Content Warning: This article discusses sexual assault and rape, and mentions suicide. 

In all the rape crisis counseling, therapists, and call centers I’ve dealt with, I’ve never seen “how to date after rape” on the agenda. 

It’s one of those things that you never think about until it happens. Like how doctors and midwives don’t tell you that you might shit yourself during childbirth. 

One in three women is the victim of assault throughout their lifetime. And once you’ve been a victim of sexual assault, you’re more likely to be victimized again through something called revictimization. 

It’s a concern that lives in my head both consciously and unconsciously. It is the phenomenon that has broken the once steadfast trust I had in myself. A state that I now yearn for, even if it feels like part of a distant past. 

It is the reason for the uncertainty and confusion that can come from even the smallest touch, the slightest smell, or the slight glance at an octopus tattoo on a man’s neck that stopped me in my tracks outside my neighborhood Thai restaurant. 

Some days, you think you’re fine. Fixed even. That event that happened in my mid-teens is years away now! How could it still affect me? 

Until one day, something small devastates your world — like an unexpected touch sending you into a tailspin. Making you feel guilt, shame, and a simultaneous disgust for your body that makes you want to curl up into a ball, retreat into your dreams, and shrivel away. 

So how do you move on, how do you wake up one day and decide to date again when there’s a base level of distrust and violation baked into all of your bodily tissues? 

Some ‘victims’ choose to tamp it down, or lock it in a box in their subconscious — never to be thought of again. Some ostracize touch and romantic attention, and some break down and take their own lives. These ‘victims’ don’t always feel like survivors. Even if ‘survivor’ is the ‘proper’ term. Assault is not ‘proper,’ especially when the assaulted are stuck reliving the heavy emotions that make them feel victimized.

When’s the right time to start dating after something like rape? When’s the right time to talk to the person you’re seeing about your history? When’s the right time to think that you’re ‘normal enough’?

All of these questions permeate while you have to explain the actions of another, feeling grief and shame for something that is not your fault. These actions that the survivor shouldn’t have to explain, that the survivor did not have control over. The actions that should make the perpetrator feel guilt, and shame, and fear. The actions that the assailant should be forced to disclose and feel the same embarrassment that I do every time I speak about it. 

But that does not hold in this reality. Instead, the survivor sits there, hoping, crossing their fingers and toes, that their partner won’t see them as damaged goods or too much work for what they’re worth. 

When do you tell your loved ones? While secretly hoping that they won’t look at you with pity? Even going as far as to make this life-changing event seem like it wasn’t as bad as it really is, just to calm your mother’s nerves. 

When you’re assaulted, you’re thrust upon an obligation to explain and coddle everyone else’s emotions 

And there’s this look in their eye. Everyone gives it. 

It’s the same look I get when I tell people my father is an alcoholic. It’s a simultaneous perplexion and pity. A look that tells you everyone knows you’re as broken as you feel. 

Are they really loving me if they don’t see me as whole? Can they really love me if I’m not whole? 

Divulging a rape history is a combination of emotionless words while every single nerve fiber of your being feels like it’s expecting a lightning strike. Even if you look calm on the outside, the fate of your emotional stability rests in the hands of someone who doesn’t even know that they hold it. And you have to confide in your romantic partners — at least if you want to feel safe and want a relationship that feels real. 

But there are too many choices. Do I say assault or rape? How much or little do I describe? Where do I tell them and when? 

So what’s the right answer? I don’t think there is one. The only thing I know that comes from sexual assault is a fundamental change. A change that takes your being and throws it into the

crash of a monstrous wave. Some weeks you’ll think of it every day, every hour, and other times you won’t remember it for months. 

It changes how you receive and give love. 

Going through rape teaches you more than anything in any class or therapy appointment. It teaches you of the strength you have within, even if it is a strength you don’t want. 

Love after assault is questions without answers. It’s feeling alone in the arms of someone you’ve divulged to, even when they think they’re giving you all the love in the world. It’s having your emotions attack your body at the worst possible time and place imaginable. 

Love after assault is involuntarily changed.