I’ve been in a very devastating relationship for 8 years. For educational purposes, I moved away from my husband’s home-country last fall, and only after living on my own for 9 months have I found the courage to share my story anonymously. My story is a long one, but I am grateful for you reading it.
When I was 18, I moved abroad for the first time and very soon I met this guy who was foreign, handsome and cool and who to me was a window of opportunity to escape my previous life of a small country, emotionally abusive family and friends. So I decided that I would fall in love with him no matter what and make him love me in return. He was very calm about me and almost never tried to hide it. We moved in together almost immediately, although both of us were living abroad, so moving in was not something massive: I only had to move my suitcase in with him. He almost stopped French-kissing me 2 weeks after we started dating. I tried to ask him about it, but he would always say that he liked kisses on the cheek much more. So it was. I was very attracted to him and was very excited to have sex with him in the first weeks we were together, but after the first attempt failed, he explained me that he was too big to fit in a condom and that this condom experience traumatized him immensely, so every time he saw a condom he would be turned off. I believed him and started taking pills, but then he came up with new excuses: what if the pills were not reliable enough and what if I got pregnant. Again, I believed that and tried my best to help him find a solution.
During that time, right from the first night when we were ‘trying’ to have sex, he explained me that men cannot be hard for more than 5 minutes and that they need to cum, otherwise it hurts them a lot. So I needed to give him hand jobs. I was a virgin and it was very easy for him to make me believe all those fantastic stories. He, however, would never touch me in return. In fact, he would never even look at me. He humiliated me for wanting to have sex with him, for wanting being naked and for wanting to touch him even. He said I was a ‘bad girl’ and that I was into ‘naughty things’. At some point he played it so well that I almost had to beg him to give him a hand job. And all that time from the first week we dated I cooked, cleaned and washed for him, I took complete care of everything and he was quite cool about it all along. I thought that he was negative about pre-marital sex, so I was even proud of how honest and highly-moralized my man was.
He was never excited about getting married with me, but I wanted him more than anything else in the entire universe, I wanted to keep him. Finally, he agreed to marry, saying that it would be the only chance for me to get residential visas in his home-country. The fact that he, by marrying me, could get visas and work permits to the EU could never be part of the narrative; I tried to say that it benefited us both, but he always was cool about it and ‘never needed it’, although he has of course used it extensively afterwards. However, he would only marry me in a private symbolic ceremony with no wedding, no festivities and no guests. On our first night, when I was happy, excited and ready to give myself to him once and forever, he kissed me on the forehead, turned around on the bed and fell asleep. He never attempted having sex with me ever since, although I begged for it and did everything to have it. I am a very slender, tall girl and where I live now, I am often told that I am attractive; however, when I have been told so before, I always found a way of excusing it: that particular man who hit on me was probably extremely lonely, or that men looked at me because I had spilled something on my blouse.
Needless to say, hand jobs had to continue because I wanted him to feel good and healthy; it’s a common belief in my home country that people can only be healthy if they have regular sex. Consequently I felt that even though I was deprived of it, I could never take it away from him. As for not having actual sex – we have never had that even once, in the course of 8 years – he would come up with new excuses every time: sometimes there were other people staying in the same house (!) with us and they would hear me ‘screaming’, sometimes it was the fear of pregnancy although I was on the pill all the time. Sometimes it was just that I was too pushy for it and that this was a turn-off for him. My whole body hurt from the pain of being close to the man I loved madly and selflessly, from giving him sexual pleasure and from being completely and utterly rejected. Every time after a hand job I needed to run to fetch some napkins. He would never touch me and he made me believe that I was disgusting, dirty and unclean. And oh, I believed that! I tried to talk to him about the sexual problems millions of times and every time he would tell me to stop pushing him, he would say that he was working on solving the problems and that we shouldn’t talk about it at all. He would push me when I tried to kiss him, he would make me sleep on a separate bed whenever there was a chance and he never even once called me by my first name. Ever.
I also did ALL of the house work, not only routinely, but very nicely. I wanted him to have a beautiful cosy home, great food, superb desserts. I wanted to give him the best. He, however, cooked for me only once when I was in bed with severe fever and vomiting and he cooked me a cup of instant soup. He would quit jobs after doing them for a week, claiming that the jobs/environments/people there were unbearable and that they were destroying for his personality. So, his parents and I had to take care of the finances, which he was completely cool about. At some point he said that he wanted to be an academic, so he quit a job where he worked for a month after being unemployed for 1,5 years and I helped him get into a graduate programme at the university. He was very happy and very excited about it, but he claimed that he was not good at academic writing, so I needed to help him. This help was that I did his every single assignment, which made him rank school’s first and got him into several Master’s and PhD programs, including ones at Oxford, Cambridge and LSE. And he didn’t even do his applications himself, all of it was my job, because ‘I was helping him as spouses are supposed to help each other’ and ‘I was doing it for myself as much as I was doing it for him because it was for our family’s common good’. And every time he would tell me that either the assignment was crap or that my English was insufficient. Each of the papers I wrote for him got top marks; I did even better with his papers than with my own.
The reason why it all lasted for so long and why I never suspected anything was that he would always victimize himself, cuddle on my lap and cry about how tough life was for him. And he would always blame me, make me apologise for everything, including his mistakes (sometimes I did it on my knees) and he would strictly forbid me talking to anyone including my parents about it. He even tried to forbid me seeing some of my friends, who would ‘contaminate me with feminist ideas’. I had to cut contact with all of my male friends. And the worst thing was that he made it in such a nice and sacrificing way that I believed that a really loving couple should not spend time with their friends, and should only seek each other in this world. That lovers just want to spend all of their time together and should not waste it with other people. So, I was deeply ashamed when I spent time – especially when it was fun – with other people. I was shamed and blamed for everything, and I believed myself to be a deadly sinner who would rot in hell; a person who should spend her whole life on charitable activities to save the people I love from the ‘spill-overs’ of my sins.
We’ve been together for 8 years. 8 years of sexual humiliation, myths, hard work and self-disrespect. Of course there were happy moments, too, when we would eat the dinners that I cooked for us, or when we watched movies at home. I was a very happy person and I was a very cheerful one, because every time I complained about something, he made me feel as a traitor and as a selfish, ungrateful tart. When I finally gathered strength to tell my story to my best friend, I was sure my friend would be judgemental about me and would stop talking to me, because I was sure I did everything wrong in this relationship. I was sure that everything was my fault and that I was never able to help my loved one and support him in the way he needed it.
I tried to break up, but my husband threatens me with suicide all the time and says that he has always loved me, but has just failed to show it clearly. Moreover, he says that he has never realized that good relationship, signs of love and sex were somehow important for me. And he openly says that I was very good at showing him that I loved him immensely, that he never thought that I could eventually leave him and that he just had fun pushing the limits to see how far I could go.
The worst thing is that I feel deep guilt and sorrow for him. I developed a feeling that he was my child and that there was only me in the whole world to take care of him, to listen to him and to help him through life. And now when I live away and have a wonderfully rich social and professional life, I feel that I don’t deserve happiness and respect, that I am a sinner and a wicked creature and that I need to stop wanting being happy, that I need to stop my life, return to him and continue taking care of him for the rest of my life. I can’t even realize whether he has actually done anything to me or whether I’m just complaining about something entirely normal. My perception of truth is so wretched that I don’t understand what is normal and what is outside the framework of normality. Even when I am writing right now, I am afraid that I present my story too single-sided and too subjectively. Generally, I feel like a traitor for talking to people about it. I don’t know what to do and how to live on with that. I would love to hear what you think about my story. Thank you for taking your time to read it.
TL;DR Was in a relationship for 8 years, but never allowed to have sex, told to be guilty for wanting it, did chores and academic papers and finances for him.
