Need advice

[yellowsunflower]

Hello,

I feel a bit silly writing on here, as I feel like my experience isn’t necessarily that bad and maybe I’m being dramatic. But other times I feel so low about it and I just need some advice. The last month or so I have had some big realisations about my relationship of several years. For a long time I haven’t been honest with myself about what has been going on and haven’t spoken to any friends or family about it. The thing is everyone absolutely adores my partner; they have said things like ‘you’re so lucky’, ‘he’s a good one’ and things like that. I do think he is a good person in a lot of ways and I feel sick and guilty thinking of him in any other way.

Here’s where I am at:

A few years ago I went to the doctors about experiencing pain during sex; turned out at the time that I had a cyst but the cyst was normal and subsided and the pain continued and was quite a severe, deep pain. After lots and lots of testing, they concluded that there was nothing wrong with me physically, so I was referred to a sex therapist. I have also been seeing a counsellor for a couple of years for bad anxiety. I repeatedly told both my counsellor and sex therapist that there was nothing wrong with our relationship and that it was something wrong with me (that I hated my body, had low self esteem etc.). I now have severe anxiety about sex and hate the idea of even being touched.

One day I went for my final appointment with the doctor and it was someone I hadn’t seen before. I wasn’t expecting them to ask me about my relationship, but they did and I suddenly broke down and burst into tears. Since this day, I feel like I’ve opened my eyes and the floodgates have opened and I have started realising a lot of things.

I feel like my body is not my own and that I walk around not really occupying my own body. I don’t know if that even makes any sense. Throughout our relationship, I realised that my partner repeatedly referred to my body as his and when I asked him not to touch me in a specific area he would do it anyway and say ‘it’s mine’ and refer to me as ‘his’. I realised that he doesn’t respect me when I say I don’t feel like sex or don’t want to be touched. He says things like “why don’t you love me” or “love me” or “you’re mean” or “why do you hate me” etc. On occasion he has said “I just treated you to X (like a nice dinner or something or he took me away somewhere)”. If I stand my ground and say that I’m sorry I really don’t feel like sex then he turns away from me and won’t give me any attention or affection and acts coldly towards me. He won’t talk to me until the next morning, when he’ll try to have sex with me again. He often says that I hate him. On many occasions in this scenario, I have started to panic and I often end up then trying to make him feel better by giving him sex, even though I still do not want it myself.

He often seems to see me saying ‘I don’t really feel like it’ or something like that as a game and just continues to try to ‘get me in the mood’ and again gets frustrated with me if I don’t so often I just let it happen. He has sometimes held me down or sat on top of me when trying to initiate sex or during sex. I have remembered times where he’s been trying to touch me and I don’t verbally say no but I continuously move his hands away and quite visibly don’t want to be touched but he keeps going at it until I let him, or has sometimes physically trapped my hands behind my back so he can keep touching me to ‘get me in the mood’.

In the mornings he often tries to start having sex with me or touch me whilst I’m still asleep.

He jokes about sex a LOT and frequently starts speaking about it as soon as I see him, like says things like ‘can’t wait for sex tonight’ etc. If I go out drinking with my friends he says ‘ooh great, we’ll have drunk sex tonight then’ (even when he hasn’t been drinking) like my consent is assumed just because we are in a relationship, not an in the moment decision. He does give me a lot of compliments but they are always related to my body or my attractiveness and not me as a person – ‘you’re so fit’, ‘you make me so horny’, ‘I love your t**s and your bum’. Sometimes I have been in bed and said things like ‘can we just talk’ and have admitted that I feel like I want to talk about some things and he just starts to reel off a list of generic compliments like ‘you’re so great, I love you’ and then says ‘ok can we have sex now’.

He always says on special occasions that I have to give him sex because it’s his birthday, or he sends me memes about (detail removed by moderator). He’s joked about giving me money for b******s on other occasions.

In the past if he has pleasured me, he then says he deserves X Y Z in return.

I feel so anxious about sex and even going to bed and don’t even like being kissed anymore because I feel like I can’t kiss him without him initiating sex. Many times I have gone to the bathroom and cried immediately after having sex. I have had panic attacks during sex. I have finally realised, after trying to blame myself for so long about how I’m feeling about sex, that actually, things don’t feel right in the relationship.

He knows that I’m seeing a sex therapist and counsellor and rarely asks about it or wants to talk about it. Initially, the sex therapist suggested we take sex off the table for a while so that I can learn what I like and try to feel comfortable with my own body. I said this to him and he wasn’t pleased – he said OK but it only took a few days for him to completely ignore it and just start initiating sex again. I haven’t yet spoken to my therapist about all of this, because I haven’t seen them since (detail removed by moderator) as our last appointment was cancelled.

I have started to realise other things as well. When we’re out together, he always talks about how fit other women are and talks about other women fancying him. He says it in a ‘jokey’ way and when I call him out on it he just says its a joke chill. I feel quite passive in the relationship, like he has the final say over all decisions and I worry about upsetting him, even small things like what we’re going to have for dinner or watch on TV. (Detail removed by moderator) and my friend has said to me that she felt like I was acting and didn’t seem myself. I realised that I would constantly be asking him what he wanted to do.

Before (detail removed by moderator), he encouraged me to go to the gym 5 times a week and track all of my meals. I got to a place where it made me feel so low about myself and I tried to confide in him about this and he said that I was being negative and that if I didn’t like my body he didn’t understand then why I didn’t want to just work really hard to change it by obsessively gyming and tracking what I eat. He got really frustrated with me about this. He also suggested that I go and see a surgeon about getting a breast enlargement if I was so unhappy with my breasts. I have recently realised that I don’t want to change myself and I just wish I could learn to love myself as I am.

He’s never physically hit me and I don’t think he ever would. We have been together a long time now. We have had arguments lately about my career choice; (detail removed by moderator) and I want some time to figure out exactly what I want to do but he is pressuring me to ‘just get a job’ so that we can get a house together. Increasingly, I feel really nervous about our future together and quite claustrophobic. But, I really love him. I feel really sick saying all this and talking about him in a negative way. I have moments where I feel like it’s fine and like I want to marry him etc. and I tell myself I’m being paranoid and that he’s a really good person and he loves me a lot and I’m lucky. And then I have days where I feel like I just can’t cope.

I can’t go on like this anymore. Am I being silly? I don’t know how I can work through this. I tried to open up to him a few weeks ago about things and he got really panicked that I might leave him and really upset. I said that I felt like we really needed to take sex off the table for a while and that I wanted to be the initiator of sex, but told him to understand that I might not want to initiate it for a while either and that I just needed time. Fast forward a few weeks and I feel like we’re back to exactly where we were before. At first he didn’t explicitly say ‘let’s have sex’ like he used to but he made it VERY clear he wanted sex by rubbing up against me etc. and he didn’t touch me on my breasts but was rubbing my thighs etc. (Detail removed by moderator)

I need help, I’m back to the place where I feel like I can’t say anything again and am just passively letting it happen. I feel like it’s my fault for not communicating how I feel properly and not being able to stand up and say no.

Sorry this was so long, I just needed to get it out.

[Iwantmeback]

Hi yellowsunflower youre not being silly and what hes doing is abuse. Pat Evans explains about the sexual dominater in her book, living with the dominater. Your body is your own, it doesn’t belong to him, its a living, breathing organism, not a b****y car. His words would have sounded like compliments in the beginning but then they no longer are. You are his to satisfy his needs and wants and that’s it.
You are realising that something within the relationship isn’t right, our inner self knows this and its trying to tell you in whatever way she can. listen to her, she is never wrong. Please dont marry him, buy a house or get any large debt with him. The abuse will get worse, cos he’ll see you as his property with a ring on your finger.
I used to do a toning class absolutely loved it, i also lost around 3stone in weight. All he could see was my pot belly, so would make comments about that, or tell me i shouldn’t eat whatever, if i did more sit ups id get rid of my belly. I literally want to cut it out, he’s made me so disgusted with that tiny imperfection(in his eyes)ive had 2 children, they grew inside me, this wee overhang is my reminder of what i achieved. It’s to be proud of not ridiculed.
When the exercise class (1night a week)finished, if it took me more than 10 mins to dtive home he started making accusations, k no longer go to class. I no longer go to my slimming class as i cant ea healthily at all just now, i can barely eat and what i do is keeping me overweight. He doesn’t want diners but if i say down to something it would be a greeting match until i made him something. My dinners id cook him are classed as sh..e now if i do cook and its not ready for him coming in thats a greeting match too. They ALWAYS find something to have a go at you for, and the rules change day to day or from week to week. Its exhausting trying to decide anything so much that you stop making choices cos any choice is the wrong one.
Keep posting on here, there are lovely wonderful women who all have similar stories. The main thing is youre here and youve opened up.
IWMB 💕💕

[yellowsunflower]

Hi Iwantmeback.

Thanks so much for your kind message. If I am honest I am really worried about how to move forwards now and feel sick about the whole thing. I also don’t know how I didn’t realise all of this sooner. It still feels wrong to me to think of him in a negative way and like I am being foolish for thinking these things because everyone tells me he is so great. I’ll keep posting on here and talking to you guys about it. I am glad to have found this space. I came here after listening to a podcast on it where I identified with a lot of the things they were talking about.

Thanks for the book suggestion, I’ll take a look at that.

I completely don’t feel like myself anymore and like I don’t know who I am without him, and that scares me.

I get what you’ve said about the dinner thing – I had a similar thing last night when I’d cooked a really nice meal, cleaned, done his washing, but I hadn’t done XYZ right…

I hope that one day you will be able to go back to your class, if you really enjoy it. I’ve started trying to go to yoga instead of the gym and finding that helpful to get some head space. But my partner gets annoyed at me when I say I don’t want to go to the gym with him and want to do that instead.

You are 100% right when you say you should be proud of your body and love it and you shouldn’t be made to feel any other way!

Sending love <3
yellowsunflower

[yellowsunflower]

I feel like I’m so confused at the moment. With every day that goes by something else seems to come to the surface for me, like I’m slowly finally peeling my eyes open.
I’m noticing more and more. I realised how much he has never listened to me, how he never ever puts himself in my shoes and it’s always about making him feel better and making him feel comfortable. It feels like my feelings don’t count and that he has not respected me and my body. Everything we do is to his schedule and recently I’ve started noticing and trying to stand my ground and ask if we can do something I want to do, or if I can do something my way, and he says I am being mean and I end up feeling so guilty. I can’t get my head around it all and feeling quite overwhelmed. I think I want to leave the relationship but I’m worried and feel sick. Even feeling this way, when I’m with him I feel like I’m still craving his affection and I’m constantly worried about how he’s feeling and yearning for him to listen to me. But then at the same time I am having panic attacks about going to bed because I don’t want him to initiate sex because I feel like I don’t have a scenario in which I can really say no. It’s either be ignored & made to feel really guilty, like a terrible person, and he shuts me out if I do, or just go along with it anyway, or say no and not be listened to and him persistenting and persisting. Even though I am more aware of what is going on now and I know that I have been feeling like this for years, I can’t seem to reconcile this in my head with the person I thought he was and that everyone else seems to think he is. It makes me feel so sick.

I am also having some flashbacks about my parents relationship when I was younger. My parents had a really messy divorce and don’t speak at all and I was angry at my dad for a long time but didn’t quite understand the situation, I was 17. From what has been coming up from me lately, I think my dad was abusive towards my mum.

Just needed to vent. I’ve been writing some thoughts down in a diary too.

The good thing is that I reached out to a close friend last night and went through some stuff with her and she told me it doesn’t have to be this way and that I deserve to be happy and that she will support me. It feels good to have told someone.

[yellowsunflower]

Also, I feel like I wanted to say that I don’t think he’s intentionally done or is doing any of this with the goal of hurting me. I don’t know, I think he just doesn’t see a problem with it, I’m confused

[Tiffany]

I didn’t believe that my partner was acting intentionally at the time, but when I look back I told him so many times that I didn’t like things, asked him not to do things. And he just carried on. I don’t think he thought he was a bad person. But he viewed me as less of a person than he was, and my feelings were less valid than his. But he knew he was hurting me and he carried on. That’s a choice.

You get ground down when your partner is like that. You start to think that you are less important. You are not! Keep your diary safe and hidden. He will go through it if he finds it and use what is written to manipulate you. Keep thinking about what is going on and getting stronger. Don’t confront him, just start looking more critically at what is going on. There is definitely sexual abuse, and I suspect that there is also emotional abuse going on too, because we generally don’t accept other types of abuse unless there has been some level of emotional abuse first to lower our self esteem. Look out for others too though. I left my partner because of emotional abuse, but there were also incidents of sexual and physical abuse, and systematic financial abuse. Whatever you do, don’t buy a house with this man.

[Iwantmeback]

Hello yellowsunflower, i couldnt agree wirh tiffany any more. I too have told my OH what he does hurts me, TOLD not asked and hes not listened. I have literally been on my knees betting him to stoo treating me the way he does, i couldnt take anymore (i tried to kill myself a few days before it). He tried fir a while, but the snide, sarcastic,caustic comments begin all over again.
It took me a good few weeks of reading and posting on here begire i plucked up the courage to contact WA. I got in touch with my local one. I even tried to get a housing form recently but someone we know in the family was at the desk when i went in for it. Look up trauma bonding too. It explains why we can’t leave. You feel guilty too because you have loved/or still love(i no longer love my OH, i see a stranger now)your partner
Its good to see you bavk on here. You will get stronger and more assertive the more you realise you’re no longer accepting their behaviour. What we find hat’d is letting go of the dream man. The man he was, the life wed planted together.
Sex was and still is a huge part of my OH life. I can’t bear it to have him touch me. He cant just cuddle before sex, he just paws at my breasts or tries to pull my pjs down. I feel like a piece of meat. He’s said often enough he needs to ’empty his ba..s. to me that jyst gross.
Take care
IWMB 💕💕

[Author]

Posts