A woman has developed an absurd obsession for me [35M] purely over correspondence. How do I tell her to leave me alone while hurting her the least possible?

So I work as an online content editor and several years back I put out a call for writers on the subject of Middle Eastern poetry. A woman around my age wrote from Tajikistan to send an article; it was not very good (her English left a lot to be desired), but it was on topic and I worked a lot with her to bring it up to editorial standard.

She wrote several times after that, her letters becoming increasingly casual and personal, and some time ago she started saying these absurd things about being in love with me. We've never even met, and our correspondence has been rather superficial (I mostly responded out of politeness). I told her as gently as I could that this was not to be, and for a few years she did not contact me again.

Now she just wrote again to reiterate that her "true love is forever" and pressing me to reply to her letters and help her with a manuscript.

I want her to leave me alone as I really have no time for her and I am tired of writing letters which are (for me) no more than a continuous exercise in tactfulness and psychology. But this is clearly an individual with very little in the world - very poor, no hopes of fulfilment for her literary dreams, no partner. She is also delusional about her love for me and I'm not sure to what extent it is possible to reason with her, or treat her like an adult.

I want to be as firm as possible that I have no interest in her and no intention of ever meeting her, but I'd also like to communicate this without making her feel that her "true love" is in fact a heartless bastard and that the world has nothing for her but cruelty. Any ideas on what/how I should write?

TL;DR A woman from a poor country thinks she is in love with me, and I want to tell her to leave me alone and move on yet somehow not shatter her heart.

Submitted May 27, 2020 at 02:04PM by Judge_T https://ift.tt/2X8wD3l