This post discusses rape in a relationship. This is a topic I struggle to talk about, as it's so taboo. "Marital rape" has only been recognised as illegal in England, Wales, and Scotland since 1991, and in Northern Ireland since 2009. Regardless, rape is rape, even if the rapist is your partner. Indeed, the betrayal of trust is enormous when the rapist purports to love you. To then live with that person, knowing that they raped you, must take such a toll.
The author's words are exactly as I received them.
...
To
the rest of the world he was quiet, bumbling, polite – a bit of a throwback,
with an understated, dishevelled charm. Or dull and odd, depending on one’s
perspective.
When
Trevor and I first became a couple, my friends couldn’t quite understand the
attraction. We were very different, but I insisted that underneath our obvious
differences were twin souls. Or something. I was 23, had married young and
foolishly, and was overjoyed to be swept up in a shiny new romance.
Very
early on (maybe a week after we’d met at a party, when I was still telling
myself I’d simply met a lovely new friend) Trevor started telling me stories
about other women – exes, crushes, women he’d stood beside while waiting for a
lift – there were lots. One of the first stories he told me was about a friend,
Nina, whom he’d first met online. He and Nina had become close, and almost had
sex. He rejected her. Nina then began dating Dan, his closest friend at university.
This was when things between Trevor and Nina and Dan went suddenly sour.
On
one incomprehensible occasion, he told me, Nina had walked up to him, slapped
him in the face, and walked away without a word.
Over
subsequent months, Nina and Dan conducted a small but persistent internet hate
campaign against him, via the blogging and poetry websites he used. (This was
before Facebook and Twitter.) Their attacks largely focused on accusations that
Trevor was drawn to women with mental health issues, fetishised them even. He
became very emotional while telling me this story, and I desperately wanted to
assure him that he was not the person they had portrayed him to be.
The
slap, he confessed, had worried him. It was as if, he said, Nina “believed” him to have “done something”. I probed, and he
volunteered the concern that he might have raped Nina, but have no memory of
it. He had often worried about this, he told me.
Hearing
these words from a person I believed to be gentle, kind, and principled (in
fact, I barely knew this man, and my naïve trust was baseless), shocked me.
“There is no way a person could forget raping someone,” I insisted. “It can’t
have happened.” I reassured him of this countless times over the next eight
years.
Eighteen
months later, Trevor and I were living together. I had ended my marriage and
moved, with my child, 150 miles away to a city where I knew no one. Trevor knew
all about my past by then: the sexual abuse and rape I had been a victim of in
childhood, and the mental health issues it had left me with (complex trauma,
although I didn’t have that terminology then). The move had left me isolated,
and I was experiencing a period of depression, for which I was seeing a
psychotherapist.
One
Sunday morning, Trevor raped me.
We
were lying in our bed, and I was in a mute, dissociative state. (This is seen
in people who have experienced trauma, as a self protective mechanism.) I was
still, silent, and unresponsive. Had I been interested in kissing, cuddling,
and sex, my behaviour would have been the opposite: as an enthusiastic sexual
partner, I expressed consent fervently. But not that morning. On that morning,
I was lost in an inner pool of despair, unable to express anything verbally. I
simply needed to be left alone.
Trevor
ignored all of the signs that he should have known meant “no”: my silence, my
stillness, my lack of eye contact. This was not how we had sex, not ever. He
climbed on top of me as I lay on my back, and I kept my face turned away from
him, staring unseeingly through the wall, which was inches away. Tears welled
up in my eyes. This was not sex. I wanted it to stop, but I felt as though I
was miles deep under my skin, too far to climb back up in time. All I could do
was wait. Trevor finished, and he lay down beside me: “I’m sorry, I’m so
sorry”. He was kissing my shoulders as I cried, silently, still turned away.
“I’m so sorry.” He stayed close as I slowly, slowly felt my way back into my
body, regained the power of speech. He kept apologising, “I’m so sorry”.
He
was sorry. He knew it was wrong. He knew what he’d done. He was sorry. He was
sorry that he had raped me. I accepted that he was sorry, and we didn’t talk
about it. We never talked about it.
In
recent times I’ve wondered how much my mental health, and my relationship with
Trevor was coloured by him raping me.
Rape
takes away a person’s agency, and tells them that their wants and feelings do
not matter. To receive those messages from the person who says they love you
more than anyone, and who then continues to behave as though nothing bad has
happened… that sounds like the pattern of a child abuser.
I
can’t accept that Trevor raping me was anything other than an expression of his
power. It certainly feels unlikely to have been an expression of passion. In
actual fact, mine was the greater sex drive, and I frequently felt shamed by
Trevor, for wanting sex when he didn’t.
Our
relationship continued for a number of years. We weren’t especially happy, but
he always insisted that it was “the nuts and bolts”, practicalities, rather
than an issue with our connection.
Sometimes,
in a way typical of those living with complex trauma, small things would arouse
in me an overwhelming panic, and I would need to get away from Trevor, to get
out of the house, to be alone in order to calm down. When this happened, he
would do everything he could to stop me from leaving the house. He would pin me
to walls, he would hide my keys, he would shout and hurt me. In the aftermath,
I would try to end the relationship, but he would never let me.
Aside
from these explosions, I continued to feel content and invested. I believed
that we were in love, and although we did not see the point in marriage, I
expected to be with Trevor “forever”.
Then
life got complicated, and my relationship with Trevor was a casualty of that.
He did not love me any more. The breakup was brutal and complicated, and came
at a time when I did not have the emotional resources to cope. Despite my begging
him to go sooner, to stay with a friend, Trevor took a month to leave. As much
as possible, I stayed elsewhere during this time, but there were evenings when
we were both in the house at the same time.
On
one such evening, things fell apart. I was hurting so bitterly, and his being
so casual as though we were just housemates was causing me to spiral. I said
some horrible things about Trevor and his new, much younger girlfriend. (That
it would be nice to no longer feel intellectually challenged, for instance.) He
was furious, angrier than I’d ever seen him, and began to verbally tear into
me, telling me that I was a nasty person, that I would always say the cruellest
possible thing, that this was why he didn’t love me, that he didn’t feel safe
with me, that –
I
was stunned. “You raped me.” The words, incredulous, were out of my mouth
before I could stop them. It felt like a betrayal, like telling a terrible
secret, even though I was telling it to the one person who already knew. But I
was angry: he was telling me that I
was nasty, that he felt unsafe – he who
had raped me!
Nothing
could have prepared me for what came next: “What?” He didn’t remember. How could he not remember? How could he
rape me, be sorry, so, so sorry, and then forget?
He made me tell him about it, so I did. I described staring through the
wall, my face turned away from him on top of me, the tears flowing over the
bridge of my nose, the burning hollowness in my chest. I described his
apologies, and my forgiveness.
I
expected, at this point, for him to argue. To return to his refrain on my
nastiness, to call me a liar. But he didn’t. Instead he crumpled. How could he
do that, he asked me. How could he ever trust himself again? He was in tears,
and I found myself pushed into the role of comforting him, reassuring him. I
knew this was not right, so I told him that he should probably speak to friends
about this, which he accepted. I hoped he would speak to friends who knew me,
and who I respected, but I feared that he would choose his new girlfriend, or a
particularly sycophantic female friend he’d made online.
A
few days later, I asked if he’d spoken to anyone about it. Yes, he said. Two
women. He seemed uncomfortable with the question. Had they told him I was a
liar, I asked him. Yes, he said. They had.
I
have told four friends about this, in the year since. One tried to tell me I
was mistaken, that he hadn’t raped me. That it had been sex. She and I are no
longer friends. Another, knowing Trevor to be a quiet, calm man, asked me if I
was sure. I told her I was, and she believed me, although it grieves her to
think he could do that. She has known me for 20 years, so she knows I am
telling the truth. Another, who perhaps wants to keep her lines of
communication with Trevor open, had very little to say on the topic. Because I
love her, I haven’t pushed it. And the last friend accepted my account,
unconditionally. I am so lucky to have her.
I
think, very occasionally, of Trevor’s new girlfriend. The same age as I was
when he and I got together. Was she one of the ones who told him I was lying?
Would I have done any differently? I listened to his story of Nina, to his
concerns that he had “done something” – raped
her and forgotten. I told him he could never do that. But I was wrong.
I
think that to an extent this is something that we all do. Shushing out of one’s
mind the stories that do not fit with one’s picture of a new love, of who they
are, of what you will be together. Imagining that what the two of you create together will be a perfect, redeeming love. That nothing from before will matter, that it isn't even real. But it is real. And reality always catches up with you.
...
When we experience sexual violence, we are never to blame and we should never feel ashamed. These Are Not Our Secrets.
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