What am I doing here? Looking for meaning?

Part I, Chapter 3: “What Am I Supposed to Do with This?” Con'td

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From my book, Unsolicited Advice: A Consent Educator's (Canceled) Memoir, only on Substack.

The book starts here.

Previous

CW: Sexual assault

Unfortunately a big part of this story is that we got back together, nine years later. I was 28, we were both in New York, and he and his girlfriend (a different one than the one in Madrid) broke up a couple weeks after I told him I was moving to L.A. We had been attempting a friendship that was always tinged with a “will they, won’t they” rom com-esque tension. Now he was sober, and I wanted to give it another chance.

We started to try to date. We talked about his incredibly recent breakup and how he would need time to recover from it. I promised to be patient and stay by his side while he healed. I said there was no rush for me to move to LA, and I could stay as long as we needed to figure things out.

He had moved out of the apartment that he’d been sharing with his ex and needed a new place to live. He ended up renting a boat under the Kosciusko Bridge. Despite being in a rather famous band, he was perpetually broke from spending egregious amounts of money on kava. (Alcoholics are warned against kava consumption, which he knew. He was buying it every three days or so in gallon-sized growlers, spending $150 a week, and yet “couldn’t afford therapy.”) The boat was a temporary and cheap option. He wanted to leave the boat so we decided to move in together. I wanted to get out my place, and we figured we had lived together before and knew we liked it. At the time it seemed a little crazy to move in so fast, and yet looking back I’m glad we did because I was able to see our incompatibility much more quickly than I would have otherwise and eject myself.

He was completely unable to talk about sex. I think we had sex four times the whole four months we tried being together, and he couldn’t tell me what he needed or what he didn’t want. He was unable to say no to me or other people, or to state his boundaries, to make requests. His people-pleasing led to his own total separation from himself, doing things he thought I wanted for neither of us, martyring himself, resenting me. Violating his own consent, crossing his own boundaries, pressuring himself based on misperceptions and societal norms he had internalized, blaming me for not reading his mind.

At a certain point, it became obvious that he was avoiding me, scheduling things so that he wouldn’t be home whenever I was, wearing headphones when I was around, growing out his beard and telling me I must hate kissing him with it even though I told him I didn’t. He told me he’d shave it by Thanksgiving, and then Christmas, and then after he made a music video, and so on and so on. I couldn’t ask him for intimacy or connection without him spiraling into shame about how he was a bad boyfriend because he wasn’t giving me what I needed. He started recoiling to my platonic touch on his back or arm because he thought I was trying to initiate sex, so I explicitly took sex off the table. I suggested we connect over games or reading a book together, offering a few choices, each of which he vetoed. He agreed to go running once, but he put headphones on. I remember we went to the grocery store once after a difficult conversation, and he threw around the shopping cart like a teenager. I started to understand that he had no awareness of his own behavior, both what he was doing and why he was doing it. I became a shell of myself.

One night he was playing a show upstate, and we went up together and got an Air BnB. That night in bed he rolled on top of me and started to try to put his dick in me. He didn’t kiss me, didn’t touch me, didn’t say anything. I said, “Wait, hold on.” He didn’t seem to hear me.

“Slow down,” I said.

“What?”

“Slow down.”

“Huh?”

“Are you wearing ear plugs?”

“I thought this was what you wanted.”

“Are you wearing earplugs??”

He rolled off of me.

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