I just need to get this out ! TW for those sensitive to sexual harassment

Hi,

I am struggling with how exactly to articulate this. I already have a past with sexual violence, as I’m sure many of you have too, so maybe this is why it has affected me so deeply?

As some background, I am 19 years old and I live with my boyfriend of over 1.5 years.

However, there was a situation that occurred while we have been dating and I have not been able to bring myself to tell him. My boyfriend is my best friend and I tell him everything, I don’t know why I didn’t tell him right away but it feels weird to bring up now. I haven’t told anybody about this situation, and it is eating at me, so I just need somebody to hear it.

I had a friend, we will call him J. So, I had known J for a while, if I had to guess we met at some point in 2017. Back when we first met, J had expressed some attraction to me over snapchat but it didn’t go anywhere.

After I started dating my boyfriend, we talked less and less, to the point where he would pop up only every couple of months to check in on me.

I do suffer from multiple health conditions, and he would ask me how I was doing with them, for example if i was in remission or if it had made a relapse etc., hence the “check up”. I didn’t see anything wrong with this and was touched by how he had still cared about my well-being even if we were not actively friends.

A large part of my health is weight fluctuations, and you can tell I am not doing well by my appearance/size, and when he would ask me how I was doing I would usually send him a picture (clothed!!! obviously!!) to show him; hey, i’m doing well, i look a lot more healthy these days etc..

One of these days J asked for a picture where he could see my frame more because he “couldn’t tell if i was telling the truth” because of the clothes I was wearing. It seemed odd but he kept reassuring me that it was just because he was worried for me, that i looked small in those clothes and not as healthy as I claimed to be. I felt very pressured but i pushed it aside, and I sent him a picture of me at the gym! Harmless, right?

But he pushed to see more, I told him I wasn’t comfortable, I have a boyfriend who I love and I don’t think he would like that either, that i wasn’t like that.

He swore it was just because he cared about me, and asked repeatedly even though I shot him down, repeatedly.

I told him, I don’t cheat. Simple as that, I respect my relationship, I want to marry this boy, I’m not cheating on him by sending you a picture.

He had told me that I had ALREADY cheated on my boyfriend, and i owed it to him to send more because he had been waiting for so long.

I had felt so hurt in this moment, because J had been someone that I trusted, and I hadn’t sent him anything inappropriate by my standards? These were photos that I would post! I wasnt naked, I wasn’t positioned in a sexual manner, they were just photos of me standing in the mirror.

I felt like he had violated me, that he had taken something so innocent and turned it sexual. He said I turned him on and he needed more, that he was tired of waiting... that I lead him on. He told me it was my own fault, that I should have just let him f*ck me when I was single.

It got to the point where I had just blocked him, not worth my time.

But it kept eating at me and eating at me, did I do something wrong? Was I too friendly with him? Did he think I was interested? Was it my own fault? Were the pictures inappropriate and I just didn’t see it? Did I bring this onto myself?

I have cried and cried over this.

Looking back on this now, I can see he was just manipulating me, trying to put me in a position where I felt like i had to provide him something, that I had already betrayed my boyfriend, that there was nothing left for me to lose.

Just being able to vent this situation has taken such a heavy weight off of myself.

I’m am very grateful to anybody that has taken the time out of their day to read this. This is something I have beaten myself up over for a long time, with the belief that I ruined a friendship, that i deserved to be treated poorly, that maybe i hurt the one that matters most to me... but now I can see that J was just a manipulator that wanted something from me and would do anything to get it.

If anybody else is going through a situation that they feel pressured in, you are allowed to say no and it is not your fault that you are being treated this way.