Everything was black, until it wasn’t. Coming to felt like swimming up from the depths of a murky pond. When I reached the surface, I found a reality scarier than the darkness. I was on my stomach on an air mattress on a dorm room floor. A man crushed me from above, thrusting into me roughly from behind. With a blurry glimpse over my shoulder, I registered the face of a close friend’s brother. My leaden brain, slowly grinding back to full consciousness, struggled to push away unwanted questions: How did I get here? Did I say yes to this?
I did my best to piece the fractured night together like shards of glass. The last thing I remembered was arriving at a beach-themed frat party with my roommate, who had primed me with several shots during our pre-game and convinced me to forgo a shirt for a bikini top. Evidently, other friends noticed that I was dangerously drunk, and one deposited me in the common room of her dorm suite to sleep it off, along with her brother, who was visiting that weekend.
I’ll never forget my roommate’s blasé response when I told her that I’d come to during intercourse with a relative stranger. “So, you had your first one night stand. Don't you feel cooler?" I felt numb, but I seized her words like a life raft that would float me to a less intolerable outcome.
Article continues belowI retained so few memories that it was surprisingly easy to let the whole incident recede from my mind.
In an attempt to shake off the surreal, creeping dread, I told myself things like, Those shots were a bad idea, but I needed to blow off steam. And I’ve only slept with two boyfriends before—maybe I really was due for a one night stand? And Besides, what 21-year-old college girl hasn’t had a night like this?
But I didn’t say any of that to my friends, family, or therapist, for fear someone would question my interpretation of what happened. I told close girlfriends the bare minimum, letting them assume the encounter was consensual. I retained so few memories that it was surprisingly easy to let the whole incident recede from my mind. I started dating someone new. I graduated. I got a job.
When my college friends planned to reunite and go dancing a few months after we’d moved off campus (most of us back in our parents’ suburban homes), I was excited. I didn’t think twice about the invitation to join one friend’s family for dinner beforehand, even though it meant seeing her brother—the one with whom I shared a disturbing history. My denial was so strong, so effective, that I could sit a few feet away from him like it was no big deal, laughing, chatting, eating lasagna.
After dinner, it became clear that the brother would be joining us at the bar and, strangely, I started to escalate my small talk to flirtation. It was like shifting into an autopilot mode I didn’t know existed. Without a clear thought or strategy, I drank enough to soften my focus and banish my inhibitions, but not so much that I lost control. I knew where I was and how to get to safety. I could pinpoint my friends on the dance floor—the better to dodge them as I moved closer and closer to my assailant. Eventually I suggested we go back to his apartment.
Oddly, being back in bed with him didn’t scare me. We rolled around and made out in the bottom half of a bunk bed. It was all very PG-13; the way I might have behaved with a high school crush. He didn’t push for more and I didn’t offer. I woke to find three friends rousing on his grungy couch and shooting me confused looks—they were friendly with my pretty serious boyfriend.
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I knew I should be ashamed and, frankly, worried that my boyfriend—who I’d been with for a year and would go on to date for another three—would find out. But I was neither. Instead, I felt like I’d scratched a hard-to-reach itch. Cheating wasn’t something I took lightly, but whatever deep-seated need I’d satisfied that night was more important than fidelity. An obscure yet palpable sense of relief drove away any hint of guilt before it could take hold.
Counterintuitive as it may seem, my impulse to initiate a second encounter with my attacker more than a year after the original incident makes sense to experts on sexual assault. “Attempting to master a situation in which you previously did not have control is one way a lot of assault victims respond,” says Jim Hopper, Ph.D., teaching associate in psychology at Harvard Medical School and a nationally recognized expert on sexual assault and trauma.
Whatever deep-seated need I’d satisfied that night was more important than fidelity.
Looking back, I see the logic: Why wouldn’t I want to reclaim the narrative by rewriting my story with a different ending—one in which I reversed the dynamic with someone who’d previously robbed me of all power? “The motivation is usually trying to gain some sense of authority, either over a sex scenario or even how the perpetrator sees you—i.e. not as someone they can do whatever they want to,” explains Hopper. “It can also be a way to manage your perception of yourself, by painting a different picture of what happened. Because who wants to think of themselves as a rape victim?”
It took me until age 29—eight years after the assault—to even consider that the term “rape victim” might apply to me. When I told my fiancé and therapist the story about a year ago, they were both quick to call it rape. For so long, I evaded the truth so that I could avoid becoming a statistic: 70 percent of rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. Up to 25 percent of women will experience rape during college. More than half of those co-eds won’t tell anyone about it.
“One reason people push away or block out these experiences is because of the implications for their identity, which are bigger than the pain of remembering or recognizing what happened,” Hopper tells me. It was easier for me to cling to the idea of being a cool, sexually evolved college student than it was to face the excruciating truth—that there was no way I consented in my blacked-out state.
By seducing my rapist, I extended the shelf life of my denial. Whenever my mind flashed back to that terrifying night in the dorm, the bitter recollection was diffused by a newer, more palatable memory. My brain used a vivid evening of dancing and flirting to overwrite one of the darkest experiences in my life, and to replace one damaging label—“rape victim”—with another, less distressing one: “cheater.” Of two grim options, the latter was more acceptable—for a while, at least.
Ten years after my rape, I can finally call it by its name. I’m grateful to people like Hopper, who are dedicated to helping people understand that recovering from sexual assault is a long, thorny process. Rarely does the narrative unfold linearly, with police reports, justice, and a clear path to healing. I now understand that there were complex survival instincts at play when I chose to climb back into bed with my rapist. It’s time we stopped being surprised that the primitive, unnatural act of rape can trigger equally primitive, unnatural responses in its victims.