Rape Within A Relationship

Photo by Yasin Gündogdu: Pexels

I had sex with him so many times, consensually, sometimes out of feeling I should and a few times where I did not want to. I was in a relationship and the times I did not want to were mixed in with times of consent alongside an extremely high level of abuse which I am unpacking piece by piece. It has taken me over a year to be able to see and call those times I didn’t want to as rape. Being in a relationship made me feel I couldn’t call it that, the abuse and gaslighting I was being subjected to were tearing me to pieces. I was living a life where I was hyper vigilant, experiencing insomnia, shaming and blaming myself, feeling numb, feeling angry, feeling sad, confused, incredibly anxious, hardly able to function or think clearly, pretending I was okay to other people, having circling thoughts and flashbacks and trying to minimise what was happening to me because I wanted to believe he would go back to treating me nicely again, like he did in the beginning.

I have blanks in my memory from that time because the abuse was putting me into a constant fight or flight mode, but there are some things that I remember so clearly that if I focus on them for too long my body reacts as though they just happened. One of those memories is the last time he raped me. It had happened a few times before as I lay motionless, crying while he used my body. Feeling numb and disgusting. I told him afterwards that I didn’t want him doing that to me, that I didn’t like it and I didn’t want to be used like that. He didn’t listen. He kept coming to bed in the early hours night after night after hours of bingeing on porn and I would be woken to the feeling of my underwear being pulled down and him using my body. He even asked me after a couple of times why I wasn’t making sounds like I was enjoying it and that it was hurting his feelings that I wasn’t.

This last time though was different, he was so much more aggressive. He held me in place with his hand on the back of my neck, his fingers digging deeply into the sides of my throat. I was rigid from wanting him to stop as I sobbed in the dark room. I was much to scared to say the words no or stop at this point. He hadn’t listened when I had told him before I didn’t want him doing that. He had been becoming increasingly aggressive to me to the point that I was in real fear for my physical safety and my life. So another night of…