"How could you let him do something like that to you?”
I didn’t let him! I never let anyone do anything to me before.

I honestly don’t understand people who ask me that question.
“How could you let him?”
It’s not like when a man’s about to beat up his wife, he stops to ask her if she’d let him first.
Why is there an assumption that just because something happened, she must have agreed to it?

I never got to consent to anything, because I was never even asked in the first place.
We were engaged to be married.
We spent a lot of time together in the apartment we were going to live in.
He was pissed at me that day, and I didn’t try to make it up with him.
I trusted him. I said to myself that even if something happened between us, it would be no big deal. We were getting married soon anyway.

But when he started approaching me, getting closer, I felt weird. It didn’t feel okay.
“Let’s not,” I said. But that didn’t stop him.
He never asked then or any other time whether I wanted to or not.
He never asked or even thought of asking me. I only realized this later on.
He got closer and kissed me—a bit violently.
He kept on going.
I resisted at first: “Let’s not”, “Not now”, and “It’s not right”.
Then I just stopped resisting. “Just give him what he wants,” I thought.

I ended up hating him and myself afterward.
It took years to begin to understand that what had happened wasn’t okay.
My body wasn’t a chocolate bar that I should just “let him have,” even if I didn’t feel like it.
But I was weak then. I had felt that my body wasn’t mine.