I’m a very heavy sleeper. My boyfriend and I used to be homeless, and it was a regular thing for the police to wake us up when they found us sleeping. Everytime, the cops would always have a difficult time waking me up, to the point of thinking I was on heroin (I wasn’t) or that EMT was needed. I have always been this way. As a child my mom would wake me up with yelling my name and shouting at me, probably because that’s the only thing that would work. In my adult life back when I was going through my party stage, alcohol and this heavy sleeping thing led to me experiencing (to my knowledge) 2 different instances of sexual assault. One was from a guy I had been dating for a few weeks and the other was from a friend of my parents and his wife. I woke up in the middle of the first instance with that guy I was seeing, and the incident with the family-friends I only knew about because they later told me about it.
Due to this I can be a little oversensative when it comes to certain things. Previously in my relationship there was a big blow out because I suspected my bf was having sex with me while I slept. He used Apple’s health app and would fill in our sexual activity. One day while I was browsing through it I noticed that there were some days that had two entries for given days, at different times. I’m the type where after having an orgasm I fall asleep. The times of the entries seemed to correlate, for me, to the expected period that I’d be in my deep sleep after sex. I sort of brewed and obsessed over this for months. Instead of addressing it I chose to just quietly watch his phone. It drove me crazy. I finally lost my shit one day, screaming at him about how he was all sorts of things, and proceeded to havng a melt down. He eventually assured me he didn’t do what I thought he was doing. We chose to end the conversation with, “If you’re touching me I need to be awake. FULLY awake.” He knows about the sexual trauma and for a long time things continued as I had requested.
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I wil say that I am to blame for this because I should have said something the first time it started happening again. Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, to him touching me/groping/caressing me. I don’t wake up enoug to WAKE UP but I am stirred from my sleep enough to take note of whats happoening. This makes me feel frustrated when it happens during periods that we aren’t being intimate with one another. It makes me feel used, because he’ll feel me in my sleep but wont make the effort to wake me up and try to initiate anything with me. And when we are awake he doesn’t initiate often in a way that he knows will work. Making jokes (like reffering to me as if I’m a prostitute) making lewd comments to me, or changing the topic of conversation IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR conversation to sexual things/sex only piss me off and after 6 years you can correlate that those things dont work. So to me it feels like, you’ll make lazy attempts to get things “sexual” with out actually trying in away that involves effort, yet you’ll feel me up in my sleep then go jack off while watching porn instead of trying to wake me up.
Am I seeing this in a skewed way? I have a tendency to be dramatic and I have my insecurities due to porn, so maybe I’m not seeing this right?
1 comment
It sounds like you told him “If you’re touching me I need to be awake” and he has since touched you before you were awake. If I were you, I would break up with him and find a partner who respected my wishes and didn’t violate my consent.