Four years (TW: rape, abuse)
It took me four years to call what happened to me, in a romantic relationship with an exclusive partner, rape. I still struggle with feeling like what happened to me wasn’t terrible enough or violent enough to call it rape. I think a lot of people struggle with this - the fact that so many times, rape isn’t a violent encounter with a stranger in a park after dark (although sometimes that is what rape is, too). It’s all of these other non consensual acts of intimacy, often with people we know, and sometimes with people we love.
It wasn’t until I was sitting in my therapist’s office, months after having gone public about the sexual harassment I experienced at the Texas Legislature, that I was able to use the word “rape” to describe what happened to me with a boyfriend I loved.
I was sitting across from my therapist. I had told her I wanted to talk about a relationship I had with a man who had lost his dog to cancer only a month after we started dating. This was true - watching him fall apart when his dog died of cancer had made me terrified about what would happen when my own dog, who has terminal cancer, passed away. It’s a fear I’ve been carrying with me since she was diagnosed over a year ago - that not only would I fall apart, but I would become someone else.
I thought I wanted to process the way he changed - how he started drinking a handle of alcohol a week on his own in the apartment where he lived alone, and I only saw it because I was the person who came by often enough to watch the bottles appear and disappear. I thought I wanted to talk about how he was always drunk or stoned, how he couldn’t seem to function, and how I hoped that wouldn’t happen to me.
But instead, I ended up telling a story I hadn’t ever told from beginning to end to any one person before. By the end of my story I was sobbing. It was so much worse than I thought. And it wasn’t really about his dog.
He was a charming, charismatic republican who I met at the Legislature. He had a thick Southern accent and a beautiful smile. He was an amazing cook, and we would have friends over for dinner and game night. He introduced me to his parents a week after we started dating. By the time he ended things, his mother and I were texting regularly, and I was sure that she would eventually be part of my family.
He also made me help him masturbate if he was in the mood and I didn’t want to have sex with him. I didn’t enjoy it, I didn’t want to be a part of it, but I thought that’s what you did. Compromise.
He gave great foot massages, which I craved at the end of a long day in heels at the office. His massages often turned into foreplay - whether I wanted them to or not.
“Do you want a massage?” he would ask in his gravelly, southern drawl.
“Yes,” I would say, “but I don’t want to have sex. Just a massage, ok?”
“OK,” he would say. But I had to sit in between his open legs so he could get the right angle, which just so happened to allow his hard on to push against my back. He would move from massaging me to touching me sexually, trying to turn my “no” into a “yes.”
And I loved him. It felt physically awful to have him touching me and kissing me and trying to convince me to change my mind. But most of the time, I ended up playing along with it. Playing pretend. Doing what I knew I was supposed to do. And most of the time, I felt guilty. Why didn’t I want to have sex with my boyfriend? What was wrong with me? Maybe if I went through the motions, even if it made my heart ache, I could fix whatever was broken inside of me that kept me from wanting to have sex with someone who clearly wanted me.
He would visit me in my office at the Capitol after we first started dating, when I still had an office with a door. He would make advances and try to touch me, because he thought it was hot. I was never comfortable with it. I didn’t want it to happen. He took “no” as “convince me,” and it makes me cringe to remember those moments when I was trying to play it away and hoping that my feeble attempts to say “I don’t think this is professional!” would mean more than my saying “I don’t want to do this.”
We didn’t agree politically and were constantly debating the news.
That’s how I found out that he thought that sexual harassment allegation standards were biased in favor of the accuser, because he had been accused of sexually harassing a former coworker.
Now, looking back, I am sure that he did not think he had done anything wrong. But I am equally sure that he crossed a line - just one he would not, could not admit existed.
While we were dating, California was debating passing a law requiring active consent. He thought it was preposterous.
I still remember him, sitting on his couch, saying to me, “Genevieve, according to this bill some of the things that we do aren’t consensual.” He said it to convince me how ridiculous and far reaching this bill was.
But somewhere deep inside of me, something broken answered to my heart, “That’s because they’re not.”
He broke up with me. He broke up with me twice. I was so deep into the black hole of his emotional distress and the roller coaster of our relationship, so caught up in what I thought was love, it took him breaking up with me twice to say that I didn’t want to see him anymore.
Even then, it wasn’t because of the way he treated me. It was because I was heartbroken that he could leave me. And I knew I deserved someone who wouldn’t leave.
He didn’t take the breakup well. He had expected me to be fine with what he proposed - that we would still be friends, still have sex, but not be in a relationship so that he could focus on doing a good job in his first session as a legislative staffer. But I wasn’t.
So he started tagging along when I went to legislative happy hours and events with other friends. I never went alone, and I asked guy friends to tell him to stop talking to me. He didn’t listen to me, and he didn’t listen to them, either.
He would walk into the office with a cursory, “I have a meeting with Genevieve” to the intern or staff member at the front desk, planning to walk by and avoid the policies I had to put in place. Everyone knew he wasn’t allowed to see me.
I laughed about it like it was a joke. “He’s an ex who is taking the break up hard, haha, so he can’t come to my office.” “Isn’t it funny how obsessed he is with me?” On the occasions that his white male entitlement got him past the front desk, other staff tried to intercept him as best as they could.
If I wasn’t in the office, he would wait, sometimes for thirty minutes at a time, in the waiting area near the front desk for me to come back.
I have a vivid memory of getting a text message from a colleague that he was there. I told my boss, an elected official who should have been able to walk into her office at any time. Exasperated, she said, “Let’s keep walking.”
As the words spilled out of me in my therapist’s office, I saw the whole picture for the very first time. The whole dark, terrible story. “This is so awful,” I said, through my tears. “I didn’t realize it was so awful.” I sobbed on the couch processing what I had never allowed myself to process before.
If my friend had told me what was happening to her, I would have told her it was rape.
If my friend had told me what was happening to her, I would have told her it was abuse.
But I was still afraid to say those things out loud. I thought my therapist would tell me what I was telling myself - that it wasn’t bad enough to be rape, or abuse. That using those labels on my own story would tarnish them for the people who had really experienced something bad.
But she didn’t. She asked me how it felt to use those words to describe my own experience. I told her it felt hard, and scary, and like I didn’t deserve to use them. She assured me that I did. And then she told me how sorry she was that this had happened to me.
I didn’t think I was in an abusive relationship. I thought I was with a good, normal person, because the first month of our relationship was like happy bubbles exploding inside of me all the time. Then, his dog died. And I blamed everything bad that happened on that event. “This isn’t really him,” I would say to myself. “This is the depression. This is because his dog died. He raised that dog from a puppy and then it died in his arms! He’s just not himself.”
There’s always a switch that flips. There’s always a then that you think you can get back to, that makes the bad things not seem real.
I didn’t think it was rape. Because, despite all of my feminist theory and training, I still thought rape was a violent thing. I thought it was something that happened when you were too drunk to consent, or drugged, or something someone did who knew they were raping you and wanted to, anyway.
I didn’t think rape could be confusing, or happen with someone who said they loved you. I didn’t think it was something that happened again and again. But it did happen that way. It happened that way to me.
A little over a year ago, I was at an airport with a different boyfriend. I thought he might be the one. He always respected my sexual boundaries, even though he could be cruel, mocking, and mean towards me in other aspects of our relationship. I didn’t know I deserved more than that. I just knew that he didn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do, which made him seem like a prince.
We were eating a sad airport salad on the way back from a trip with his family. He was upset because he had just heard from a friend that a woman he used to know was claiming that a man they had worked with had coerced her into sex using alcohol - and that man was now running for office.
He scoffed with disbelief, telling me about the way these two carried on in front of everyone they worked with. One of them had a long term partner, and their open displays of affection had made everyone complicit in their lies.
I got this feeling deep inside of me. That nervous feeling when you know you want to say something, but you’re afraid. Something that I hadn’t ever really processed was starting to click.
I asked him how he knew it was actually consensual. “I saw it!” he said, disgusted. “She would sit on his lap in front of everyone!”
I didn’t know this woman. She had worked with my boyfriend long before we met. But I was inclined to believe her. And the way my boyfriend was talking about her made me feel sick inside.
Looking back I’m not exactly sure what finally made me choose to tell him a truth I was only beginning to understand. I know that at least some part of this decision was a desperate need to say it out loud, and have someone hear what had happened to me. But I also hoped that it might change his mind. That if he heard what had happened for me, he might have a little empathy.
I don’t remember the exact words that I said. I do know that my point was that just because something looks consensual doesn’t mean that it is. And I told him that I had a boyfriend who, to everyone on the outside, made me incredibly happy. Someone I would probably consent to. Someone I hosted dinner parties with. But sometimes what happened wasn’t consensual. And it had taken me three years to admit that to myself, because sometimes it’s hard to see.
He went back to texting his friend, and dug in to the fact that he knew that she was lying, and she was telling these lies just because he was running for office.
I wish I could say that was enough, and that his dismissal of my experience as just another piece of information to discredit in the debate about this woman’s lies was enough for me to recognize that he wasn’t really as nice as I thought. I also wish that as the first person I told this hard truth to, he had been empathetic, or compassionate, or kind, instead of running over it and back to his point - that she was full of it.
We did eventually break up, but not because of that.
And I did eventually tell this story to someone who really listened, and who let me come to the sad truth on my own. I have been raped. I have been in an abusive relationship. I couldn’t see it when it was happening to me.
Sometimes people don’t report rape, because they can’t comprehend that rape is what is happening. And other times, because it doesn’t feel like a crime that you would report, and the statute has probably run out, anyway.
I’m still sorting it all out. But now at least I know it has a name.
