When a Man Tries to Access Someone

There’s a certain kind of ache that doesn’t sit in your bones or your chest, but somewhere deeper—like your soul has an itch it can’t reach. That’s what it feels like when a man becomes obsessed with someone he’s never actually met. He doesn’t know her laugh in real life, has never smelled her skin or watched her pick at the label on her coffee cup while she thinks. But that doesn’t stop him from trying to access her.

Not physically. Not in the way of stalkers or creeps that linger in the shadows of restraining orders. No. This is subtler. It's digital, emotional, psychological. It starts with a face in a photo. A name in a comment thread. A voice in a video. And suddenly she’s a presence in his mind—warm, inviting, and haunting.

He learns her birthday from an old post. He knows her favorite coffee shop because she tagged it once in a story from 2021. He’s memorized the songs she’s added to her playlists. He watches her move through her curated online life and builds something in the empty spaces. A narrative. A connection. A false intimacy.

And it’s not even romantic—not always. Sometimes it’s just longing. To be understood by someone who never asked to understand him. To be seen by someone who didn’t volunteer to look.

The man convinces himself he knows her. That if they met—just once—they’d click. She’d laugh at his jokes. She’d finally feel like he’s the person she didn’t even know she was waiting for. That maybe her carefully-filtered loneliness would find an echo in his own.

But of course, it’s all projection.

He isn’t connecting with her. He’s connecting with a character he’s crafted using her digital breadcrumbs and his own emotional need. She’s a mosaic made of his fantasy and her fragments. And the cruel thing is, he knows this. Deep down, he knows.

But that doesn’t stop the scroll.

That doesn’t stop the late nights rewatching clips or reading old captions like sacred texts. It doesn’t stop him from writing messages and deleting them. From starting a new account just to watch her stories when she blocks him. From decoding emoji like they’re personal confessions.

Because even when he knows it’s one-sided, his mind keeps whispering, what if?

What if she’s watching him back? What if she feels the same strange pull toward a stranger she’s never met?

The fantasy becomes a refuge. Safe. Predictable. He can imagine her any way he likes. She never rejects him, never argues, never complicates the picture. In this imagined closeness, he gets to be the version of himself he likes best—confident, calm, clever. Not the guy who feels small and unwanted in real life. Not the man with bills, back pain, and unresolved trauma. He gets to matter.

But reality has sharp edges.

One day she goes private. Or deletes everything. Maybe she posts a selfie with someone else. A boyfriend. A partner. A life he has no place in. And it stings. It stings in a way that feels unfair because she never owed him anything. She doesn’t even know he exists. But still, it hurts. Like something sacred has been stolen.

Because even though it wasn’t love, it felt like it. And feelings don’t care much for logic.

When a man tries to access someone he never met, what he’s really trying to do is access a version of himself he’s misplaced. He’s reaching out into the digital mist for connection, for validation, for something soft to press up against his loneliness. But people aren’t puzzles for solving, or mirrors for our wounded reflections.

They are whole worlds—unreachable if you only explore them through secondhand stories.

Eventually, maybe, he’ll learn to close the app. To feel the loss and let it stay lost. To sit with the ache without needing it to mean more than it does. Maybe he’ll look for connection not in the illusion of curated perfection, but in the messy, mutual chaos of reality.

Or maybe he won’t.

Maybe he’ll just keep scrolling. Quietly haunted. Quietly hopeful.

Because hope, like obsession, is hard to kill.