My husband grew up in the Amazon rain forest.
Until he met me, he had never left the forest, let alone his country Brazil. His world is physical, raw, natural. He grew up with hard physical labor on the field and in the forest. Hunting and fishing was how he learned to provide for his family. Things were not thrown away and replaced by the next order on Amazon. They were repaired, mended, taken apart and reassembled. Conversations with other men were and still are centered around fish, boats, game and games, football and politics. Communication with women was and still is focused on You’re beautiful, Let’s …?, I love you, Where are my pants?
Sex is life. Sex is fun. Sex is natural.
I, on the other hand, grew up in a theoretical household. My world was mental (in every sense of the word), distant, abstract, analytical, rhetorical. By the time I was twenty, my mom and I had already psycho-analyzed myself to death. I had to cut my skin every now and then to feel that I was still alive. My father understood the world through books. Even when the most outrageous, crushing experiences shook the foundations of our little family, he resorted to his books and solemnly informed me that Russian literature confirmed this was all well and normal. Really, there was nothing to feel about.
Sex is art. Art as an expression of pain. Sex is a power battle.
Brazil Of All Places
My husband and I met after I had gone through a valley of darkness and come out the other end determined to stay away from the masculine as far as I possibly could. Moving to Brazil was probably the most idiotic decision I could have made with that idea in mind.
Then again, my decisions have rarely been made by my conscious mind. As much as I was raised and understood myself as a rational, fast mind (and ONLY that), at some point in my early life I must have signed a treaty with the devil that made me surrender to my intuition no matter how much screaming and kicking would have to go with it.
After three months of ‘being together’ — if you can say that for a couple that lives twelve hours apart by boat — we were lying in his hammock in complete darkness, when I heard his voice next to me: do you want to marry me?
Seriously. I could fill a book with reasons why this would be insane. I said yes and felt at peace. So much at peace, indeed, that he asked me after a while: “Hello? Are you still there?”
Talk It Out
I don’t remember at what point I decided to tell him about my great uncle’s abuse at the age of twelve. And to this day I don’t remember if I told him about having been raped when I was sixteen. What I do remember is that for many years I kept trying to ‘talk things out’, to make him understand my trauma while he kept trying to make me understand that sex was fun.
How many times did I ask myself why of all people in the world I — the survivor of sexual trauma, the woman who’d rather not have sex at all, the lover of theoretical passions, disciple of sarcasm and queen of scything rhetoric — chose to marry a man of the jungle. A man of the physical world, communicating with his body, free of irony, who has no access to the subtleties and unspoken rules of modern psychology. I didn’t get an answer; the only thing that always showed up was the treaty I signed so long ago of complete surrender.
This Is NOT…
At one particular moment last year I opened up to him again. As so often, his response made me sigh in my mind. This is NOT how you speak to a victim of trauma, I thought. And I imagined what it would be like to be with a man, who’s ‘fluent’ in that language. Who would know exactly how to deal with a survivor of sexual abuse, how to talk to her, what to say, how to be ever so careful not to cross any boundaries.
And the answer finally hit me.
Or Is It After All?
My husband never spoke considerately to me as a victim, because he never considered me a victim. He speaks to me, he holds me, he touches me, he desires me, he looks at me, he treats me like a man treats a woman he loves. That’s what he’s about. That’s how he allowed me to finally leave my twisted identity of survivor, victim, avenger, accuser, judge, and executioner, and return to my natural state as woman.
I realized that when he told me “Well, I’m not your uncle,” he wasn’t being inconsiderate. He wasn’t ‘not getting my point’. He wasn’t gaslighting me. He was right. He is not my uncle. He is not my rapist.
He is my man.
It took a long time. Fifteen years. Lots of work on my part. Lots of patience and an unshakable certainty on his part.
After almost fifteen years I no longer need to talk anything out. I no longer need him to understand my trauma. I no longer expect him to apologize for being a man. I no longer resent his sexuality. Because I no longer resent mine. There is nothing left to talk about. There is nothing left to understand. I apologize. Let’s have fun.
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Previously Published on Medium
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