I used to only sleep beside people who didn’t love me

disclaimer: this piece contains reflections on intimacy, emotional discomfort, and ambiguous experiences around consent and sexual agency. some passages may feel emotionally heavy or triggering to readers who have experienced boundary violations or related trauma.

while based on real emotions and fragments of lived experience, this is not about one person or relationship. it’s a composite of moments, feelings, and dynamics that accumulated over time. this writing is not intended to equate or minimize more explicit or severe forms of abuse — but to explore that quieter, harder-to-name space of sadness, imbalance, and longing that many women live through, and often carry in silence.

please read with care, and know that your own story — however similar or different — is valid. love you.

at the beginning of this year — january 8^th, shortly after my anniversary, I sat in a café with one my longest-term friends, someone who has been with me for almost twenty years now (which seems an impossible and ridiculous number when you feel, so many times, you haven’t reached twenty yourself, but oh well). we met at the beginning of basic school (fifth grade) through another friend, were in the same class for years, and best friends since I can remember. sometimes I tell her she’s the closest I can ever be to home – whether we talk about the beautiful or rotten dimensions of a home – because she saw it all. as long as she’s here, the memory of my early teenage years, of our difficult adolescences that we sailed together though, of first loves and heartbreaks, of families breaking apart, of her moving to another country and me falling into my first depression, and everything that came in between and afterwards, will never be forgotten. she knows a raw, tender, open flesh part of me that maybe no one knows because no one else has seen me like that. twenty years is a life. she saw them all, close, at a distance, but she did.

this year, for the first time in a long time, I was lucky enough to have her in the country around my birthday – and we met for lunch and the longest coffee ever, as we always do, and had a very important conversation, where I could finally verbalise what I had been thinking about, knowing she would understand what I meant. I don’t know what started the topic. but as soon as I noticed we were talking about the past, and this heavy, black fur ball that I feel on my chest sometimes burst, and I said, ‘I want to be loved and love in an innocent way, by a friend, like when we were in school’. she nodded, ‘I see what you mean – like your story with Patrick’.

Patrick isn’t his real name but will do for now. we were about 14 years old, and he was my first love. not crush, not a ‘he’s a cute guy’ whisper when I saw him passing the wall. but this solid, friendly, kind affection. one day I’ll write about this, maybe, but the most important thing to retain is that I believed, for decades, and did tell that to my friend on that January — that that story represented one of the most pure, innocent ways of liking someone. the story itself was dramatic, tv-show intense, known by half of the school, tragic in the end, but will always remain a bit sacred. we were too young, of course — that plays a big role. our relationship was shy and nervous, and we liked each other (that I believe), holding some distance from each other; there was a crystal wall between us that we haven’t learnt yet how to cross, or, maybe — even though this is only clearer with age — were too afraid to. it’s easy to misunderstand this, as teenagers are so full of hormones bursting and their hands seem to have a life of their own. but for us, it wasn’t like that, and I think that this was crucial for how secure it felt.

we were comfortable in our little intimacy gestures – holding hands, strolling together in the city park, hugging, combing each other’s hair with our fingers, writing long messages saying everything we felt, telling ‘I love you’ so easily that it was like those words were just a fluffy cloud we could throw at each other. of course we didn’t know what love was, but in some ways, we knew the feeling of safety, respect, and care that should be present in all relationships. that somehow, for me, became scarcer to find as I grew up, leaving that feeling as a tender bruise of the past, something that belonged to a time and place where I haven’t been hurt by intimacy yet. where I didn’t know I could be hurt by intimacy, something that was supposed to be beautiful. years passed, me and Patrick never talked again, I never saw him after we finished school, our relationship was never more than that. we grew up.

I became a woman constantly looking over my shoulder, trying to lock eyes with the teenager girl I once was, trying to bring her here, trying to save her, trying to get her to save me. I spent all my adult life so far looking into those hopeful eyes and asking her, ‘where did I go? where did everything inside me disappear to?’, confused as if someone had cut a clean wound and taken everything from my entrails while I was still sleeping and I only noticed the void much later. I have talked plenty about that girl (wrote a letter to her here) that seems to me a constant flickering figure dancing on the roof, sad eyes, waltzing and waltzing around with a long white dress, a figure that I can never reach, someone that can never reach me; a phantom that marches to a song and a dance that will be perhaps endlessly repeated until my last day, a dying march with some 15-year-old girl tired and breaking and almost on her knees, but still shining like there’s something to hope for.

as I revisited this topic with my friend, I looked at the old me and almost immediately turned my face away, my eyes to where she can’t see them, and tried to sew my mouth right then and there with some needle and a sewing thread I carry in my pocket. I’m afraid of what she’ll ask me. she already asked me plenty; ‘why did you leave me’ being one of the hardest ones. but there’s so much more to ask – there’s a whole life to ask, indeed, she has fifteen years to catch up, to grab, dissect, in an attempt to understand how they brought me so far away from her. or to try, at least. maybe she’ll be more successful than the adult version of me, who still can’t answer any of it. but well. she’ll want to ask me many things; she doesn’t have an older sister, only has male cousins, her mother would never talk to her about that, or about almost anything, for what matters. she is shy about many subjects, and it’s not like she will be dying to know these things, she won’t even pay that much attention to them for a long time, and then eventually she’ll read about them somewhere, until, much later, she has friends to talk about it.

but it’s normal, she’s growing up, and she’ll eventually want to ask me, ‘how is it? to be with a boy?’. maybe she’ll go even further, nervously ask, ‘is it as good as they say? as important?’. and there’s where she’ll catch me, and I will let her down again. I want to be better and have beautiful and encouraging things to say, but suddenly, I am crying and inside I am screaming, ‘I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know’, and will feel that again, that desire to crawl out of my skin, that embarrassment of myself, that wave of sadness. I turn away so she doesn’t ask me; maybe she can wait a bit longer. but she does ask, anyway, and the questions fall on me like dying stars. I’m still crying, ‘I don’t know’, but I have to tell her. she needs it.

I will tell her, maybe, that the way men will treat it – sex — as the most important thing, the primordial act, will lead her to do things that she really doesn’t want to. I don’t want to bluntly say to her ‘it’s bad’ because it can be good, of course. it will be good on some occasions. but there will be some experiences that will feel like they are scraping her skin off. I want to explain to her that at some point, intimacy will feel a kind of abuse without being it completely – and I should warn her that for the first years after she has sex for the first time, there will be no words for this; damn, there won’t even be words for consent then. later, they will start talking about ‘no is no’ and other limits, and much later they’ll discover that those explanations don’t cover all the experiences women and other people are having, don’t wrap them where they need it, don’t offer them warmth and comfort for what they are feeling. and then, only then, some will talk about ‘grey areas in sex’, about the sadness and incompleteness that sometimes comes with the intimacy, about how consent is the first and essential step, but it is not a feeling, not happiness. and yes, we will say yes, and everything will be according to the rules, but inside of us there’s no yes, there’s nothing - just a black hole.

“There’s a name for this in academic circles: sexual compliance – the act of saying yes to sex you don’t desire, out of expectation or the feeling of obligation, but where there is not coercion involved.1 But in life, it doesn’t feel so clinical. It feels like the night you didn’t want to but did. Like something slipped - not a boundary, but something more abstract. Your sense of self.”2

I will try to explain, but it’s hard because I’m just now starting to understand too. maybe I can say that it's a kind of abuse that comes from the sense that she’ll always owe men something, that she should go along with whatever they want, even when her body says no, that she shouldn’t go on a date if she doesn’t want to sleep with them afterwards, that she can say no, but, deep down, she can’t reaaaaaally say it, or if she says she’ll need a good excuse, or she’ll have to apologise; otherwise he will be mad at her and probably won’t want to see her again.

But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon. It wasn’t that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.

Kristen Roupenian, Cat Person (The New Yorker)

I can reinforce to her — that is not liberty, that is not your will. go home. and in my mouth, I feel it, yes, I’m sorry, baby girl, it really does feel a bit like abuse, like exploitation, and all of it comes from a sense of inequality, of power imbalance, of never feeling whole. she will try and fail to feel whole in those situations. I’ll tell her, ‘there’s something you leave behind, at the door, at your feet, inside the cardigan your aunt made you and is now trashed on the floor’. there’s something that has to be silenced, there’s something that needs to be transformed, in order for it to be what it is supposed to be. I need to tell her that many of these experiences will leave her feel broken, empty, and sad. unfortunately, as a result, she’ll spend years thinking she has a problem. that she needs fixing. she will try to get it fixed. and then she’ll have more experiences, ones that start bad, others that start good but turn out so depleting that she will feel more alone in the world than ever. she’ll feel that she had to rip herself open, be as naked as a woman can be, and first it was good, and then it will be destructive. because most men won’t know how difficult, precious, vulnerable it was for her. and still, late at night, she will whisper and sell her soul and declare, ‘alright, I’ll do everything’.

when I spoke with my friend that day, I said to her ‘I cannot go there again’ and started crying. back then, what I felt was this enormous certainty that I could never be intimate with a man again – I could not think about it without feeling someone was punching me – because it cost me so, so much; I gave all I had, and it was not taken care of. I explained to her that I wanted to feel secure and warm and in my comfort zone. yes, I want to go to bed with someone who makes me feel comfortable – since when did that start being boring or a problem? over the years, they try to convince you it is – ‘you take things too seriously’, ‘it’s just fucking’. well, everything is serious. it can be a one-night stand, it could be a casual situationship, it could be whatever – it is serious. doesn’t have to mean more than that, yes. doesn’t need to be love, yes. but it is serious. it is still a delivery of body and soul, and for me, that shouldn’t be taken lightly. it's for me, the most vulnerable place you can be in. and if I have feelings for the person (which I always do, in some way because I cannot do it otherwise), when it is all a bit sacred, as it is an experience more spiritual than anything. it’s a true commitment and to strip everything behind and just truly give yourself with no restrictions, and it requires a blanket of emotional safety that allows the surrender of everything (yes, of the body too, all is connected). you cannot become one with a person who doesn’t see this value in it. so, you’ll be alone – and that’s how I felt. I felt I always left part of me in those sheets. by then I had spent more than a decade feeling outside my comfort zone just to be cool and hated it.

the 15-year Carol looks at me a bit frightened; I know that my tone doesn’t help. but I was really angry, for a long time. and sad. with me, with my previous experiences, with the men I had been with. I say to her, ‘I’m not trying to blame anyone, that’s not the point’. but I’m doing it because I feel I must collect my losses and honour them. I ignored all of this for too long – it’s not that important, I would try to convince myself, while disappearing. those losses were bits of me, too. I must name the feelings. the feelings of not being enough. having the feeling that they were with me because it was easier (one man actually called me ‘easy’ one day, many years ago); staying with me for years but claiming there are no feelings to support a relationship; hearing ‘yep, you’re not indifferent to me’ (!!!!), as the only ever expression of feelings coming out of his mouth. what the hell. indifferent is not even the bare minimum; it’s nothing. I don’t think I feel indifference to anyone – not colleagues, not past friends, not even half-strangers; imagine feeling just a bit over that for someone you saw for two years. I just want to tell my old girl that it is not okay. the way they’ll never express anything they liked about her. not her hair. not her intelligence, or kindness, accomplishes or humour. did they know you had those? she is shivering a bit. she will feel ashamed and sacred and say, ‘is that what people call just sex?’. I’ll shrug and tell her I don’t know, I never understood what was ‘just sex’. it was never just that.

at the table with my friend, I lose a bit of my temper, ‘ok, well, they wanted to fuck me, only that, you can argue. okay. but since you’re doing it, can you say something about my body, my mouth, whatever, or am I just this amount of flesh you’re hurting?’. ‘I tried’, I continue, ‘said I liked them, tried to be honest and open, tried to apply the therapy techniques, and got ghosted. or got emojis back. could you call me pretty, at least?’

oh, sorry, boys, that was too much. pretty. what about hot? no, not even that – and it’s so humiliating to be here complaining that they didn’t even say that, like that was my dream to hear. one guy once told me that “for someone who doesn’t exercise, you don’t look too bad”. other was bolder, said, “you’re not what I expected, sex is not what I expected with you”. that same one told me to “hurry” once because he had “other places to go and things to do”. I don’t mean to imply that some of them didn’t like me in some way. but somehow, saying something nice to me was always too much. not worthy it. that infuriates me – school sweethearts say it all the time to each other, young couples say, ‘I love you’, kids have their girlfriends and boyfriends known by everyone. and yes, we can claim it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just childish, whatever, we are so over it. but we’re not. we’re not over it because their emotional maturity never allowed them to even reach it. say something, Jesus. why don’t you notice anything about me – what I say, what I think, how my hair is today, if I’m sad? why don’t you care about my clothes unless you can rip them and see me naked? because no one taught me otherwise, I thought sex could save me, could make them love me, could change the future, could make me happy. so, I gave everything. and did everything they wanted, when I didn’t. I tried everything they asked me. it hurt bad sometimes. they didn’t ask. I didn’t say. and I don’t mean to be a hypocrite – I loved it on some occasions; I really cared about some men. and I thought I was giving them the most precious thing I had, and so they would more easily love me back, but it never happened. and then I spent hours crying because the idea of showing my body to anyone, of seeing another person’s body, of touching anyone, was unbearable. I told my friends – ‘I think I won’t be able to do it; it makes me sick.’

I felt being abused with nothing happening. I felt ugly and unattractive and as I write this post I am still recovering from that. I went from feeling a powerful woman to feeling like a child, so little and ripped of all innocence. once, one told me that to save time, we could skip the conversation and go right to the business. one left me alone when my period came unexpectedly. couldn’t even look at me. left me in the middle of the night, alone in my bed. and other times, when trying to make plans, they wouldn’t do it if I was on my period because, why would they? to spend time with me and not inside of me? if they couldn’t have sex, then it was not worth seeing me. they couldn’t stay the night because of all the reasons of the world, but the only reason was that they didn’t want to. sometimes I talked to some of them saying I would like to spend more time together, that I wanted more. “I can come over and compensate for that”. that was the answer of one of them. come over to fuck me and compensate the fact that I felt I needed other things. “dumb girl, maybe like this she’ll forget it”. and the worst part is that, so many times, I took all this stupid, horrible things as care, love, dedication. because I had nothing else, and they made me feel I shouldn’t have anything else. I followed their lives as a spectator, never too close, supported them anyway, was their first and best fan in whatever the project was, would have done so much.

there were moments that haunted me especially. one day, I thought I was pregnant. I went to a pharmacy, shaking like a teenager, asked for the best pregnancy test. then I went home, and with my best friends on the other side of the phone, I did the test and waited those eternal five minutes, but I was so sad and crying so much that even when it came negative, I didn’t grab the phone to tell her right away, and she had to furiously (with every right) text me multiple times until I woke up from the shock. and for a horrid moment in my life, I thought, ‘well, at least it would have his genes’. thank god I wasn’t pregnant because I am afraid of what I would do, out of the fear I had of giving up something that was ‘his’. because back then I thought that was so important. I was twenty-six then. or twenty-seven. doesn’t matter. the point is that I didn’t want to have a baby for sure, that the person didn’t want to have a relationship with me, was leaving me alone constantly, and yet, stupid as I am, could only think of him during the whole process. for what?? I was crying alone in a bathroom thinking I might be pregnant while him was just ghosting me, before coming back and pretending all was normal. I destroyed my body so many times for these men to make fun of me, not take me seriously, to say that I was lame or corny when I tried something affectionate, or too emotional, to tell me that I had some cellulite and maybe had to go back to the gym and that I looked bad in glasses, and didn’t know a thing about music, or literature, or anything they knew so much more than me. I should also say that I started drinking, a bit out of control because of all of this. to feel more interesting, sexy, unattached, bold, free, adventurous, not caring. I started doing because I felt that slipping into unconsciousness was better than to show my true self. and then I found myself looking for the escape of alcohol at odd times — whenever I was sad, depressed, angry, tired. until it became a bit of a problem. one tuesday afternoon, I drank a whole bottle of wine so I could tell one of them I wanted to see them more often. it became a joke and led nowhere.

because of all this, I would recoil with the thought of being intimate with other men again. for two years, I let no one come closer. in any way. nothing happened, not even conversations. I said multiple, multiple times to my friends, ‘I just… I just can’t’. I couldn’t breathe, picturing anyone close to me. I tried to imagine it sometimes, and it was like someone was kicking me in the stomach, making me throw up. I could almost feel it in my mouth. I became sick every time I thought of a body, an interaction, a relationship. I didn’t know how to explain that I felt “taken advantage from” so, so many times because people asked me for proof and I had nothing to lay on the table. but it surely felt like that. and for that reason, I didn’t know how to feel safe in intimacy, how to give myself without feeling exposed, abused, pushed. so, I wanted to come back to the teenage love, the pureness of it all, because back then none of this, that should be so special, had been corrupted, dirty, tarnished, desecrated.

one day at the dinner table with some friends, I said ‘I never slept with someone who loved me’, and I still think it is one of the saddest things I’ve felt.

and that’s how I told my friend, “I think we must go back to loving how we did in the past”. when we were kids, teenagers, doesn't matter. like before. loving like remembering the past. like coming back to it, in a way because suddenly, it seems that we could be growing there, side by side, dusty hands, feet on the ground, dogs by our side, the glorious blue sky above us. the feeling that everything is still to come, and it’s good, good, good. I knew that was the goal — to recover the past, even in love — but I didn't know I could do it. so, I just closed my eyes and held my own hands and waited for the love that felt like the first to come along and some time passed, weeks, months, a lifetime even, and someone said, we can be kids together for the rest of our lives, and I looked and wasn’t holding my own hand any more.