“I’m Choosing Myself”

This happened five years ago.

I am writing about it now because I keep meeting versions of her. Different women, different marriages, different cities. But the same exhaustion in the eyes. The same careful way of describing what is happening to them, like they are still deciding whether it is bad enough to call it what it is. Too many women are suffering in silence inside marriages that are slowly taking everything from them. And I think silence, in this case, is doing enormous damage.

I will call her Amara.

Amara came to me on a Wednesday afternoon in November. She was thirty one years old and she had been married for four years. She was soft spoken and she chose her words carefully and she sat with her hands folded in her lap like someone who had learned to take up as little space as possible.

She told me she had not been feeling well for several months. Recurring infections. Fatigue that would not lift regardless of how much she slept. A body that felt like it was waving a flag she had not yet learned to read.

Her doctor had treated the symptoms. Nobody had asked about her life at home.

I asked.

What came out over the next hour was slow at first and then faster, the way things come out when someone has been holding them for a long time and suddenly finds a room where it feels safe to put them down.

Her husband had requirements.

That was the word she used at first. Requirements. Like a job description. Like something she had signed up for and was now obligated to deliver.

He expected sex every night regardless of how she felt. If she was unwell, it did not matter. If she was exhausted, it did not matter. If she had asked, quietly, for a night where she was simply allowed to sleep, that request was met with anger so cold and so sustained that she had eventually stopped making it.

He dictated how, when, and in what way. What she was permitted to decline and what she was not. There were things he insisted on that caused her physical pain. She had told him this. He had told her she was being dramatic.

She had started dreading going to bed in her own home.

She had started planning her evenings around managing his mood so that by the time they reached the bedroom he would be satisfied enough not to push for the things that hurt her most.

She described this to me in a flat, matter of fact voice. Like she was describing a commute she had gotten used to.

I asked her when she had stopped thinking of her body as her own.

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she said: “I did not know I had.”

What Amara was describing has a name. It is called marital rape and it is a crime in most countries, including the one she was living in. The law in many places has been slower than it should be to recognise this, and culture has been even slower. There is still an enormous number of people who believe that marriage is a contract of permanent consent. That a wife’s body belongs to her husband in a way that overrides her right to say no on any given night for any given reason.

This is not a grey area.

A person’s right to their own body does not end at the altar. It does not get signed away with a surname. It does not expire because someone put a ring on a finger.

Amara knew none of this when she came to me. She had been told, by the man she married and by the silence of everyone around her, that what was happening was just marriage. That good wives adapted. That her discomfort was a personal failing rather than a human right being violated daily.

We worked together for several months.

The physical symptoms improved as the situation at home was addressed. Her doctor, once given the full picture, understood immediately. The body had been telling the truth the whole time. It always does.

The harder work was the internal one. Amara had been so thoroughly taught that her needs were secondary that she had nearly lost access to them entirely. She had learned to override her own discomfort so automatically that she had stopped registering it as a signal worth listening to. She had to relearn, slowly and with patience, that her comfort in her own body was not a preference. It was a right.

She had to learn that choosing herself was not selfish.

She had been told it was selfish for so long that the lesson had gone deep.

What is happening to you is not normal.

The fact that it is happening inside a marriage does not make it normal. The fact that he does not hit you does not make it normal. The fact that you have adapted to it does not mean it is acceptable.

Your body is yours. Your comfort is yours. Your right to say no on any night for any reason does not require justification or explanation or the management of someone else’s anger.

You are not being dramatic.

You are not a bad wife.

You are a person whose boundaries are being violated by someone who has convinced you that you do not have the right to have them.

Amara eventually left.

It was not a quick decision and it was not a clean one. It took time and support and the slow, difficult process of rebuilding a sense of self that had been systematically worn down over four years.

The last time I saw her she seemed different. Larger somehow. More settled in her own skin. She talked about her life with a directness she had not had when she first walked into my office.

Choose yourself.