Confessing Sexual Assault: Confronting My Darkest Truth

The story. The apology. Her response.

(Trigger warning: This article contains discussions of sexual assault which may be distressing to some readers. Reader discretion is advised.)

(Oh…one more note. It’s worth listening to the voiceover today. My victim gets a voice, literally. There may be some tears in this one. And yes, I screwed up the title. Things happen.)

More than ever, context is important. While you won’t be confused by reading or listening to today’s entry, you’ll want to understand how we got here. Use the links below to get up to speed. You’ll be glad you did.

• The story begins: When Your Marriage Begins to Fall Apart

• The longest trigger warning ever: Dearest Gentle Reader…

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My wife and I had been married for approximately nine and a half years when we found our marriage at its lowest point. She was ready to separate. 

Separate. 

She kept using that word. I was hopeful it left room for getting back together, but I wasn’t completely clueless. She was using “separate” instead of “divorce,” a word that carries more weight and finality. There was no doubt, she saw divorce as a more appealing option to staying married to me for the rest of her life.

It wasn’t that she hated me, I just wasn’t the kind of partner she needed in a husband. She’d been carrying much more responsibility than I had, and after years of hoping I’d figure out how to be a better partner, she had given up hope. In a fashion I found confusing, Joy had a like/hate relationship with me. While she hated my lack of effort, she liked me as a person. The love, however, was gone. I understand that now. I couldn’t understand it then.

I, on the other hand, still loved her. I wanted her to be happy in life. I knew her dissatisfaction with me had been an ongoing issue, and I continued to fail to do what needed to be done. So, as much as I didn’t want to get divorced, I was willing to let her go if that’s what she needed. We were both at our wit’s end, but from different perspectives. It looked like things were over.

But still, I wasn’t sure. And I wanted to be sure we’d discussed all our…stuff…before we ended the marriage.

All of it.

I asked her if we could go to marriage counseling. She said no. She couldn’t see how any amount of talking through things would make any difference. She believed we already had talked, and talked, and talked about things. Her grievances were clear and written on the wall. As far as she was concerned, we had talked it all out.

I knew we hadn’t.

Mostly she was right, of course. We’d argued and talked about things ad nauseam. However, deep in my gut there was a knot that told me we failed to address some important things. Primarily, the circumstances surrounding our relationship when we entered marriage. One circumstance in particular.

We’d been sexually active before our marriage. For a significant portion of society this would have been a non-issue, but not for us. We’d grown up in the purity culture that was evangelical Christianity. Having sex before marriage was among the worst things you could do.

I thought it might be something we should talk about, whether we stayed married or not. There was this overwhelming thought that marriage might have been a way to eradicate feelings of guilt for our moral failures.

The two of us had talked about this some and realized that while it may have been part of our collective subconscious when we married, it was a terrible reason to get married. But I knew there was more to it than just premarital sex.

I will likely be stricken deep into the world of dementia before I forget the conversation where I was first willing to address the topic. We were laying on our fully made bed during the late afternoon. The sun was shining through the windows of the bedroom, bright light reflecting off the yellow and browns of the floral pattern on our bedspread. It was a quiet, calm conversation. We were discussing the next step for separation, how we’d tell our family and handle the emotional fallout we were sure we’d create for our conservative parents. She’d protect me from her family’s reaction to the news, and I’d protect her from mine. We cared about each other. The marriage just wasn’t working. Still, I gave counseling one more try, this time laying all the cards on the table.

“Joy, are you sure we can’t just try counseling first? Just to make sure we’ve talked about everything?” 

She looked at me, resolute, but with compassion in that moment. “Jeff, we’ve talked about it all. I just don’t have the energy for it. It's too late.”

“I…don’t think we have talked about everything.” I said, staring at the ceiling. “I mean, you’re right, we’ve talked about a lot. But we haven’t talked about the circumstances surrounding us at the beginning.”

“What do you mean? What…circumstances?”

“That we had sex before we were married.”

“Oh.” She paused for a beat before continuing. “Wait, what? We definitely talked about that.”

I continued, “I think part of the reason we might have gotten married was to alleviate some of the guilt we felt about the premarital sex. Like, in our minds it was kind of a way to pardon the sin. To make it ok, after the fact. …I don’t know…” 

“Yes. That’s right. We have definitely talked about this already and what terrible logic we had at 20 years old. But we can’t continue to let that bad logic shape our future choices.”

I took a deep breath.

“But we never talked about how it started. It wasn’t healthy.” 

Joy grew annoyed at my pressing. It was beginning to sound like I was grasping for straws.

“Jeff…”

“I didn’t mean the start of our marriage.” I demurred, unsure I wanted to say the words I thought needed to be said. My eyes welled up with tears.

“Then…what do you mean?” Joy looked at me and shifted onto her side.

I continued to stare at the ceiling, feeling safety in its blank response. My emotions were growing heavy, and the world began to well up and blur.

“We never talked about the first time we had sex.” I said. A tear rolled out of my eye, down my face, settling in my ear canal.

“Oh.” I felt Joy’s body shift a bit. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her head tilted downward.

I knew I had one more thing to say. I had to say it. I had to be looking at her when I did. She seemed to know and looked right back at me.

I gathered my courage. Looked at her, and confessed.

“I think it was sexual assault. I think, maybe I raped you.” My words came out quickly, racing to escape my mouth before the next tear fell.

“It’s always been there…since the very beginning of our relationship. We never discussed it after the next morning. You didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It’s like we buried it. But it was always there, like, haunting our relationship whether we knew it or not. Divorced or not, Joy, I think we need to deal with this.”

She looked away, considering my words.

“I’m sorry, Joy. I can’t believe it happened that way.” My throat began to ache. “I never would have dreamed I’d do something like that. But I did. I don’t know what happened. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I don’t even feel like I have the right to ask for forgiveness.” 

It was all I had.

Joy didn’t look at me. “Yup. That sucked.” She paused again. Then continued, “Why… me?”

“What?” I wasn’t really surprised by the question. I just didn’t know how to answer her. I didn’t know why I did it, let alone know why her.

“Why me? I mean, you kept saying you just wanted to know what it felt like. You wanted to know what it felt like? Like…where did that come from? Why were you so intent on knowing what it felt like?”

It wasn’t the response I expected. Nor were the thoughts I had the moment she asked. A lump formed in my throat. The tears came faster. There was an answer to the question, no doubt. I knew the answer. I knew exactly why I, at 19 years old, had been intensely curious about what sex felt like. The achy lump in my throat exploded. The gentle tears gave way as my shame burst forth into full-on, sob crying. They were childlike tears filled with shame, regret and fear.

“Hey…” Joy said, confused by the strength of my emotions. In all the years we’d been together, it was an emotional outburst she’d never seen from me. I was melting; a puddle of tears, saliva and snot, all of which I wiped away with the sleeve of my shirt. This was something different. She sensed it was about more than us.

“What’s wrong?” She asked.

I didn’t reply.

My lack of response was too much. The annoyance she felt at her husband was gone. Her husband was gone. In his place was a crying little boy. The mother in her took over. Placing her hand on my opposite cheek she gently pulled my gaze towards her. I averted my eyes from hers, looking anywhere else I could. When she removed her palm from my cheek, I moved my head back to the original position, again fixating on the emptiness of the ceiling.

She replaced her hand and tried again. “Hey…hey… look at me. What’s going on?”

There are things you don’t know about me.” I squeaked between sobs.

“What things?”

“Things.” I didn’t want to tell her. They were days I didn’t want to revisit, from years before I knew her.

 “Jeff, what things?”

“Things from when I was a kid.”

“Jeff, what are you talking about?”

Laying there on a pillow wet with tears, staring at the ceiling, I began to understand I hadn’t dealt with some experiences that had nothing to do with Joy. I didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t know if they were reasons, or excuses…or whatever. But suddenly, I decided she deserved to know.

So, I told her. All of it.

She was pensive. The quiet was unsettling and I filled the void with the only thing I knew to say.

“I’m sorry.” I repeated with desperation.

“I know.” She said, once again laying her head on the pillow, now staring at the ceiling with me.

As we lay on the bed next to each other, we were an emotional mess. Our lives were askew, regardless of what it looked like from across the street, or at church, or wherever else we were faking it.

I moved my hand to where my pinky was touching the side of hers. She placed her hand on mine and gently took it into hers, stopping short of the intimacy of interlaced fingers. We were two people who cared for each other, but unsure what anything meant.

Eventually, Joy broke the silence.

“I’ll…go to counseling with you.”

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This conversation happened in the summer of 2007. 17 years have passed. 

We’re still married. And, I might add, we’re wild about each other. Meaningfully so.

My confession to Joy on that sunny afternoon was the most important moment of our marriage, and probably the most important moment in my life. Not only because I confessed a wrong to Joy, but because it opened the floodgates for me to address some other issues I’d been ignoring for a long time. It was hard. Sometimes it still is. But it made all the difference. The tears I cried that night washed away a veil through which I’d viewed life. A new path began for both of us.

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In the coming weeks, however long it takes, I will continue to share this story with you.

My story is not yours, or that of person you might be thinking about right now, and those stories are not mine. But they all have similarities.

There is a chance you read this and you’ve come away with a weird, cringe-y feeling that I glossed over something important that was happening. As you read about my crying, it jumped out to you as another form of manipulation. Perhaps reminded you of gaslighting. The kind that happens when an abuser will cry intense tears in an effort to get their victim to stick around. You’re not falling for my sob story, even if she did.

It was a reader called me on this in a comment elsewhere. I didn’t like what they had to say, but they were right. I did use the tears to manipulate. Even though I’d convinced myself that’s not what was happening. I had to reconsider what my confession was.

The process continues.

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Longtime readers of The Unfiltered Scribe will be familiar with some of the circumstances that led to the conversation above. For others, you can read about it here.

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Now, here’s where the relationship began: