It Happened To Me: My Boyfriend Raped Me And Tried To Give Me Herpes (But That's Not Why We Broke Up)

When you've finished reading this you'll know why I didn't report him. It was the wrong sort of rape and no one would have believed me. I didn't ever tell anyone because I didn't want to be a 'victim' or, even worse, a 'survivor'. I hate that term, like half an hour of your life indelibly marks you forever.

 My first warning should have been that I met Martin on a blind date – the blind date wasn't with him, he was a stranger in the bar that came and sat with us and refused to leave until I handed over my number.



I'd just come out of a five-year relationship and been forced to move out of our flat and hundreds of miles away back to my hometown to live with my parents. My ex was very cold, critical and undemonstrative. He'd cheated on me throughout our relationship and delighted in belittling and 'knocking me down a peg or two'. Despite this, we'd parted amicably.
So when Martin began showering me with affection and attention, I didn't know what hit me. At first I refused to go on a date with him, he wasn't really my type and had a reputation for having a bit of a temper, so we struck up a deal: I needed a lift to the next town one day, so he said he'd drive me there on condition that he could ask me out again at the end of the journey.

When we got talking I was surprised at how smart and funny he was. And genuinely kind. Our first date was a weekend at a seaside town: he booked a huge hotel suite and told me he loved me.
We quickly fell in to a pretty intense relationship, made worse by the small town we were then living in. There were three places you could go on a night out so we lived in each other's pockets.
Despite this, about a month in he started accusing me of cheating on him. He'd ring my phone in the middle of the night and accuse me of having a man over, or show up at my parents' house to catch me out. I thought he was being sweet when he offered to pick me up from the local flea pit at the end of the night, but he was doing it to make sure I went home alone.

By this point I'd got a new job, so he would trail me there and sit outside in his car for hours to make sure I really was working. Of course, after a few weeks he lost his own job because he wasn't going in.


He befriended my siblings and would come over to see them on the days we were apart. I'd take him to work events and he would send me texts accusing me of fancying other men “WHY AM I EVEN HERE IF YOU'RE GOING TO FUCK HIM” while standing next to me and my heart would sink.
He would phone me 50 times in a row, and if I didn't answer, would report me missing to the police. He began to stalk my friends – male and female. He cloned the Facebook page of someone he'd found out I'd been on a date with years before and started impersonating them online. We were about five months in at this point.

He got and lost about three jobs during this time. Mainly for not showing up (stalking is a time-consuming business), but one he lost for punching his boss in the face at the office Christmas party. He'd been allowed to bring a date (me), and when I went to toilet, he'd assumed I was in there sleeping with someone else. His boss. So started a fight, then inexplicably stripped naked and lay in the snow outside...


To be continued