A Sexless Relationship Healed My Sexual Trauma

fuck me or fuck me not

Echo and Narcissus 1903 — John William Waterhouse

“Girl, I’m pretty sure this man is gay” said my one confidant.

The truth is I would have found solace in that being the fact, but it was all more complicated than that. In my mind, after months of avoidance and rejection from someone I was in an active relationship with, and multiple instances of gut wrenching embarrassment from my own desperation—him being gay would’ve been a kinder reality than the cruel explanations my psyche lined up.

1. he finds me disgusting

2. he’s sleeping with someone else

3. I just don’t turn him on

4. maybe it’s a disability

5. am I disgusting?

6. he’s asexual

7. he hates me

8. i’m not fit enough

9. maybe he has some trauma of his own

10. he’s still in love with someone else

The list could go on forever, but most of its lines had one thing in common—I was the problem. I felt like the room was constantly spinning, I was caught in therapy sessions where I’d lie to my psychologist selling my relationship as heaven sent. He was a kind, funny, attractive, hardworking, loving man. We were friends first and lovers after. Except the lovers part never really bloomed, only the title did.

Behind the curtain of our romance, in soft sheets warmed by two bodies, we’d sleep side by side and I’d feel lonelier than ever. Rolling awake too cognizant of the lack of affection, witnessing how he’d eventually turn his back to me mid sleep, realizing how I had never been ignored like this before. It was as if I was a sexless object, as if I repulsed him.

Months of this went on, me finding myself stumbling in an awkward virgin like two step, avoiding the subject of sex all together. Never bringing it up in order to avoid being shot down, quieting my inner needs and removing the side of me who wished to be seen as a madonna and committing to the virgin. “Maybe he just needs time, maybe one day it’ll just happen when I least expect it. Maybe a relationship is better this way.”

The relationship came to a natural end— for exactly all the reasons you would think. We can really only tune out and drown our needs and worries for so long before they explode out of us at unplanned times. The bomb will go off sooner or later making strangers out of us as we release everything we’ve kept inside for so long. This wasn’t surprising, but it was still just as painful. The pain was heavy, foggy, visceral. It lasted for years. I was grieving the friendship—I was left without answers, I was confused.

The pain was not from the ending, but from the lack of closure about the mystery. It all came to a stand still before I ever really got a reason why. The list would exist in my head forever, until one day all the lines went blank. 16 months had passed and the friendship would still peek through, a message her, a letter there, a happenstance encounter. It took 16 months and some serious frontal lobe development for me to accept the wildest part of the relationship—this man really did love me. In his own way sure, but it was real true, romantic love, and that fact sat heavy on my heart because it meant a belief I had carried since childhood could in fact not be true at all.

I can be loved romantically without sex being on the table. Moreover, I do not have to share my body or offer up sex to be accepted, to be wanted, to be loved. This discovery, this FACT, blew up my internal belief system. My trauma had nothing to grasp on to, it was a thought experiment gone array.

How could I, a girl who has been sexualized by others since the age of 5, be loved and accepted by someone romantically without sex as a crutch. And how could I then spend so much time suffering through the one relationship that offered me that lesson? The questions burned inside me.

Years passed and much like a spiral staircase my perspective grew upward and away from the source of pain and confusion this relationship marked for me. The mystery of why he was like that with me faded because I realized the answer wasn’t mine to know—it didn’t matter. I was loved well in the ways that person could love me at the time, and accepting that for myself was a gift, it was a step forward in my own evolution, it softened knots in my body and soul. A Thai massage delivered in the form complicated life lessons.

It’s a hard question to ask and an even harder question to answer, especially when you have a muddied past where others harmed you, where people failed you and love was lost.

Can someone love you to the best of their ability and it still not be enough?

The answer for me and my life is yes— and even harder to acknowledge still is that it can be good love, pure love, true love and still not be enough. We can not stretch, bend, and swallow our needs for the sake of keeping love. We also shouldn’t deny there was love at all just because it didn’t tick all the boxes or because it didn’t look how you had been taught to expect it . I’ve been loved but not fucked, and I’ve been fucked but not loved and the former means more—and thats is a truth that for me at least, could only be revealed with healing.

Con Mucho Amor,

Henny