of a friend. The girl your guy friend has been on two dates with. The one who doesn’t know you, has no reason to watch you, yet studies your life like it’s a history project.

That’s what frustrates me. When you open your phone and find strangers walking through your most vulnerable moments with muddy shoes. When the parts of you that feel the most exposed become entertainment for people who have already decided what they think about you before they’ve even met you.

To be seen is to be known. And I don’t want to be known by strangers who were never supposed to be here.

Being “seen” feels complicated for me. I’m pretty private. I overshare on my stories but it’s like a golden ticket trying to get through the door. Yet here I am, also writing under a public author account, sharing things I never meant to shout into the void. Vulnerability becomes a double-edged sword, because the same posts that feel healing are now the ones others use like a window into me, and not always in a kind way.

I forget that the world doesn’t just include kind readers and quiet, thoughtful women who relate.

It also includes watchers and lurkers. Those who peer in not out of shared experience, but because they want to measure, compare, judge, or decode. They don't want to understand my work, they want to understand me. And not always with the best intentions.

But still, I try to understand the psychology of it, because I don’t think it’s truly born from cruelty. Women stalk each other for reasons that are tangled, rooted in both curiosity and survival. Sometimes it’s projection or even comparison. Mostly fear. And often, like I learned previously, it’s admiration wearing a slightly distorted mask.

the psychology behind the stalking spiral

the curiosity loop

Women are naturally inclined towards pattern-spotting. We notice emotional micro-shifts, digital footprints, inconsistencies, the faintest edge of a story we’re not being told. A profile isn’t just a profile; it’s an ecosystem we’re trying to understand. Men scroll. Women study. It’s almost a survival tactic. Curiosity morphing into caution, caution morphing into quiet investigation.

comparison as self-protection

Most of the time it isn’t rooted in jealousy at all, it’s reconnaissance. A way of checking, Is she the reason he was weird last week? We’ve all been socially conditioned to think the other woman is a threat long before we realise she might actually be someone we’d get along with better than the man connecting us.

empathy gone sideways

A lot of women are trying to understand someone emotionally before they meet them. It’s a strange, digital form of empathy. We scroll to understand, often looking at an ex and seeing someone we could trust more than him, and then realise we’re admiring her instead of despising her.

fear of the unknown

When it’s an ex, the obsession almost makes sense. There’s context and history. There’s a puzzle we think we can solve. But when it’s strangers, your friends’ girlfriends, or women they have history with, that’s when it turns sour. And then it slips into something feral and uncomfortable. Women are more inclined toward this behaviour because we’ve been told our entire lives that the unknown is dangerous.

The unknown woman even more so.

visibility as vulnerability

To look at another woman is to measure our own edges. To view her life is to wonder what she sees in ours. That’s why it feels violating when someone does it to you, especially when they don’t know you personally, only through the men who orbit you. You didn’t ask to be a character in their story, and you definitely didn't audition for the role of the villain in a romcom.

desire for connection disguised as surveillance

The truth is embarrassingly tender. We stalk the girl because, deep down, we want to know her. We want to hold hands over iced lattes and say, God, wasn’t he awful sometimes? But didn’t he also have that laugh? We want to sit beside her instead of across from her.

The problem is that the internet makes us forget that we're real. Our posts aren't puzzles to solve or stories to psychoanalyse. We're people with feelings, boundaries, and a life beyond whatever someone can piece together from a grid of curated squares.

That’s the saddest part of this epidemic, not that women stalk, but that we’ve been conditioned to see each other as threats before we ever think to see each other as mirrors.

Imagine how different it would be if our first instinct wasn’t “What does she have that I don’t?” but instead “What do I recognise in her?”

What part of me do I see reflected back?

We’re not rivals and never were. We’re just women trying to navigate a hyper-visible world where privacy no longer exists and curiosity is only ever one click away.

If you’re the one scrolling, I’ve been you.

If you’re the one being scrolled, I am you.

And somewhere between those two versions of ourselves, maybe we can find the grace to handle each other more gently.

Not by pretending we don’t look, but through honesty about why we do. Nothing good comes from breaking each other down just to understand ourselves better.