Why Didn’t You Just Say No?
A lot of people want to know: why didn’t you just say no? If you didn’t want to do it, why would you consent? Why wouldn’t you speak up? Why did you say nothing?
This is a question that took years of therapy to unravel but the short answer is: I thought sex was love.
My confusion between sex and love may have started when my “friend” had sex with my “boyfriend.”
I wanted to save myself for marriage and my boyfriend was a normal 16-year-old boy. He had no interest in saving himself for anything. So when I repeatedly refused him, he had sex with my friend, ending both my “relationship” and my “friendship.” She got pregnant at 17 by another guy, so I figured that was karma.
After 40+ years, she found me on Facebook and I was still furious – but she was flabbergasted.
“You never said anything,” she said.
I never said anything…?
To be fair, any human with a functioning brain knows not to have sex with someone else’s boyfriend. But maybe I really never told her how I felt.
Maybe I said nothing because I had learned this: boys don’t like me as a friend or a girlfriend. Boys only want to have sex with me.
This added to my belief that something was inherently wrong with me. I believed in my soul that I was weird and unlovable. I thought I needed to be someone entirely different. It never once occurred to me to be self-respecting or to love myself as me.
I believed men were responsible for all the love. (No pressure for them, right?)
What I wanted more than anything in the world was a man to save me, to make me cool and smart and funny and attractive. I wanted a man to make me the person I wanted to become.
I expected this as if it were a reality, as if young men weren’t human at all, but unnamed Disney princes just waiting for me to hop onto their white horses and ride away. In the castle, I’d be transformed.
I believed The One was my one and only true prince. We dated for a month. He didn’t want me, but I obsessed for decades believing he could have made me the person I’d imagined I could be.
I didn’t know that having that kind of relationship wouldn’t save me from myself.
Also I had a few truly wonderful boyfriends who fit into my dream, who treated me well, who gave me everything I thought I needed. But when I didn’t get whisked away on that white horse, when I realized that those guys were mere humans, I moved on to keep searching for that one who would magically transform me into … something better.
The guys who got to know me didn’t change me into the lovable, un-weird person I thought I needed to become.
And most guys preferred to have sex with me rather than get to know me.
So with my head down, my eyes closed, and my teeth clenched, I chugged a ton of beer and had sex with guys who didn’t know me because I thought that’s what men wanted. And having some male attention was better than having no male attention. I did as they asked and waited for them to go away.
I believed that sex with strangers was the best substitute for self-love that I could ever have.
Physically and biologically, I was quite capable of saying no. But to do so would have left me, emotionally, with no love at all.