Sexual coercion

I don't know how to start this blog post but my journal from the mid 2010s reminded me that sometimes you just have to start writing even if you don't know where you are going, so here I start.

As I come out of a heterosexual marriage, a relationship that began at a time I thought I was a lesbian or at least bisexual, I struggle to understand where I exist on the sexual identity spectrum.  What adds to that confusion is repulsion from the idea of sex.  I've tossed around the idea that I might be asexual but it never quite lands because I think my repulsion comes from a place of fear, maybe trauma.  The more the fog lifts from my marriage overall, the more I question how much damage he may have done in the way he approached and viewed sex.

But until now, all I had was foggy, incomplete memories that leave me feeling unsettled.  In this journal I recently found, there is one entry where in black and white, I write about coercion and what felt like a complete disregard for me.  Part of me didn't want to find this entry.  When it was just foggy, incomplete memories, it was easier to just bury and accept the not-quite-right label of asexual.  

About year two or three of our marriage, intercourse became painful for me.  Over the years I saw more specialists and tried more treatments than I can count.  None of my doctors ever could find a cause and every treatment they prescribed only made it worse.  Eventually what was just pain during intercourse became every day pain in my hips, back, pelvis, butt, etc.

My messed up ideas from society left me feeling like I owed some amount of sex to my husband so I suffered through the pain when I could but I couldn't always and so we had sex less often.  And I blamed myself for the pain and the limits on our sex life.  And I believe he blamed me too.

On January 21, 2013, I wrote:

I've also felt frustrated over my vaginal issues.  It's been so long since sex hasn't been painful.  [He] has made a number of comments lately about our lack of intimacy which have really hurt.  He seems to define intimacy or romance as intercourse and only intercourse.  To me it is so much more.

At some point after that, he started watching porn and got fixated on blow jobs.  They didn't cause me physical pain so I thought that would be better but it was actually worse because of the expectations that came with it and how uncomfortable it made me feel.  He usually smelled so strongly of urine that I would gag.  He would put on a certain pair of boxer shorts and sit next to me on the couch to let me know that is what he expected.  That was the only time he would sit on the couch with me.

I felt pressure from him to meet his sexual needs regardless of what it cost me.

And in those later years, when I was actually have a good pain day and tried to initiate vaginal intercourse, he would reject me saying he could only get off on blow jobs.  And then when he discarded me, he blamed me for the lack of a good sex life.

I want to remind myself at this point that my chronic pain issues have disappeared since the divorce.  I even had a pain free pelvic exam at my annual physical for the first time in close to twenty years.  The common denominator was him and the effect his treatment of me was having on my body.  The pain during intercourse was my body physically rejecting a man who didn't love me.

Reflecting back, I realize the last time he cared about my pleasure during sex was before we had married.  After we married, if I wanted an orgasm, I used a vibrator on my own afterward his needs had been met.  He didn't even try to please me.  There was nothing reciprocal about sex or intimacy at all with him.

He was my first sexual partner so I wasn't sure what a healthy sex life looked like.  I just knew that sex quickly became something I dreaded, something that made me feel uncomfortable, something that I ultimately just ended up treating as an obligation in our marriage.

I've never written any of this down before today, except the very brief journal entry I quoted from January of 2013.  And until yesterday, I had never even said out loud that I think I experienced sexual coercion.  

I don't know what I do with this information or how I process it.  I think I just start by writing it down.