I'm not a toy.

How my partner treated me like I was less than them.

Introduction.

Trigger warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual abuse.

A relationship should be a coming together of feelings, a mutual respect and enjoyment of eachother.

It is not a "I treat you like I love and respect you, and you treat me like a toy that you can do anything to ship"

The law around Sexual Violence

A person (A) commits an offence if:

(a) He (they) intentionally touches another person (B),
(b) The touching is sexual,
(c) B does not consent to the touching, and
(d) A does not reasonably believe that B consents. source

A complainant does not consent if they are incapacitated through drink.

source

Personal Boundaries

The law is the law, real life is real life.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't have sexual relations with my partner after drinking on a few occasions.

It was something that we had mutually agreed that we were comfortable doing. Something about pulling out a breathalyser to check if eachother were intoxicated was... inconvenient

However, the thing with such a mutual agreement, is that eachother's boundaries must be respected.

I would never have had sex with my partner if they seemed intoxicated to the point where they were unaware of what was happening, or unable to agree in a manner that I knew was usual for them, and I would have hoped they would have done the same.

My experience.

You'll notice there's no disclaimer for this. Unforunately, I don't have the luxury of being able to say "this is a fictional story" because it's not.

So here we go.

Picture yourself, stood infront of your partner.

They are sleeping, after a night of drinking.

They are naked, as they always are when they sleep.

Now if you are sane you'd think to yourself:

"That person really looks like they don't want any sort of intimate activity right now, I should let them sleep".

If you prefer to dabble in the Andrew Tate side of life, you may think:

"Yeah that looks like consent to me".

If you are not one for half measures, you may think:

"That looks like consent to me, and in fact, I think they want me to film myself performing sexual acts on them!"

My partner, unknown to me at the time, picked the last option. They decided to film themselves performing oral sex on me, as I passed between a sleeping and incoherent state.

I found this video over 2 years after the fact, and it broke me.

It always sounds so unreasonable for a victim of something to believe it was their fault. But, once I was in that situation, I completely understood. I started questioning myself.

How had I let myself be with someone who was hiding such a dark secret?
How had I let myself be humiliated like that and then gone on to treat this person with respect?
How had I let myself be sexually assaulted?

"Getting over it"

Getting over an experience like this can be hard.

I know, at least for myself, I haven't been able to let go of thoughts of what happened, and I'm not sure I ever will.

What I have found to be more important is separating myself from what happened to me. I am not someone who was in an abusive relationship, or someone that was in love with a sexual abuser.

Instead, I was someone who was in love, albeit foolishly, with someone that happened to become abusive.

The difference is small, but important. If you ever find yourself in this situation, try to make the distinction between the person that did this to you, and the person that you believed them to be.

It is not my fault for liking someone, nor is it my fault that they turned out to be a piece of shit.

The goal isn't to "get over" what they did, but more to come accept that you were wronged, and to come to peace with the fact that what has happened, has happened, and nothing can change that now.

For me, I was extremely angry at first, more anger than I had ever felt before.

I was angry at myself for letting it happen, and I was angry at them for doing it. But after a while I realised that I couldn't let their actions hold me back from being happy. I found motivation to put these events behind me through knowing that the more I let them effect me, the more I was playing into their goals of having control over me.