UNITED STATES
VOX
March 8, 2018
It feels impossible to discuss openly.
Eight years into our marriage, sitting in a therapist’s office with my husband, I mustered all my courage and said my deepest, darkest truth: “When we have sex, I feel like I’m being violated.” The unwanted sex at times made me sick: Once I had to run straight from bed to the bathroom, where I retched into the toilet. I spared him and the therapist that detail.
My husband shrugged and, staring ahead with more indifference than disdain, replied, “She’s always so melodramatic.” His response didn’t surprise me. It was his standard reaction to my complaints about the sad state of our marriage, his way of training me to see my needs — emotional connection and communication — as excessive, and his (primarily sex) as entirely reasonable.
I had dragged us to couples counseling because I could no longer live in the vacuum left behind after the emotional intimacy had seeped out of our marriage. My husband hadn’t noticed the loss, proclaiming himself happy. At home, having tried without success the therapist-prescribed exercises for restoring emotional connection — check-ins about feelings, “nonsexual” touch — my husband lobbied for his own solution: “The thing you need is really complicated and difficult, and it’s not something I can do. But the thing I need is easy and quick. Why can’t you just give me the thing I need?”
I acquiesced. At the time, it didn’t feel like a choice; it felt inevitable. I lived every evening dreading the signals of my husband’s desire. I bargained my way out of sex as often as I could. I gloried in being sick enough to have the right to refuse.
On the nights when I couldn’t get out of it, we used a method that I had taught myself to tolerate and that he, astoundingly, tolerated as well: I read a book to distract myself for as long as I could while he did the thing he needed to do. I did not let him kiss me for the last several years of our marriage. That was the rule: You can fuck me, but you can’t kiss me, and I don’t have to pretend to like it. This satisfied him.
Submitting to sex with a man who knew it was unwanted, who knew I felt deep pain at our lack of emotional connection, and who knew — who had been clearly told — that it felt like a violation, broke something in me. Knowing that he could still enjoy and feel emotionally fulfilled by that unwanted sex shattered my idea of our marriage. I felt like a sex doll. I felt unselfed.
But I blamed myself. I was the one whose desire was “deficient,” according to my husband and our sex-obsessed culture. When multiple couples therapists over several years made no significant impact, I blamed myself again: I should have been more forceful when I said my dark truth.
Only 15 years later, as I witness so much outrage on the behalf of women who have been shamed, coerced, and bullied into sex in so many other contexts, do I wonder: How could my husband listen to me say what I said — even once, even timidly — and sleep well that night, much less continue to insist on sleeping with me?
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