I always expected that if I was manipulated or exploited sexually, it would mean the sex was painful or horrible, and that it was my worst idea of a man doing it to me. I imagined that if a relationship was toxic, I would be itching to get out of it, looking for an escape route around every corner.
But I was wrong.
The different kinds of love that I’ve experienced have had the power to transgress the boundaries I had set in place for myself. The most powerful love of all was so full of toxicity that I often rationalized it with the seemingly attractive parts of the relationship. Looking back, I know exactly how those relationships can evolve and unfold. How a relationship can be dominated by control, but can be caught up in intense chemistry and be ultimately destructive.
A few years ago, I began a relationship with a beautiful, outgoing and completely different person from anybody I’d ever dated before, an older guy. I had recently come out of my first serious relationship and was looking for somebody to show me what dating and the world is really like. He had a love of adventure and exotic food; and he also had great thighs. I was looking for somebody to show me how fun the world could really be.
We were together for just a few months, but they were the hottest, fastest and most fiery months in my entire dating history. The sex is, still to this very day, the most wild and passionate that I’ve ever experienced. Having only dated one other man, this new relationship was instrumental in introducing me to different kinds of sex, the fast, the slow, the kind that is so good you knock things off the wall and the tantric sort that lasts hours. I found myself waking him up at 3am, creating soundtracks to complement our established rhythm and losing all my inhibitions. I was absolutely smitten with him.
90% of the time, we were a great match. He made me laugh and brought out a side in me that I’d never seen before. But the ugly side was quite different.
Small manipulative tendencies cropped up early on, from the demand of not using condoms and managing to assure me it was fine not to do so. To him telling me I couldn’t go on dates with anybody else, and being clamorous that I must tell the world about him while I was kept hidden. At the time I only saw his behavior as romantic, I thought it meant he adored me.
I felt nothing but good about him. My eyes were permanently fixed like that love heart emoji whenever he was concerned. I was incapable of refusing any of his demands.
The earth-shattering, bed rattling sex was a constant in our relationship. I had only been in one relationship before him, and both that guy and I were virgins at the time. When it came to this relationship, he also had years of experience on me and incomparable levels of energy, passion and spontaneity.
From the back seat of a car in broad daylight to being thrown over the bannister in my parents’ house as they lingered downstairs, the sex was consistently adventurous and habitually euphoric. For the first time ever, my legs reached places I didn’t know possible and my lust intensified to a point I knew could never be good for me. I’d had no prior interest in hair pulling so hard it left my scalp red, or my ankles being gripped so forcibly they were left with finger-tip shaped bruises. He would push my muffled mouth into the pillow whilst he thrust against me from the side, even calling me his ‘ragdoll’ once. He would hold his breath to intensify his orgasms and wake me up to foreplay. When my hands weren’t physically tied by him, they were metaphorically tied to his bed; I found myself unable to leave, even making myself late for classes or appointments.
Constantly arguing about his lack of commitment and my need to feel wanted, we entered into an incorrigible circle of toxicity. I questioned my worth, and became paranoid for the first time in my life. His subtle nods to controlling behavior were always disguised under his need to be independent — that he wouldn’t let anybody control him, that he was a busy man. He kept me in a constant mind battle, always questioning what I was doing wrong and never knowing when he would pull one of his disappearing acts.
He promised me things, simple things like a romantic dinner or a phone call, but he almost never followed through. Not only did this make it hard for me to make plans with my own time, but I constantly felt insecure. His behavior was unpredictable — one minute he was lying next to me in bed, stroking my face and telling me how much he liked me, and the next he would vanish off the face of the earth. His responses to my anger and accusations were often just enough to justify his behavior, but kept me guessing. It was as though I always needed to earn his affection.
All of this began to slowly eat away at my mental health, riddled with anxiety. I needed to check my phone all the time, conducting daily routines of checking when he was online or rereading my last message to check for ‘mistakes’ that I might have made. Months of this back and forth bouncing between fear and the most natural and mind-blowing sex finally culminated in one very painful week that I remember through tears and a hazy mind that has tried to bubble wrap my feelings. A few days after meeting my family for the first time, he cut off all communication with me without warning. I spent nine restless nights awake in bed racking my brain for what I had done wrong, dreaming that I would wake up to a missed call. I felt real emotional torment and heartbreak for the first time in my life.
And then suddenly, as though a holy figure reemerging from beyond the grave, he was back as though nothing had happened. And I let him swan right back into my life. I agreed to visit him, and after arriving at his apartment, we both sat at either ends of the room with our heads in books, barely even acknowledging each other. All while I was wishing he would come and rest his hand on my leg or spoon feed me ice cream like he did on our first date. Instead, he walked towards me, flipped me over and pushed my face into the pillow. After a few minutes of rough yet distant sex, he returned to his desk without uttering one word to me.
In that moment, I knew that the raw, palpable sexual chemistry between us was our own mutual brand of heroine. The addictive nature involved in our wild sex life had the highest of highs, the painful come downs, and the even worse withdrawals. Both emotional and physical, the effects of even beginning to distance myself from him left me nauseous, irritable, panicked.
Then in one passion-fueled evening, he hit me across the face in bed. In the middle of a fiery round of sex. I felt nothing but the lingering tingle of heat upon my cheek. Days following that, he spat into my mouth while above me, something we’d never discussed and I was instantly shocked by. Weeks later while looking into my eyes, he choked me. As he tightened his grip around my neck, I tried to tap out, but he squeezed the breath out of me and everything went black.
Again, I awoke and felt nothing.
In fact, talking about these “incidents” became a bit of a funny story of mine to tell. When friends described their hilarious mishaps in the bedroom, I offered up my own emotional trauma. Nobody laughed but me.
After a few busy months for both of us in our last year of university, we decided it was no longer working. Now looking back, I question why availability was enough for us to call it a day but our clear bitterness towards each other was not. It quickly became apparent that had things not ended, his hold over me would’ve destroyed me, or my emotional torment would’ve allowed me to destroy myself.
In the years following, I had huge problems with understanding that there can be boundaries in a relationship when you really want to be with somebody. Our intense physical attraction blurred the lines between what is acceptable and healthy and what’s toxic, and even abusive.
Our relationship thrived on the chaotic friction and fighting that resulted in even more explosive sex. I accepted his less than desirable behavior in pursuit of moments of utterly fanatical pleasure, all built on foundations full of cracks.
I didn’t even recognize that what happened to me physically was unacceptable until friends nudged at me to reconsider what I’d been put through. To this day I don’t quite know how to balance the feelings of attraction and resentment I have towards him. It is a strange thing to try and grapple with the discovery of what has previously happened to you, when at the time you felt elated and full of pleasure. I would never label myself a victim, as what happened never affected me in the way that perhaps it should have.
If a partner is exactly who you want them to be at times, and then withdraws on other occasions, we will continue to lust after them, whether emotionally for attention or physically. Our happy brain drug dopamine thrives on the hope of being rewarded. The thirst in a toxic relationship is quenched by bursts of those happy moments, but never quite satisfied. The uncertainty of what is going to happen causes an adrenaline release. We are then stimulated by this burst of adrenaline.
Over time it became more apparent that preventing this behavior from happening in the future all boils down to awareness of tendencies and slow learning. In order for toxic relationships to be prevented, or at least less compulsive, we must remember that we are drawn to what we know, and that is why toxic behavior continues to repeatedly draw us in.
Even now, I still struggle to manage my feelings about this relationship. I occasionally find myself reaching for my phone in moments of craze and have even entertained reconnections. I have thought of him while in other relationships, comparing faultless boyfriends to him, and have deliberated what would happen if there was a second chance. I feel conflicted between how I truly feel for him, versus what I know I should be feeling towards him. I should be fixated on the pain and emotional torture he put me through, not just while together, but in the aftermath that lingered for a long time. Instead, I am yet to be released from his clutches that keep me from fully moving on. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that the most toxic, self-destructive sexual relationship that I ever had was not just the most ruinous, but also the best.
