I don’t know if you could actually call it sexual assault, but it definitely changed me and is hard to get over. I was in a relationship for 3 years with a man who didn’t care if I wanted to have sex or not. I would verbally tell him I didn’t want to, cocoon myself in the blankets so he couldn’t touch me, and he would still either push past that and start touching me or he would start a fight asking if I was cheating on him. It happened so many times I just stopped fighting and started crying every time he wanted to have sex, because I knew it didn’t matter to him if I enjoyed it or wanted it to happen. He told me multiple times that if I didn’t want to do it the least I could do for him is lay there like a dead body, so he wouldn’t have to go find somebody else. I don’t know if I could call it s/a, I never screamed, I never hit him. I wish I would have, but it just seemed safer and easier at the time to just pretend like I didn’t exist. Thankfully I left him last June, but I don’t know if I’ll ever want to sleep with a man again. I can’t even hold hands with a man without wanting to scrub my skin raw to get it off.
It made me feel like less than a human being, like I didn’t matter anymore and there would be no point in standing up for myself anymore because it didn’t change anything. If someone is going through a similar thing I would tell them to leave as soon as they can and never look back.
