Marital Rape is Real (content note)
I had been sexually abused as a child, molested as a teen and raped in my early 20s. Little did I expect that the man I married would turn out to be my rapist even though he knew all these things about my life. It started as coercion through insults and whining or trying to get sex from me at the worst possible times, when I was going somewhere, when my child was crying, when I had gone to sleep after a long day, when I was sick.He said things like, "When are you gonna give me some" and "I need to get my rocks off". I put up with this garbage because I thought it was normal, even though it bothered me.I often felt dirty and cried afterwards, it just felt wrong. Not like being loved but like being used.
THe first instance of outright rape was 7 days after my daugher died, I was 12 days postpartum.He took me to dinner and tried to get me to drink my sister was at the house watching my other children. I was so distaught and grieving, we had had to take her life support and you should never have to do that for your child.When we got home, I just wanted to sleep. He started in with the coecion.I couldn't believe it.I was still crying and I was in no shape for anything.He wouldn't leave me alone the nagging, the guilting and the pushing for sex until he was almost on top of me with his underwear off.I said "I can't" and "No" but he proceded. I remember clearly saying through the gross nasty snotty kind of crying ,"How can you she was just there?" my womb was the last place my daughter was safe and I felt he was violating that. My sister was in the next room, I expect she heard what was going on. I mentioned it to close friends over the years and they told me I needed counselling and that he just needed comfort and I felt more guilt over not wanting to have sex with him.
Another time he Raped me outright with a vibrator I didn't even want. I clearly told him I was not comfortable with it and he just went to town. It was so humiliating and degrading and painful and there I was crying and asking him to stop. Part of why it was so awful was that his friend was visiting, sleeping in the next room,he had to have heard it. This was a few years ago and last month we were at the grocery store and he brought it up, and asked if I still had the vibrator and remarked how "fun" that was. I was completely stunned. I had to relive the whole gross episode in my head.
I guess I am sharing this because I have felt so alone with this, and like it was my job to endure and "put out" for a long time. I didn't consider it rape even though if it had happened to someone else I would have called it that and been outraged.I first ran across marital rape online and when I started reading it all resonated with me and I finally didn't feel dirty and alone and like I was somehow sexually wrong, as he liked to tell me I was.
Interestingly, when I started to fight back at night when he tried to touch me,partly by yelling, he stopped. He hasn't tried to touch me since.He uses money now as a form of control and trying to fight in public where the kids and I can't get away. So we don't go anywhere with him if we can help it.
I am preparing to divorce him now but that has been hard because he was also financially controlling. I am looking towards being a free woman and that day is very close at hand. It is not our duty as women to put up with horrible coercive sex and rape, not is it our job to tell other women we should put up with it, that a man has needs and needs comfort from us in the form of sex. We have needs to be loved and cherished and not raped when at the lowest point in our lives.
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