𝗜 𝗧𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗪𝗲 𝗪𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗙𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗱𝘀 - 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗛𝗲 𝗥𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝗠𝗲

I suppose he was the kind of guy that women swoon over that is, a hopelessly romantic, charming, tall, attractive, in touch with his emotions and spontaneous. To me, it all felt contrived, rehearsed, and I wasn’t feeling it.

However, I enjoyed his company, we had a myriad of common interests, and he challenged me mentally. So, I engaged, yet he wasn’t enough to make me give up my singledom.

There were moments, though, when we bickered, and it felt as if he was more in competition with me like our shared interest in writing. I wrote fiction, and he wrote poetry, but often, he felt the need to make comparisons that were not necessary.

In the beginning, he expressed his interest, and I skirted around them, pushing him into the dreaded friend zone. He dated other people, so did I, and when we saw each other at events, he would often leave his companion to engulf me in a hug that communicated to them that there was more than friendship happening between us.

Whenever we hung out, he would throw his flowery poetry at me, and I’d laugh and brush his sentiment off with an off-hand joke. We never defined what we were or weren’t, and I felt my aloofness spoke more volumes than I possibly could in words, but I was wrong.

I’m not a bull, I don’t charge toward red flags. I’m a mountain goat, I climb above them because avoidance is better than confrontation.

When starting a new relationship with anyone, my intuition is razor-sharp, helping me to identify those hot button issues that may be a potential issue for me in the present or future. He came with a laundry list.

What gave me pause the most was his ongoing emotional attachment with the mother of his child, his need to compete with me and assert his dominance.

Alpha men are undeniably sexy, but I draw the line at controlling narcissists. Friendship was the alternative because his redeeming qualities outweighed any of the alarming ones.

So, I behaved in kind, yes, I sidestepped any advances he threw my way, and I made it apparent we were platonic without expressly saying so. After a few months, it seemed that we were finally in a place where the friendship was mutual.

What I didn’t realize was that he wanted me to let my guard down so he could pounce. His favorite dates were the simple ones, off the beaten path, and creative, but really, he just never wanted to spend money.

We often took walks on the beach at night, went to playgrounds after dark, or watched flights depart and takeoff by the airport.

I didn’t have an issue because we were friends, and I didn’t need him to impress. It was fun, we got to talk sometimes he got touchy-feely, but I wasn’t opposed to the occasional hug.

One night we went for a drive and ended up parking in a lot next to a playground. At this point, we’d known each other for over a year, and I felt safe with him, he was my friend after all. Our conversation was flowing in the effortless way it always did. Then the energy shifted. Things went silent.

And then with steel undergirding his voice, he said, “this is happening.”

Confused, I asked him what he was talking about. He repeated himself, more urgency this time, and leaned over my seat to pull up the lever to recline my seat and climb over me in one expertly choreographed motion.

Knocked backward in my seat I was stunned, I asked up what he was doing as he began pulling at my clothes. I can’t remember what I was wearing, but somehow he got the bottoms off.

We tussled, I yelled at him; he was relentless. In my mind, I needed to get away from him, but I was so discombobulated the only thing I could think of was crawling into the backseat.

That was a mistake.

He followed after me ranting about how I’m always trying to control him. Still on my hands and knees from scrambling into the backseat, he gripped my waist and entered me. The fight went out of me with that initial thrust my face pressed against the seats as he pounded me.

With every thrust, he said a word: Stop. Trying. To. Control. Me. Let. Go.

In his mind, I was fighting him still, but what he hadn’t realized was that I’d disassociated. I kept quiet and yet just wishing for it to be over and done.

The oddity of some experiences doesn’t always click into place and make sense while they are happening.

I adjusted my clothes in silence, smarting from the assault, and longing for my shower at home. I climbed back into the front passenger seat and fixed my gaze out of the window.

The driver-side door opened, the car adjusted to his weight as he plopped down, a slight lift of my shoulders registered how skittish I was as the car door slammed shut.

Choking. I was choking on angry unshed tears. His gaze was a brand on the side of my face; he stroked my arm with a gentleness that stung as if he had struck me. He might as well have. I refused to cry or show any emotion.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”

My head turned slowly towards him; I imagine my face was fixed in livid disbelief, and with a calm that frightened me, I told him to take me home.

The ride back was an infinite silence cocooning us in a passive-aggressive bubble. As soon as he pulled up to my house, I was out of the car, walking toward the door without looking back or hearing him call after me. I just needed to wash him off of me.

At the time, I wouldn’t allow myself to use the word rape for what he did to me. He had the unmitigated gall to call me that night with a half-ass apology. I told him he’s never touching me again, and what he did was unacceptable. I was curt kept the call short. The oddity of what happened wasn’t making sense, not right then. It was too much to wrap my mind around.

I talked to my closest friend about it. Perhaps it was the way I described what happened, but she didn’t use the word rape either but agreed it was violent, and he should be written off for good.

Sometimes we can repress painful memories to deal with trauma and create an amnesiac shadow. I’m not sure if that happened to me, but after three months of not talking to him, I saw him at a Spoken Word event, and somehow, he wormed his way back in.

It was reckless. It can even be filed under self-harm, but I went out with him again, in the daytime, to the beach. I figured I’d be safe at a public beach. In the car, I laid out some ground rules, explaining how I prefer to be handled when in the ocean.

I’m not a swimmer, in fact, I really can’t swim, and that is tied up with some other childhood trauma of nearly drowning. He agreed to my rules and told me to relax.

We went into the water. About 10 minutes in, he attempted to lift me and wrap my legs around his waist. The first attempt I reminded him of the boundaries I’d set, again, he told me to trust him and relax.

Hearing no from a woman was a trigger for him. This time he was more forceful, and I screamed he stopped pushed away, and swam out to sea. Annoyed, I got out of the water went to read my book.

He got out of the water after some time and began getting dressed. I asked him if we were leaving; he refused to talk to me. Instead, he walked to the car and drove off.

I phoned a friend that lived close by to come and get me. He grilled me about what happened and then told me he was on his way when Jason (we’ll call him that) came back through the brush and said, let’s go. Now there were two other people in the car, so I sat in the backseat again the ride home I remained silent.

Later that night, he called me again, tried to gaslight me in the process, reordering my recollection of the events. I wasn’t having it, so I let him have it and ended our ‘friendship.’

Going out with him again was a colossal mistake, and I don’t even understand why I did, but maybe it was the closure I needed.

It took years and talking to a friend about what happened to me, for me to admit that it was rape. Date rape to be exact since he was known to me and we had, what I thought was a platonic relationship.

I had to make sense of what happened and forgive myself at the same time.

I was raped by a man I trusted as my friend.

In honesty, I can admit that at the time, I felt like it was my fault.

The situation was so odd, how did he get his wires crossed so thoroughly? Had I been leading him on this entire time? Did I send mixed signals? Was I asking for it? Was I trying to control him by spurning his advances at every turn? Why couldn’t I like him as much as he loved me?

The answer to the questions above is No. The reality is he was not entitled to my body; he had no right to violate my space and ignore my rebuff.

While I may not have expressed outright that I didn’t want a relationship with him, I was obviously in my actions that we were indeed friends.

There were no mixed signals; I did not ask him to assault me, there was no plot to control him, and he just wasn’t the type of man I wanted to be in a relationship with or have any romantic feelings for.

Admitting what he did to me helped me begin the process of healing. I’ve experienced sexual assault at various times in my life, but this was by far the worse experienced.

Being date-raped screwed me up for a long time and at present, I still have trust and intimacy issues with men but I am working on healing them.

It’s been a decade since this has happened, and I’ve suffered at the hands of other men since then and as recent as 2017. I’ve learned but, more importantly, accepted that my sexual energy is not an invitation for assault.

The problem stems from the genre of men that wish to act out their depraved proclivities and use women’s bodies to satisfy their need to assert their dominance through sexual force.

The best thing I can do is to work through the damage caused by years of sexual assault and abuse, learn to trust the men worth trusting, and protect myself against the ones that are trash.