Rape and Intimate Relationships

 41. RAPE AND INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS 

Hello and welcome back to Raped 25 Years. At this time I invite you to join me on a short walk through my journey of healing from sexual trauma. Don’t forget to stay to the end, so that you can enjoy my gem of positivity.

Rape, by its very nature crosses the intimacy boundaries. It is a violation of the physical body but also a key factor in any intimate relationship, a violation of trust. So after the violence of sexual trauma, what is it like to form an intimate relationship with someone else?

The first obvious answer is it’s highly distressing for a rape survivor to form any sort of relationship, and even harder to form an intimate relationship. Intimacy for me requires a strong connection between the man and me. It also requires a higher level of trust than I am feeling.

Until recently, the only relationships I had with men were based on rape. Particularly when forced to live with the man I refer to as Alex. I was traumatised by the brutal treatment of rape many times. Alex had said he wanted to marry me, which I now know was simply to trick me into trusting him.

The first time he raped me, I was stunned. Disbelief flooded my brain. Why would he do such a vicious act against me? What did I say or do for him to treat me in such an aggressive and appalling way? But notice how I started. It was the first time he raped me.

Each time Alex violated my body, it broke a piece out of the trust I felt with him. However, when he started to collect money for allowing other men to rape me too, that trust totally shattered. There was nothing genuine in his weasel words of apology, nor anything meaningful about his false declarations of love he claimed to feel towards me.

Since then I haven’t been in any relationship with a man. For the last twenty years I could not trust enough to form a relationship of intimacy. In fact it was only two years ago that I met someone. It was a major triumph for me to trust this man (I’ll call him Percy) enough to simply hold hands. Our first kiss came several months later. 

Even then, the very first kiss, I hid my lips. To use my lips, seemed to me as a level of intimacy that I wasn’t comfortable enough with. But after lots of talking about our feelings and needs in the relationship, we now kiss lip to lip. But the trauma wrought by Alex’s brutality and cruelty, still interferes. If I am held or touched on some areas of the body, I still flinch and pull back.

It is very much an uphill battle of trusting the intimacy will not turn into another relationship of traumatising abuse. Thankfully, Percy is very understanding and patient. We spend a lot of our time in simply being together, just enjoying each other’s company. And slowly but surely, I am trusting in the intimacy Percy and I are building together.

What about you? Do you find it an uphill battle to form a relationship of intimacy between yourself and another person? Trusting takes time, especially after the violation of rape. But, as I’m finding, forming an intimate relationship can be done. There is hope; there is healing.

The gem I chose this time, is a quote attributed to Robert Sternberg:

“Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still”.

This quote really says what an intimate relationship is about. It’s more than just the sex and fireworks. As I am doing with Percy, our intimacy is based on communication and the ability to work on companionship first. And as I heal, I am able to move further on into the intimacy. And you can heal into an intimate relationship too.

Thank you for joining me on this short walk in my journey. Don’t forget to leave a comment on what intimacy means to you. And until next time, just breathe and believe.

With love and care, Ruby