This article is courtesy of Friend Finder, one of the first dating sites established.

Cole had just moved and was looking to make new friends and find someone to date. He contacted a few women at FriendFinder and spent some time IMing back and forth with them. He was perfectly polite, perfectly legit—making sure never to lead anyone on.

He narrowed members down to a couple of different women he wanted to get to know and was contemplating meeting each of them for coffee and mentioned this to them both in emails. After he met Lauren, he felt pumped about getting to know her.

His communication had been going downhill with the second woman, Sarah—there were a lot of incompatibilities popping out and he didn’t feel like he wanted to meet her in person anymore, so he wrote to her, explaining his feelings in an honest email. A perfectly acceptable thing to do, right? Wrong, according to Sarah. She replied, ripping him to shreds and saying that he was a liar, a manipulator and an all-around grotesque person for not realizing what they had and for leading her on.

Cole, on the other hand, was proud of himself for spotting some of the signs because what he had just done was avoid a Stage 5 Clinger! Remember Kate Hudson’s static cling character in How to Loose a Guy In Ten Days? That’s who we’re talking about when we say “Stage 5.”

Start spotting the following signs of a Stage 5 Clinger at the beginning. The key is to nip the connection in the bud. Otherwise, you’ll feel like your growing relationship is a giant piece of Velcro that’s hard to pull yourself away from.

No boundaries in the beginning
If you just contacted a FriendFinder member two weeks ago and now you feel like they’re all over your life, you’ve got someone who knows no boundaries. The no boundaries person invades your space by trying to get to know you and be an intimate part of your life – too quickly.

An empty life
People who have full lives with friends, family, work, and hobbies don’t have the time or the desire to latch on as much because they have other things to keep them occupied. If you are the only thing going on in this person’s life, be careful of the cling.

Trust issues
People with major trust issues tend to cling because they get paranoid. The thought process goes: “I’m assuming you’re a liar and a cheater so I have to glue myself to you to prevent the bad thing you are inevitably going to do to me.” You can spot people with trust issues right away if they are constantly talking and writing about how wronged they’ve been in the past.

Abandonment issues
People with abandonment issues are watching the clock, waiting for you to leave. They will perform “tests” on you to see how far they can push you and then say, “See, I knew you were going to leave.” These “tests” include picking huge fights, flirting with other people, and in general, finding your buttons and pushing them.

Way low self-esteem
People with way low self esteem don’t like themselves, so they are looking for a new self to cling to. Often you can spot these types of people because they don’t seem to have a set of things that they like to do. Instead they take on whatever you like to do. Beware!

Caroline Presno, Ed.D., P.C.C. is a psychotherapist, doctor of education, and author of Profiling Your Date: A Smart Woman’s Guide to Evaluating a Man.

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