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Hybrid Volume 36

Warning Signs Your Guy Friend is a Garden Variety Creep: What You Should Know and Next Steps

by Candace Angelica Walsh

Look Me In the Eye by Kevin Bodniza

Warning Signs Your Guy Friend is a Garden Variety Creep: What You Should Know and Next Steps

Ethically Reviewed by peers of Author on October 29th, 2024

Written by: Candace Angelica Walsh (she/her)

15 min read

Garden Variety Creep /noun/:  A person masquerading as a friend to have greater access to you, and often portending a love and respect for women, but working hard to conceal their default setting of dehumanizing women as objects: shapes, lines, lips, hips, vessels to deposit their desire, shame and resentment, playthings and puppets in a sexual theater who—when they assert their humanity and announce their discomfort—are told they are in fact the bad actor and blamed for any perceived wrongdoing, that it was all in their head.

In the early stage of the eight-year friendship with your guy friend, you may discount any signs that he is a creep. You may have many friendships with the opposite sex that you’ve maintained enthusiastically for upwards of twenty years, some of them since high school, so you’re likely to believe that this friend values you as a person and is not subversively objectifying you. If you first meet this guy friend while both of you are hustling in the service industry living in the Southwest, you as a bartender and him as a server, you will bond over a shared ambition to get out of the desert and support yourselves entirely from your art: your writing and his painting.  

If in the past you have not been shy of confrontation, but in recent years you have been doing hard work to regulate your reactions to bothersome things in order to avoid getting called a bitch or insane, then this may have swung the pendulum to the side of avoidance. Because you have gradually begun to measure your value through other people’s eyes and how agreeable you are to them, you don’t speak up like you used to, leaving you feeling like a watercolor pad doused with a too-wet brush, like you don’t know who you are anymore. See: A Blocked Throat Chakra: Is it Slowly Killing You?

Early Warning Signs: Objectification

When signs start to appear, they can include:

  • Casual comments on your physical appearance that oscillate between compliments and out-of-place criticism: one day you are radiant, glowing, that shirt looks amazing on you. The following week “Are you tired or something? Have you seen how you’re looking lately?”
  • He has a different woman hyper-sexualized as the screen saver on his phone every time you see him. He places his phone upright on the table and highlights it when it goes to sleep even though there is no text notification, so you can see whatever the girl of the day is: one spilling out of her bathing suit, another leaning up against a wall with short shorts and her face a come-hither look. It makes you a bit uncomfortable but none of your business—right?
  • He paints almost exclusively beautiful women, and the work is stunning: he really can capture every curve, muscular propulsion, the most intricate features of a woman from a 2D photograph into a work of art that bursts from the canvas. Initially you think: women are beautiful, of course he admires them and wants to render their beauty—he reveres them. Objectification alarm bells don’t ring at this stage despite the screensaver phone thing, because, well, a letdown guard under a flag of friendship has resulted in some of history’s most retold stories.

These early signs may or may not be reasons to write this person off. If you have been socialized as a woman, you likely have been conditioned to normalize how women must lead with their desirability and men with their merits, so you may unconsciously tune out how he positions himself as a gatekeeper of female beauty despite being no Adonis himself.

Intermediate Warning Signs: Stolen Intimacy

  • With his extraordinary artistic talent, he paints you from a picture he saw on Facebook and brings the painting professionally framed to your bartending shift on your birthday as a surprise, where there are a great number of people who came to celebrate with you while you are working, and whom a great cross-section of express this as very nice and impressive, but also telling of his attention to your physicality.
  • Although the picture is beautiful and you are flattered to be captured in this way, you are slightly needled by the thought that he never commented or liked the photo on Facebook, but when he saw it, it impressed him enough to decide to recreate it. And further, he did so secretly: spending time with a photo of you, studying the picture of your face, privately. And it is the notion of this that creeps you out: an iteration of your being is somewhere you didn’t consent, and it feels violating in a way that you are not sure you have a right to.
  • One night shortly after this you are out for drinks together and he obnoxiously and incorrectly prescribes that there are three levels of a woman’s chest: boobs, breasts, and titties. He says you are in the latter category, and you feel like you want to wipe the slime right off you and walk away then, but you are somehow numb and don’t say anything. It is here that a special kind of convolution exists: if this comment came from a woman friend would you feel as uncomfortable? If not, is this his problem or yours? Further, if you speak up that it makes you uncomfortable that he has done such a close analysis on what category your chest falls into, does this take him out of the friend category by your hand or his? And is it going to result in a particularly negative reaction, as when someone believes they are “complimenting” you, does holding them to account engender greater danger of resentful retaliation?  See: Analysis Paralysis: “The Fox in Her Confusion Was Caught Up by the Hounds”

Advanced Warning Signs: Concerned Third Party

At this point, some people will have spoken up and by proxy removed this person from their life. If you are not one of those people because your newfound avoidance has you dodging any uncomfortable conversations, your friendshipwill go on for the next few years. As a result, the following signs may present:

  • You introduce him to a boyfriend at an early dinner all together, and they have uncomfortable competitive energy with one another. The (now ex) boyfriend is a man-baby, so you can’t take his opinion on people all that seriously, however, note that the boyfriend has concerns about the friend calling you Beloved and Love via text. You explain that this is something you’ve been told not to be concerned about because he does it with all his female friends and the man-baby boyfriend responds “Exactly.”
  • When you break up with that boyfriend, the friend asks, “How did he get a bad bitch still living in his parent’s basement?” You laugh at first because the Man-Baby was living in his parent’s basement, but later you consider his word choice and find it off-putting.

Late-Stage Warning Signs: Overt Sexual Messaging and Casual Allusions to Violence

When you observe the following signs, it is time to tell the guy friend to kick rocks, though you will likely feel hesitant to do so, as you have known each other for close to eight years and wrongly believe that it will reflect poorly on you to have the friendship fail. See: Sunk Cost Fallacy

  • You move to a metropolitan city in the Midwest, where he has also begun staying over the Summer to work on his art. You go to a festival where he is exhibiting, and afterward you get some burgers. When you part ways, he offhandedly comments that he noticed men looking at you over the evening, and shares he is going to continue drinking with some friends afterwards. When you get home and by his request, you text him the selfie of you two that you took at dinner and say, “Let me know if you get it!” He writes back “You’re sick lol” with a litany of emojis, incorrectly assuming you are insinuating (you can only surmise) sex with someone while being out. It is a very strange response. “Let me know if you get the picture,” you clarify—he doesn’t respond to this.
  • A couple days after that, he sends you a video on Instagram which you almost don’t open as the thumbnail picture shows a woman in a short red dress with her face away from the camera and a focus on her backside. You get a bad feeling but give him the benefit of the doubt—maybe it’s something lighthearted or something that he thought you would think is funny? Instead, it’s a guy on a rant about how if a girl looks a certain way (you can’t remember because upset nervous systems sometimes block retention of details), he’s not pulling out, which he says in increasingly creative ways—so better get ready to pay the child support. You are disturbed, why did he send you this? You think maybe it’s a mistake like when Man-Baby sent you that video of a girl shaking her butt that he intended for his guy friends group message and you innocently assumed he was sending it because he wanted you to do the same for him so you “hearted” it and then he called you immediately afterward and apologized profusely and basically told on himself (seriously, Man-Baby had an IQ about six points higher than butter, but you digress). So, you respond “Umm…what the hell” to the guy friend which he immediately “hearts” but doesn’t say sorry or stop sending videos. You couldn’t say what the rest of the videos contain because, after that, you stop opening his DMs. You know you are being avoidant, but feel that if you speak of your discomfort, he will respond with an adverse and aggressive reaction instead of accountability for himself and compassion for how you feel. And you will be right.
  • After continually dodging his DMs, he texts you at 10 PM one night, “What are you doing,” no question mark, not how are you doing, what, and you don’t feel like dignifying it, so you don’t.
  • You still haven’t responded to his last text a week prior, but you posted on Instagram because you got a photo shoot back for a new theater/writing role you took on, and you are excited about how they came out. He screenshots your post and texts it to you saying how great you look, but he’s still going to “kick your ass” for your non-existent replies. You want to ignore him forever or tell him that you have achieved your childhood dream and moved to a pink star in another galaxy. But instead, you decide to respond some hours later, something in the ballpark of: Hey! Been juggling a lot, hope that he’s been well. He says he has and wants to get together sometime soon. You don’t respond to this.

Other Warning Signs to Watch For

Some signs can be overlooked due to layers of denial and sudden physical trauma. Those signs could include:

  • He displays an intense curiosity about your travel to Cuba the year before the pandemic and jokes that you have a lover there (you did), but his jokes turn increasingly hostile, and he gets visibly upset when you fail to divulge anything further than a vague shrugging off of the inquiry. He makes a comment under his breath about how he knows you got your “back broken” out here, as a euphemism for gratuitous sex, which along with being disgusting is an ominous comment given the next sign.
  • Two years after that exchange, you make a last-minute trip to the city in the Southwest where you lived for years and met the guy friend, after getting a new job out of the bar industry, getting sober, and getting past the breakup with Man Baby. At that time, you felt like you could conquer whatever life threw at you, so you go indoor rock climbing for the first time, and it is harder than you thought. At the top of one wall you are finally able to scale, you look down before you release and realize you aren’t strapped in. You start to climb back down but it feels like you’re in a nightmare with pools of sharks circling so your body and brain panic, and you fall from 25 feet and break your lumbar spine. The guy friend is one of the first people to ask when he can take you out to lunch during your two-month recovery, and you are still in your back brace. At some point during the outing, he comments on how you lost your butt. Because you burst your L1 vertebrae and the nerves at that location on the spine control many things including the hip abductors, you don’t activate your glutes anymore when you walk, which he doesn’t know, but you find very disturbing of him to note the result of and further to say it, especially since in addition to your back brace, you are still using a walker to get around. When you put together that he may have noticed your shrunken backside when you got up to go to the bathroom some moments before, you feel like both crying and punching him right in the face. Here, your mind flashes to your dad’s favorite story to tell about you. When you were three years old a kid stole your swing and kicked sand in your eyes, and though he was bigger and probably around five, you walked up to him and socked him square in the nose. Your dad’s favorite part of this story is when he pantomimes the kid’s reaction after he asked if he was ok, and covers his nose with both hands, nodding wide-eyed, shocked that you wouldn’t take that disrespect laying down. See: Showing Up Authentically: Are Our Toddler Selves Our Truest Selves?

How to Break Off the Friendship

Even if your guy friend believes by his random sprinkling of superficial praise about your writing on social media that he is a good friend, he is simply a garden variety creep who has negatively impacted your confidence by making you uncomfortable with both subversive and outright sexualized comments and behavior, and cultivated a sense of doubt and hesitance for you to do or say anything about it because you are in a liminal space of cobbling together pieces of your past self together with the aspirational pieces of who you want to be. If you are having trouble crafting a response to his latest request to hang out again, please see recommended action steps:

  • Use the new skill you acquired from a browsed library interrelationship self-help book to rate the situation in terms of priorities: Objective, Self-respect, Relationship Value and then conclude they are in this order, respectively: 2/1/3
  • Respond to his text about hanging out again by saying you must be honest that your last few exchanges have made you uncomfortable.
  • Raise the examples of his out-of-left-field responses after the last time you saw him and the hypersexual reel he sent you.
  • Say that you have appreciated and valued his friendship but share that you don’t have room in your life to manage this kind of discomfort (remember in descending order of importance: Self-respect, Objective, Relationship Value, and be at peace with whatever connection you have not continuing).

Results of Confrontation

If you have already sent the text and/or communication, expect the following:

  • An immediate response that is not well-thought-out saying (though you have not accused him of this and only pointed to the things that made you uncomfortable) he’s not trying to pursue you “like that.”
  • “This is so left field,” he says, straight up co-opting the turn of phrase you used just moments before.
  • He says he is grateful no one has ever accused him of some elusive “this.” But, he says, “to each there [sic] own”—which in addition to being elusive is nonsensical.
  • After no response from you, he waits a few hours and texts you again. This new text is a mile long and includes the explanation that he is no longer mad, just disappointed in you.
  • Tells you that whatever toxic stuff you have going on he doesn’t want it in his circle.
  • Tells you how he has blocked you on everything (he did this almost immediately after the first text exchange, which was not surprising but also not news to you).
  • Tells you (again despite you never having said so) that he never “made a damn pass at you.”
  • Tells you once again how, in all caps, “GRATEFUL” he is that no one has ever accused him of “this.” Again, your message being a simple recap of the incidents that made you uncomfortable with no accusations.
  • Tells you how people end up showing themselves, and you agree but for a different reason, and asserts that he’s a great human being, though you haven’t said anything to the contrary. Then he claims that he will continue to go on being the successful and loved person he is, despite individuals like you.
  • He goes on for another paragraph, and towards the end reasserts how loved and respected he is, though once again you haven’t said anything about his character, and he doth protest too much you think, but also is trying in a way to forebode that your honesty will somehow hurt you in the long run.
  • By some divination of restored confidence seemingly as a direct result of speaking up, you don’t feel anxiety to further defend what you are saying. All you respond is that on the contrary, it is he who has shown himself, and although you have wanted to say something many times in the past, you see now that it would have always led to a poor result given that he clearly doesn’t have the emotional maturity to handle it. Armed with the resolution that maintaining the relationship is at the bottom of your priorities, you feel vindicated after raising your voice and are pleasantly surprised that you have no albatross around your neck after doing so. You tell him whatever narrative he needs to self-preserve, do that. It’s fine, you get it.
  • Shortly afterward, you block him and feel so light it’s like your red Vans have sprouted wings; like you just lost about two hundred and fifty pounds of asshole.

See: A Brief History of a Bruised Male Ego: “You’ll Never Work in this Town Again!”

Also: Common Tactics of Perpetrators – DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender

Signs the Universe Was Trying to Tell you Something All Along

  • You never put up the picture he painted of you because 1) you felt ridiculous having it anywhere in your house—where does one hang an altar to oneself? Bathroom, living room, kitchen? And 2) You were traumatized by watching the movie Seven at the preposterously inappropriate age of twelve and cannot ever forget that the girl who was murdered for the sin of Pride (and you won’t re-traumatize yourself by recounting the details) had a picture of herself over her bed. All that said, you—out of guilt or obligation or both—carried the picture with you from your move across the country, and it was the only thing the movers dropped, and the glass broke. When you moved to another neighborhood in town and were settling in the first day at your new place, you realized it was the only thing you left behind—sitting framed and glassless behind the mud room door. You, again out of guilt or obligation or both, went back to the old neighborhood and collected it, but you couldn’t help noticing how badly it wanted to run away or off itself.
  • The moment you have the final text exchange to break off the friendship and block him, you’re walking by a restaurant with live music, and they are playing Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s “Free Fallin”. You stroll by right as the man in a grey Irish shepherd’s cap is belting out about being free, and it feels like the powers that be are giving you a wink.
  • The next morning you are walking your dog and start thinking it might be important to share some of what happened on social media so you can put your side of the story out there, as you are certain he is on a smear campaign having witnessed him denouncing other people on this medium in the past (an earlier indication things were not going to end well). As you walk along a sidewalk in your metropolitan city with coffee in hand, you think then again maybe not, and step onto the grass on the side of the sidewalk for your dog to do his potty business. At that exact second, a snake, something you have never seen in the three years living there, slithers between your feet and you scream, jump, and spill your coffee, as it whips its way towards the gutter then quickly is out of sight. You decide that perhaps you should broadcast this experience. Maybe it will smoke out more snakes in the grass.

Recovery

After sharing some of what you experienced on your Instagram story, you receive an overwhelming response from people sharing their view that the guy was not a friend and indeed a creep. Further, others reach out with similar experiences. You mutually feel seen, validated, and cease to self-gaslight. And it feels good to know that no matter how much he tried to pin you as culpable for some misinterpretation of his fuckery, you didn’t give. Because your truth is not captured by the rendering of someone else, no matter how good they are at painting it.

Rates for breaking off a friendship with a garden variety creep have been increasing with the reclaiming of the inner little girl self who knew nothing else than to instinctively fight back at a transgression against her. Once the offender is kicked to the curb, he will slime his way to some other landscape, and a new but somehow old you will emerge, your most vibrant version—like Dorothy stepping into Technicolor.

Author Candace Angelica Walsh has words in Midwest Review, The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism, River Teeth, and elsewhere. She is a former participant of The Kenyon Review Nonfiction Workshop with Dinty W. Moore, a Cal Arts Institute Summer Writing Program, a 2023 Story Studio Chicago Nonfiction Fellow, and recently received an acceptance into the Tinhouse 2025 Winter Nonfiction Workshop with Lily Dancyger. Originally from California, she now resides in Chicago.

Artist Kevin Bodniza is a self-taught artist born in South Florida, has always approached art instinctually, creating without formal training. Using collage as his medium, he constructs textured worlds that reflect the chaos and beauty of life. His work is raw and unapologetic, evoking emotions that range from joy to discomfort.