You’ll have to bear with me as this post will be LONG. I’ve just realised I’ve never properly spoken about this so it’s kind of cathartic to write it all down.
When I was 18 I met a guy that I was absolutely besotted with. He was absolutely gorgeous, charming (though now I see it as smarmy) older than me (but he lied about his age, so instead of being 4 years older than me, he was 8) and just seemed so sophisticated and unlike anyone I’d ever met before.
In short, he basically used me for sex on and off for 4 years until I was 22. I was young and naive and kept thinking he’d fall in love with me. In reality, he used to pick me up from my parent’s house about 9pm at night, shag me and then drop me home. He would try and get me to do stuff I didn’t want to do sexually (anal being one, he was absolutely obsessed with it) and when I said no went stone cold and quite cruel towards me. Looking back he would frequently make undermining comments, for example, when I went off to uni and saw him for the first time in the holidays, he basically told me I’d got fat. I put on just over half a stone admittedly at uni but went from a size 6-8 to a 8-10 so hardly fat!! (I lost it as soon as I graduated pretty much because I wasn’t binge drinking and eating crap all the time)
A memory that always sticks in my mind is I had a sad and emotional situation occur in my family quite suddenly and the weekend that it did, he wanted to pick me up on the Sunday evening and have sex. I was so numb and felt very alone at the time and just went along with it because I needed some comfort and stupidly thought I might get it from him. I remember sitting in his car and just crying and whilst he was ‘sympathetic’ that didn’t stop him having sex with me. Don’t get me wrong, it was consensual but any kind, decent man in that scenario surely would’ve seen the state I was in and just dropped me back home.
The final straw was when I was out one night with friends, he was ringing me as he was out too and I ended up meeting up with him and his friends at the end of the night getting a taxi with them and getting dropped off at his. We were all sat there and he started telling his friends, in front of me, about this amazing girl he’d met, she was so beautiful, blah blah. He pulled his phone out and showed them and me a photo of her and asked what we all thought. I sat there feeling so humiliated and all I wanted to do was stop the minibus and get off. But it was 3 in the morning, my phone had run out of battery, I had no money left and no way of getting home if I asked them to pull over in the middle of nowhere and let me out. So i just had to sit there, whilst he made me look like a total twat and then when I got back to his I didn’t feel confident enough to say no when he wanted sex! Strangely, I just knew he’d marry that girl, it was the way he talked about her and the way his face changed when he talked about her. That hurt just as much as what he did in that minibus. This was also the same night I found out he’d lied about his age and he was in fact 9 years my senior and nearly 30, instead of mid 20’s like I thought he was. (He was 27 when we met when I was 18, rather than 22 like he said!)
There are so many other examples of him being disrespectful, cruel and cold but we’d be here all day.
Anyway, a couple of years went by, I’d graduated and got my first job. I was sat there in the office one afternoon and my phone beeped, it was a message from him. It said ‘were you ever in love with me?’ At first I wasn’t going to dignify it with a response, but I did message back saying as I was young and stupid I probably thought I was at one point, but it definitely wasn’t love. I stalked his FB profile for the first time in years and it was pretty much all public and I could see that he was getting married the following week (to that girl) wtf?!
Anyway, occasionally over the years when bored I’ve had a look at his social media and from his profile it is clear that he is absolutely besotted with his wife (who was that girl he spoke about that night) they both look sickingly in love, which is fine, but I wonder if she knows how her husband used to treat women?
I haven’t thought about any of this properly for years, but I’ve been doing some self reflection this week and am ashamed and embarrassed that I let a man treat me so badly. I had zero self respect so it’s hardly surprising he didn’t have any for me. I’m so angry at myself as I’m so much better than that. I’m pregnant with my first child and just found out it’s a girl. I guess I’m thinking I’d never want her to be involved with a man like him. I went to raise her to always know her worth.
So, after that REALLY long post, I am wondering this morning whether deep down, no matter how much he loves his wife, whether he is still probably an arsehole? Is it possible to treat women (because I can guarantee it wasn’t just me he was using for sex and being a dickhead to) so disrespectfully and yet be seemingly so respectful to another? Do people really change that much? I guess I could excuse all this if he was 18 too as when we’re young we all make mistakes, but knowing he was not far off 30 for most of it, he’d have known how disrespectful he was being?
Like I said, all of this was on my head I fully appreciate, someone can only treat you how you allow them to be treated and I allowed it, so I’m certainly not blameless. But IMO it doesn’t make the mark of a nice person and if I found out that DH, aged nearly 30, treated women like that, I think it would make me re-evaluate how I saw him.