The Education of a 'Good Girl' [2/3]
Part 2: Pandora’s Prying
Content warning: This piece contains descriptions of sexual assault, rape, and rape fantasy. Names have been changed. Part two of a three-part series exploring consent, sexual assault, desire, and healing.
Kiss me in my sleep Dreaming oh so deep Paradise is lost Innocence is gone Won't you come along Into the great unknown
"Before I Fall" – Latch Key Kid
Read part 1 here.
Far Away From Home
As I entered my junior year, I excitedly embarked on a year-long exchange program in the UK. Not only was I traveling abroad for the first time in my life, but I was also headed to the land of British accents. Armed with my newly unlocked slut powers, I was ready to take the Boyfriend search intercontinental.
This year abroad coincided with gaining the legal ability to drink, opening up a whole new chapter of drunk hookups after late nights out dancing with friends. Most of the drunk hookup sex was unremarkable. (Okay, fine, there was actually that one accidental FFM threesome, but that’s another story.) I enjoyed the British accents and relatively sex positive culture. The combination of these two factors led me to double my body count in the course of the year (from 11 to 22).
As much fun as it was to makeout with strangers, classmates, and members of my ”college family” on dancefloors, I soon turned back to online dating. I was hoping against hope to find a nice boy who would also tie me up and hit me. To my surprise and delight, I succeeded.
I found a sweet nerd boy who enthusiastically enacted my dominant sex fantasies. I had told him I was only looking for a study abroad boyfriend, not a serious life partner. But he fell in love with me and was suddenly asking me to move to Europe. I had no intention of moving to Europe and ended things as soon as I realized I would either hurt him now or hurt him more later.
But this fling laid the mental framework for the belief that perhaps I could have it all, if I chose wisely enough. Unfortunately, the pattern matching had not yet solidified enough to realize that “nerd” was a load-bearing criterion for me.
Prying Open the Lid
The following fall, I returned to the US, and returned to Tinder. My taste of a balanced relationship in the UK had left me hungry for more.
That's when I met my first serious partner. Tom worked in finance, but he was not a nerd. I soon realized he struggled with basic math, like multiplying fractions. While this would be a dealbreaker for me today, at that time I was suffering from some strange delusion that it was actually bad to discriminate based on intelligence in dating, and that other factors mattered more.
He was several years older than me, and he was both hot and cool in a way that my high school self would have found mind-boggling. We immediately had incredible chemistry. And he was looking for a life partner. He quickly asked me to be his girlfriend. I couldn’t believe my luck.
The first red flag was the mattress on the floor, and the second was his casual use of hard drugs. His friend group used cocaine during nights out like it was alcohol. One night upon returning to his apartment late at night, he snorted cocaine off my body. I woke up hungover, and found the tiny, empty baggie in bed with us. I’d never been exposed to drugs so I accepted his nonchalant framing. Though he would also frequently insist I was too good for drugs and too good for him. I fought him only on the latter, reassuring him endlessly, and truly believing we were meant for each other.
Sexually, he wasn't just dominant, he was truly sadistic. He was deeply kinky. As our dynamic expanded, I became increasingly convinced I could never find sex like that anywhere else.
He would declare his love and devotion to me dramatically (e.g., “I’d kill for you, die for you”), and actually treated me quite well in many ways. He was chivalrous, he opened doors for me, he positioned himself between me and traffic when we walked down the street, and he never missed a good morning or good night text. He bought me gifts, called me Princess, and gave me endless attention. Once we went long distance, we would spend hours on the phone each day, and I would shower him with a steady stream of nudes and explicit journal entries to read. We traveled together, skied together, and met each other’s families.
It was so close to everything I had always wanted. But of course, there was a catch. Tom hid major mental health issues from me, including schizophrenia. After many months of building trust and pulling on threads, he gradually revealed to me the depths of what I was dealing with. Sometimes, his vivid hallucinations would include a distorted version of myself. I was uncertain how tenuous his grip on reality might become, which scared me. He refused treatment for his mental health. In lieu of a therapist, he had me.
Unleashing the Evils
As more time passed, I noticed more glaring red flags. He disclosed violent ideations against people who displeased him (like his boss and coworkers). He disclosed participation in an online forum aimed at assisting other depressed people through suicide. This clued me in on the depths of his depression.
Even simple drives became tense because he struggled to regulate his emotions if he made a wrong turn. Backseat driving was expressly prohibited. And no matter the circumstances, I was not permitted to drive us. The dark side of his chivalry became apparent in his rigid adherence to traditional gender roles.
My google search history expanded to include topics like “spotting psychopaths”, “warning signs of domestic violence”, and “is schizophrenia heritable” as I started to look for answers about the unsettling traits and patterns I was observing. I had no one to talk to about it, because I wanted to respect his privacy and failed to spot this insistence on secrecy as a major red flag. I felt more and more distant from my friends and family the longer we were together.
I was downright scared of his instability. I could see how his unresolved childhood trauma was driving so much of this, and I was naive enough to think I could love him hard enough to fix him. At the same time, it was becoming apparent that I was not dating the person I thought I had been. I was in too deep to see it at the time, but a lot of our relationship was in some sense a massive emotional consent violation because he hid so much of himself until I was already in love.
Sexually, he never technically forced me to do anything, but due to my people-pleasing tendencies, there were nonetheless issues. As our kink life blurred into my daily life, and as my identity was subsumed into my role as his perfect, submissive girlfriend-therapist, I felt a growing unease. He would make me wear chokers every day, wanted to control my outfits, and wanted to dictate who I slept with once we opened our relationship. On the one hand I was bad at saying no, and on the other hand he was not good at making me feel like I could. I remember him once stripping me topless in front of his friends, and letting one of them grope me. I played the role, but I wasn’t particularly into being objectified without prior negotiation.
Still, I was keeping up my grades and made it into multiple top grad programs. Thanks to the stability of my upbringing, I had a lot of capacity to support him. Unfortunately, this also enabled me to stay in the relationship well past significant warning signs. My Catholic childhood had trained me to equate suffering with love, and I was suffering exquisitely with Tom.
But throughout it all, the sex and kink dynamic was addictive. I felt stuck. In my model of the dating landscape, I was never going to find sex that good again. I was chemically and emotionally dependent, and also terrified any sign of me leaving might spiral him towards suicide.
I dated Tom for over three years, much of that time in a long-distance open relationship. I don't classify him as Bad. But he was deeply hurt and hurting, and beyond my capacity to repair, despite years of codependent striving. The powerlessness wore at me. Meanwhile he was talking about engagement, and laying plans to follow me to California. My Good Will Hunting moment was in reach. But Tom was not Will, and I was not Skylar, even if we were both heading west to grad school.
Seeing the Light
The spark that finally gave me strength and cause to leave that relationship was a simple lunch date with a father of two. It dawned on me that I could not see myself having children with Tom. But I still held the hope that I would be able to have a family, if I had the strength to leave.
Having finally admitted to myself that Tom would never be the father of my children, I ended things. I tried to soften this harsh truth by lying to him in the breakup and saying I had decided I didn't want kids. Shortly after, I went to therapy for the first time to process the co-dependence. Meanwhile, the breakup would drag on for months, as I tried to walk the line between supporting his mental health and healing myself.
Simultaneously, an unexpected connection was blossoming with the dad I’d met on Tinder. He was stable, fulfilled, competent, and intelligent. I leaned heavily on his emotional support as I excruciatingly extracted myself from my codependent enmeshment with Tom.
My relationship with Tom had been sexually open ever since I moved across the country for grad school. Freed from that relationship, I was able to admit that sex with other people had been better than nothing, but that my ideal was having multiple romantic relationships. The prospect of multiple romantic relationships felt fundamentally right for me in a way that is hard to put words to.
Soon, I was falling in love with a man sixteen years my senior, who was in a happy open marriage. Though some of the signs pointed to “rebound” we are still together five years later.
Ever since that breakup with Tom, I have been fully polyamorous. Being poly means I can form relationships that are not contingent on fulfilling one specific role, or fitting in one specific box. I like the growth and pushing personal edges required by managing poly relationships. Polyamory is more consistent with my definition of love and belief that love is abundant.
Thanks to my desire to do poly well, I was learning all about consent, negotiation, and boundaries. I resolved that I was going to be able to keep myself safe, and choose better men. I was going to be extremely careful with kink, having recognized its power to make me overlook major red flags. This all turned out to be easier said than done.
Kiss Me in My Sleep
My second brush with sexual assault came in grad school. It was with a guy I'd been on a few dates with. At this time, I was mostly sticking to pretty vanilla sex, not trusting my ability to handle a kink dynamic after what I’d overlooked in my relationship with Tom.
This new guy was a postdoc at my school. He was on the dominant end of that spectrum but communicative and respectful of my boundaries. Our first few dates had taken place at his place. The first time I invited him to sleep over at my place, I woke up in the morning to him fingering me.
This was in 2021. Per Me Too rules, I was being assaulted. Sleeping people can't consent. I entered freeze mode.
After agonizing moments, I was able to ask him to stop. He stopped. I explained to him I was triggered, I was reminded of my first assault. I told him that even though we had slept together the night before, and I had told him he could wake me up in the morning, I hadn’t meant like that. And that he needed to be careful not to assume consent in situations like this. He apologized profusely and sincerely. But after that I couldn't be around him any more. I ended things.
I felt confused. I was proud of myself for speaking up in the moment, for being empowered enough to not play along. But I also wasn’t sure what to make of the incident, because he had given no other signs of not understanding how to navigate consent. This made me second guess myself. Was I being too sensitive or unreasonable?
I think he genuinely thought he was doing something I would be into. And I am into exactly what he was doing, in fact somnophilia is one of my biggest kinks. But not without prior consent and negotiation. I certainly don't think he was capital B Bad. But I do suspect that he had been sort of rewarded into recklessness, and then got unlucky in being paired with someone with past trauma.
I saw his photo come up a couple years later, while swiping through Feeld. He was paired with another girl, and they looked happy together.
Dreaming Oh So Deep
As I navigated these murky waters of consent and desire, I found myself grappling with complex and often conflicting emotions. As the Me Too movement gained momentum, I also found myself reassessing past experiences through this new lens. It didn’t necessarily make it easier to have my suspicions about my first sexual assault be confirmed in this way. But it did make me more prepared to speak up during round two.
The journey was far from over, but the lessons were starting to take root. In my relentless curiosity about sex and love, I had encountered evils which I could never force back into the box. While I was holding onto glimmers of hope for healthier future relationships, the climb looked arduous. Fortunately, I was armed with more self-knowledge, a growing ability to set boundaries, a clarity of purpose, and a fierce dedication to remaining open-hearted to life.
With dating apps, polyamory, and internet porn, the landscape had shifted so fundamentally since my parents navigated it that I needed to draw my own map and craft my own character. This era was when my alter ego, Pandora, was born. I needed an alias for Feeld, and Pandora’s story spoke to me. She was maligned in mythology for the “sin” of curiosity, just as I was pressured by society to rein in my curiosity and conform to the box of “normal” relationships and sexuality.
I didn’t have much support in my self-creation process outside of the men I was sleeping with and the books I read. While this was a good start, what truly propelled my growth was the Slut Cloud community I found in the next phase of my slut journey. Nothing in my wildest dreamlands had prepared me to stumble upon the promised land of CNC (consensual non-consent) and KTP (kitchen table poly).
The story will continue in Part 3: Persephone’s Power.