(Click here for part one. If you haven’t already, you will need to read part one before part two in order to make sense out of this post.)

Now, having stepped back and analyzed everything, the situation never should have happened. It is still despicable. But rape?  Bob, maybe, even probably, but Mark, no.  Really, as far as Bob is concerned, the current perceptions of the situation are accurate, though maybe missing a few details. The planning of the situation involved me, so as I’ve said somewhere (either in the post or comments about the posts), I should have seen it coming. Months before the incident, he mentioned to me that he thought it would be “hot” if someone watched us. I told him it was too bad, because that would never happen!

At that point, I was used to it. I was used to the suggestions I didn’t feel comfortable with. In June, 2007, I asked him to please look at all the porn he wanted (up to that point, he had been lying to me, saying he never looked at it), hoping it would take the pressure off of me.  That was a mistake, I admit it. Christians will probably say I let impurity into our marriage. Nonchristians will probably wonder why we were so restrictive about it before. Few people will realize that the dysfunction came before and continued after, so it really had little to do with us. The reason I did not want anything to do with porn was because I was giving him sex nearly every single day. What more did he want? I thought, maybe I am being prude. Maybe he just needs another outlet. So he got one. But nothing changed, except he saw my openness to that as a reason to demand more from me.

At this point, depressed and isolated with no one else to lean on, I gave in a lot. I did a lot of things a lot of times I didn’t want to do. I had learned not to fight because fighting led to sulkiness, pressure, and sometimes Bob simply doing it anyways. Regardless of the method, the result was always the same: 99.9% of the time, we had sex when Bob wanted it and when he wanted it. What I wanted mattered little (unless I wanted to try something sexual. That was fine!). But cuddling without sex? Love without sex? Didn’t happen, or was rare when it did.

Throughout our marriage, Bob would tell me, “I don’t ask for much. If you give me sex and an occasional massage, I’m happy.” And so it was. Mostly, anyways. He also needed to be right in everything from financial decisions to whether the clock was two minutes off or three minutes off, maybe even more than he needed sex. Of course, I wanted to please him. Between that and some bad advice given to me by my pre-marital counselor (even if you don’t feel in the mood, do it anyways. You’ll get in the mood!), it’s no wonder I don’t know when I’m turned on or when I simply need a hug or trying to please someone else. How much do I really want it? I don’t know.  I learned to make it what I wanted, even if I didn’t. I learned to turn off what I wanted and stop differentiating between his wants and my wants. We were, after all, one flesh, so that’s how it was supposed to be. Or not.

I suppose that advice might work if your husband respects you, but  mine didn’t. Not enough anyways, to give me the space and attention I needed. Not enough to care about what I wanted, unless it was more sex or what he wanted. Not enough to listen, not enough to notice the dark hole I found myself falling deeper and deeper into. Not enough to see how close I was to killing myself. Would I have ever done it? No, I lacked the courage (what would God say, after all), but I did think about it and often. Got close enough to meet the criteria for being committed at least once. But my counseling classes helped me talk myself down.

So all of this is background for when Bob and I planned to go to Branson for dinner and drinks with Mark. We planned on staying with Mark so we wouldn’t have to worry about driving home intoxicated. We planned it about two or three weeks in advance. Given our sexual history, it didn’t come as a total surprise when Bob asked, “Do you want to have sex with Mark?”

“What?” I asked, shocked.

“You two should have sex.”
“What? Why?”

He launched into how I’d never had any sexual experiences apart from him, and blah, blah, blah. I knew it was bullshit, but I didn’t know what he was really after.

“You do know that threesomes tend to destroy relationships. Are you okay with that?”

He skirted around the issue. “We’ll be fine,” he assured.

I stared at him. “You’re willing to risk our entire relationship?”

He again assured me we’d be fine. I didn’t give him a concrete answer during that conversation, I was too dumbfounded.

But that was far from the only time he brought it up. I did tell him that it wasn’t worth ruining our relationship over, so no. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that it was wrong. Not of him to simply ask if I was into that sort of thing (though after being married to me for over 2.5 years, he should have known that my personal preference is monogamy (yes, I am boring!), especially since we still served in a Baptist church!), but to not take no for an answer. It wasn’t a loving thing, somehow, in the approach it felt like a porn fantasy he wanted to play out.

I worried that if Mark found out about it, that he and Bob would take advantage of me. “Don’t mention any of this to Mark, okay?” I requested.

“No, of course not!” he replied. Yeah. Does anyone believe he told me the truth? Did I believe him? Yes, I did. After that, he dropped it, so I thought it was over. Ha.

So we get there that night, and you know the story, except for the part I rushed through because it was too painful to write (and at the time, I didn’t feel I was deceiving anybody to leave it out. Now I do, so I am writing it now.). The part where Bob climbed off of me, and said, “Here, Mark, you take a turn.”

Mark did not savagely rip my clothes off and jump on top of me. Instead, Mark whispered a little sentence that exonerates him completely, “Is this what you want?”

I felt shocked. I never even thought about what I wanted anymore. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what I wanted. It had been so long since I had even considered what I wanted that I thought he was joking, and stared toward him (it was dark).

What did I want? I took a deep breath, and in that moment, I stopped caring. I stopped caring about being God’s child. I stopped caring about being Bob’s wife. In that moment, I decided I was sick to death of trying to please everyone around me when nobody cared about me. I stopped caring about right and wrong. I stopped caring about being the good girl who never did anything wrong. If it wasn’t Mark, it would be someone else, I thought.  I figured Bob had made up his mind, and in the bedroom, what Bob wanted, Bob got. Eventually. I didn’t matter, not to him, not to anyone. What did it matter what I did? Unless they found out, no one would even care. I knew that from far too many painful experiences. In religious world, nobody cared about who I was or what I wanted unless I gave them something to gossip about. I was completely invisible to everyone. Except, in that moment, to Mark. And I knew that like children who will do anything for attention, even if it’s negative attention, that I needed to be noticed. That I needed to be seen in some small way, even if I was being seen for things I normally wouldn’t want to be seen for. It just didn’t matter anymore.  So I let him. Not one word of protest.Not one word of no. I nodded. Somewhere, I remember Bob saying, “My turn again” but I don’t know when that was. And that was it. I don’t remember anything else except for waking up later in the night with Bob on top of me again. Was that rape? If you live in a  state that acknowledges spousal rape, then yes. He in no way had my permission. I didn’t want to. Do I remember directly saying no? No, but I never in any way acknowledged that I did, and I was asleep when he started, which meant I was never even given the opportunity to say no, and I did feel violated.  That would fit the criteria. But Mark, no. We are still good friends and bear no ill will toward each other.

Bob didn’t even ask me what I wanted once that whole night. He took what he wanted, and he did not hear the whispered exchange between Mark and me. From his perspective, the original post told 100% of the truth. There was no respect, no care. My previously stated “no” didn’t matter. And he used it as a reason to do what he wanted when he wanted. Because Mark wasn’t allowed to outdo him. After that night, I wanted out. I didn’t know how to get out, though. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, no resources. I confided in Steve, who became outraged. He told me I could stay with him anytime I wanted. I couldn’t do that, though. I apologized to God, begged for forgiveness. I moved on from that night, but it did jar me out of my fantasy that my marriage was okay, salvageable at worst. No, not at all. Not okay, not salvageable, not anything. I could never trust Bob again. After that, truth started pouring in. The porn, the fact that he had more sexual partners before we married than he’d told me (why he lied, I don’t know. I didn’t care. It was the lying that bothered me.). That he had lied to me and had discussed it beforehand with Mark, who also told him no.  But at the time, neither of us knew that he had been going back and forth, trying to get us to agree to his plan. If I had known he had been talking to Mark, I probably wouldn’t have agreed to go, but he had dropped it, for once, several days before the event, so I thought he had let it go. I thought that even he had decided not to push me that far. So I relaxed. Whose husband does that to them anyways? I didn’t expect that he would do what he did. In retrospect, maybe that was naive. I don’t know. It probably sounds that way, reading it out. But in the situation at the time, it didn’t feel that way.

In my marriage, I felt stuck; I had no choice. If I left him, he would lose his job. I blamed myself for everything at that point: it was my fault for having sex with Mark. It was my fault for being drunk: I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been drinking. It was my fault for not saying no strongly enough, forcefully enough. It was my fault for leaving him afterward: I was going to break his heart. Somewhere deep in my head, I know it’s not completely me. But I still feel like it was all me, true or not. I get confused: was it me? Was it his manipulation? Maybe both? If both, how much was my fault and how much was his? These are the questions that keep me awake at night, when I miss my daughter and I feel bad because I have so much trouble finding a job.

This has been so hard to write. I blame myself in so many ways, and admitting it is harder than anything. It was hard to admit the situation in the first place; the ways in which I was a victim. Writing about my own mistakes is even harder. I still feel like it was all my fault: that if I had just.  . . known more about how to handle this type of situation, I guess. If I had just said no. But would I be any better off? I firmly believe not. Things with Bob weren’t ever going to get better. I know that. But somehow I feel like I could have prevented it somehow. Like I could have done something, though even now, looking at my situation from a wiser perspective and knowing 100% all the details and the context around it that I could never fully describe, I don’t know what else I could have done to prevent it, to make it better.  Except to have known more about what I was getting into in the first place, but I didn’t.

So there you have it. All of it minus real names and addresses. It wasn’t rape. There were other times with just Bob and me that may technically qualify, but I still don’t like to call it anything other than sexual abuse, because it’s not all black and white with situations anymore than it is with people. Hate me now if you want. Blame me now if you want. Try to say I tried to mislead everyone if you want, though that is untrue. But like it or not, like me or not, that’s what happened. Regardless of the label you apply, what happened shouldn’t have happened. Not the way it did. If a couple wants to do that, fine. But this was not consensual. The sex itself was, in the moment. But I told Bob I didn’t want to do it long before we got there. That should have been good enough. He definitely took advantage of me in that situation, and that was wrong. But I was not 100% blameless, either. At least, I don’t think I was. Being able to admit that is another step in the healing process, in the growing up process.

So maybe I am not a perfect, pure princess who never did a wrong thing. I’ve made mistakes, I have my flaws and imperfections, and I’m just trying to make it in the world like any other person. But darn it if I’m not still going to live happily ever after.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 12:22 am and is filed under atheism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.