I’ve had an entry rolling around in my head for a couple of days that I really don’t want to write. But in the interests of Truth and just plain dealing with it, I believe that I will try.

I have a bad attitude towards sex.

Well, maybe not bad so much as weird. Men generally think it’s cool, but I?m starting to think that maybe it’s just fucked up a little. I’m pretty damn good at disassociating sex from emotion, and they like that because they’re often that way themselves and it’s just less complicated.

But why I do that is a whole ‘nother kettle of worms, to mix a metaphor.

See, I used to be perfectly normal, if a little restrained. I had a normal sex life in college; some was casual, some was not.

But then I got married, and a couple of years after that, things really started to go down the toilet for me.

See, I don’t talk about it much (few people even know) but I was abused in my marriage. That’s why I left—once I was strong enough to pick myself up out of the depression and go.

He didn’t hit me. I always wished he had, because that would have been a clear signal to even my post-partum depression-fogged head that it was time to get out.

It started when I had my first son. I was terribly conflicted about being a mother, and just didn’t know what to make of having two roles in life all of a sudden. I went down into the bowels of hell really fast, and was never, ever diagnosed. I had no clue what was going on. Had I an Internet back then, I might have figured it out for myself, but even being forced to the doctor didn’t help. He blamed it on low thyroid, the moron, but I didn’t know any better.

And there was the small matter of an episiotomy scar that wouldn’t heal too. And having sex forced on you with scars splitting wide open is hardly fun. Combine that with the depression, and I developed a complete aversion to sex. Well, at least with that man, who, knowing about the pain and the scars (and how could he miss the depression?) kept forcing me to have sex at least weekly. For over a year. Never letting the scars heal, either physically or mentally.

He didn’t hold me down and rape me; that would have been too clear to me too and I wouldn’t have put up with it. At least, I think I wouldn’t have. No, he used whining and manipulation as his evil tools. It got so that I would just lay there and let him so I wouldn’t have to hear about it for a few days. He made my life a living hell. I was never so thrilled in my life to have my period as I was then, because then I had an excuse that shut him up and made him just leave me alone for a few days. I started lying about it a day or two on either side too, just for the peace.

This went on for at least a year. A year that I spent absolutely dreading nightfall, because that’s when he’d start to hammer me, one way or another. I do not know how many nights I spent in tears in a row. How could a man treat his wife that way? What was wrong with me? How much I hated him! No, I despised him, every glance, every sound, every thought of him.

Eventually, I moved out to another room in the house, nominally due to his snoring, which happened to be loud enough to wake the freaking neighbors, but was just my convenient excuse.

Why do I have a second son after all of that, you ask?

That was a conscious decision, and one that I also wouldn’t have made if I’d been diagnosed with depression in time, because I would have been long gone. I simply didn’t want my older son to be an only child.

So I let him near me three more times, and thank god I was as fertile as I am. I never let him touch me again after that, because by then, I was starting to come out of the fog and thinking for myself a little. I had my baby and that’s all I wanted from him.

It was also right about then that I started to work and lost a little of that isolation that kept me trapped for four long years. I met actual people who liked me, and I was good at something, and I could spend whole chunks of the day away from him and thinking about something other than dreading him coming home. And I started to get my mind back.

Oh, we went to marriage counseling, sure. After one or two joint visits, the counselor (a religious one, no less) started just talking to me. And he encouraged me to get out. He’s the first one who gave me a clue that what I’d been going through was rape. Before, I’d assumed that it was somehow my fault, that something was wrong with me for no longer loving my husband. But when the husband treats the wife so unforgivably for so long, it’s no wonder that things go to shit. The counselor told me that it would be better to put my kids through a divorce than to have them grow up thinking that’s how a marriage was, and that’s how a husband should treat his wife.

None of this really explains why I disassociate sex with emotion, does it? Well, I had to, as a sheer survival mechanism. If I hadn’t tried to, I think it would have actually killed me, because lord knows I was close enough that having a son to be there for was the only thing holding me here at times. So yeah. Rape, and lots of it. It’s an ugly word, isn’t it? It’s a wonder that I can even enjoy sex after that.

It’s not easy to admit. It’s too easy to blame myself for not being smart enough to figure out what was going on, and for not having enough self respect to leave a bad situation. But I was more afraid of the unknown, which is a huge demon when you’re dealing with depression.

You will never, ever hear me criticizing an abused woman for staying, not even when she has it worse than I did. Because I’ve been there, and the me I am today wouldn’t stay, but the me that was then had her reasons. And the reason was fear. It shapes you for the rest of your life, even if you don’t want to admit it.