Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not hopeless romantics perusing hopeless relationships. Let me reframe that: If there is no hope she will ever say "yes", he knows that and pursues her anyway , he is a stalker , not a hopeless romantic.
That's just not what stalking means. It's a pretty serious crime with a real definition, not just "I don't like somebody" or "they hurt my feelings" or whatever. You're free to call it creepy or frightening or anything else, it's just not what stalking is though. You've made up your own definition of the word.
The term “stalking” means engaging in a course of conduct directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to fear for his or her safety or the safety of others or suffer substantial emotional distress.
https://www.justice.gov/ovw/stalking
At some point, someone told me (to my surprise -- they were rebutting some comment I made online) that horror movies tend to have mostly female audiences. A lot of horror movies have plot lines that sound a fair amount like stalking or some exaggerated fantasy version of stalking.
A lot of women suffer substantial emotional distress and fear for their own safety due to the behavior of men they know who will not give it a rest. Men tend to be bigger than women, outweigh them, have a strength advantage, are more likely to have combat training or martial arts classes, etc.
One article I read years ago indicated that when asked what they most feared from a woman, men feared being laughed at. Women feared being killed (by men).
Men may not be comfortable hearing that their behavior can be taken as threatening and scary to women when they think they are just being "a hopeless romantic." But I am absolutely not making up my own definition of anything.