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Exactly. I fully agree with that statement.
So my high school boyfriend was two years younger than me. So I was actually, I was a senior when he was a sophomore. So I had just turned 18 and my boyfriend at the time was 16 and neither of us could drive. My mother's request, he used to chaperone my dates in high school with my then boyfriend, which is so weird that I married somebody who chaperoned my dates. Your ex-husband,
chaperoned your dates. Yes. My mother's request, which is its own thing, I guess. I mean, it's very I kiss dating goodbye. Yeah. But I know it's common. And I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with doing group dates with people when you're first getting to know someone at all. It's just like, what the fuck is happening? Yes, it was...
I was awkward in the moment as well. Like he'd drive, we'd sit in the back seat. And then he was like a very hands-off chaperone. We, he, we would go to the fountains in Roseville and walk around the shops and he would kind of hang back and just
pretend that he couldn't see us and just let us do whatever. What the fuck is happening right now? What the fuck is happening right now? I know in the context of what you're speaking of that this is extremely normalized, but seriously?
As an adult now who's read books, what the fuck is happening? Yeah, it gets weirder as well. If you even just take out all of the abuse parts of it, it's still weird because I later learned that my
husband was giving my then boyfriend dating tips and telling me you gotta open her door and bring her flowers and he was giving him money to take me on dates so my uh husband actually financed my first relationship as well so weird oh my god yeah yeah there's there's more to you know as a relationship goes you get more comfortable exploring each other's bodies and that's normal um
but very stigmatized within evangelical culture. But I felt deeply ashamed of myself for desiring my boyfriend, for wanting to touch him, for wanting him to touch me. And then the first time that I allowed him to touch my breasts, I felt such shame that I immediately confessed to my mother. And her, not knowing any better, thinking that
The youth pastor was a safe person. She sent me to him. She sent me and my boyfriend to him for accountability so that something like that wouldn't happen again. And I had to sit in my future husband's office and explain how my then boyfriend had defiled me, which is weird.
Can you just kind of help me understand how it went from your relationship of like him being your chaperone to him being your boy? Like what did you feel like there was a friend time between those points?
Oh, absolutely. He... Well, when my boyfriend and I were going through a little bit of a rougher time, it was... I mean, the relationship had run its course. I was going off to college, he was going into his senior year of high school, and we were just feeling disconnected, which is normal when relationships run their course, but...
I started to get really a lot closer to my ex-husband in that time because he moved into my house. He was in need of a place to stay, and so my mom gave him our spare bedroom. And I started hanging out with him more because we lived in the house together. He was driving me to and from the church to do work there, all kinds of other stuff. And I started confiding in him when I felt that my
You know, I had relationship problems and it was all very friendly, really like a lot of advice. Like, yeah, you're right. He's he's not treating you well. You should leave him. And it did stay friendly, at least in my perspective. From my perspective, it stayed friendly for another little while after that.
I started to think that it could possibly be romantic during the year that I was away at college. We would talk almost every day about random stuff, fall asleep on the phone. And then when I came back for the summer is when we got together. And then I made the decision to quit school to stay home and be with him, which was dumb.
At one point, well, my ex was very...
petty in a lot of ways. At one point he was going to give a sermon in front of the church about his life story, which is admittedly very fantastical. Lots of twists and turns. He was not a happy child, didn't have a happy childhood. But when he was getting ready to share his life story, he wanted to expose an ex for not being a virgin when they were together.
By telling the congregation that I was the only virgin girl he'd ever been with. As like a bragging point.
Like, look at my wife, everybody. She's so pure. Yes. And look at what a whore this other person is, which is so funny because in highlighting my honor and my purity, quote unquote, he would have to call attention to his impurity, which was not a problem. Him having sex with multiple girls who were not virgins. Well, he was not a virgin was the girl's problem and not his.
Now, in speaking to her directly, she said that that was a lie and she was a virgin. So it's wonderful that he lies about literally everything. None of his fucking business also. Right. And none of his fucking business to discuss in front of a group of people in any capacity. At all. And to get up on stage and talk about how he's been with so many women and only one of them was pure. Well, what about you, fucker?
In your own, like, what? Exactly! You're literally bragging about how many women you've been with while trying to gloat about the fact that your wife was like your prize fish? It's really disgusting. I am so glad that I convinced him not to say that in front of everybody. The fact that he felt so emboldened to say something like that in front of the entire church congregation...
is also mind-blowing to me. What if he had said it? Would anybody have called him out? What would have happened? I have no idea. And thinking on it now...
He might have, you know, technically been a virgin when we got together, but he wanted to preserve the image that we had waited until marriage and we didn't. We were banging within two weeks of being together. And he was trying to put that out to the congregation, like, look at what we did. Yes. Especially considering what we learned from his ex. Let's talk about that. Can we start from there? Sure.
Yeah. Because you got her permission, right? I did. I got her permission to talk about it. She has been a friend of mine for a long time. I actually remember when in childhood, my dad was deployed overseas and her dad worked with him at the same base. And he brought our family Christmas gifts one year. That's one of my most treasured memories of their family and mine. Like very young. She's been in my life forever.
She was fairly demonized after she broke up with our mutual ex. He spread some really nasty lies that she had cheated on him with her current husband. And at the time, I never thought to check on that one.
Because, you know, you should be able to trust that your spouse tells the truth. So anyway, I did not check on that claim until this last week when I started talking with her. And she outright laughed and said, no, during the time I was dating him, I only saw my current husband twice. And yet he was trying to victimize himself in the breakup of their relationship? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
And I really, really liked her. So when, I mean, I wasn't actually paying attention during the time that she was with him. I was, you know, in junior high and in my own world. Maybe barely in high school. But then after they separated, she stopped being around as much. And as I got older and started connecting with...
My ex-husband, Moore, he would talk about her in ways that helped him to demonize her in front of his friends and family. He really likes to look at exes and say that they're only successful because of his influence, which is absolutely false. Like, women's successes aren't their own. They're because somebody hurt them.
Whatever. He talked about her like she was this bitch who cheated on him and hurt him very badly and he will never recover from the damage that she has done to him. In reality, it is the opposite, except she has recovered, which is amazing, and she's doing better than ever, not because of him, in spite of him.
They got together pretty young. I mean, 18. When she was dating our mutual ex, he was fairly controlling over a lot of the same things that he controlled me over. He wanted her to dress a certain way. He controlled who she saw. She hung out with a group of friends from junior high and high school off and on. She told me about every month or so. And when our ex found out that
Her high school boyfriend ran in the same friend group. He forbade her from seeing any of them. So all of that controlling behavior, I was not the first. And unfortunately, I will not be the last.
It happened before me too. And like the girl that he's interacting with now, I couldn't or wouldn't see those red flags. And the woman that we're talking about, she shared with me that a lot of the feelings I have, the ex had toward me.
Since I've known her since childhood, my childhood, she was a leader in my youth group. We ran in the same circles. Our families were really close. I love her parents. All of that. The same exact parallels exist between me and the current girl. We've been friends forever. I love her parents. We are so close. We were so close. And we, all three of us, even look alike, which is so creepy.
I just don't understand how people are looking the other way and nobody's saying, this is not okay. Right? Out loud, verbally, this is not okay. This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.
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Rather than for myself, including on, you know, Sunday mornings, which I always came to church in, I mean, usually jeans and tennis shoes and a t-shirt because I worked with children and I was always on the floor playing with them with Legos or running around the room and doing things that are physically active. So that's just what I wore to church. And he, um,
He continually berated me for coming to church with my hair up and not wearing makeup and looking like I'm ready to play with kids instead of dolling myself up at 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning and wearing short dress and heels. No matter how many times I would tell him that it was exceedingly impractical for me to do that, he would insist that I owed it to him.
This translated often into him policing what I wore out to events and functions. He bought me dresses all the time that made me uncomfortable, like something that is see-through or halter tops or very short dresses and very high heels. So in... How to express...
When he would want me to wear these things, he'd buy them for me and give them to me in this very grand gesture, surprise, and tell me to model them for him. And initially I'd be like, wow, that's so thoughtful. Thank you so much. And I'd put it on and I would realize, you know, I don't have a bra that will work with this dress. I'm going to have to wear it without a bra.
I do not like that. I don't want to do that. So the dress would go in the closet. And in any argument that we'd have, he would bring up that I don't love him because I wouldn't wear his gift. So I would talk to him about how it makes me uncomfortable.
I don't enjoy it when people that I don't know look at me and the first thing they think is, wow, she's hot. I don't enjoy that. I would much rather be seen as a person with a brain rather than a thing with boobs. And he really wanted me to be seen as a thing with boobs. But more importantly than that, he wanted me to be seen as his thing. Like a trophy. Yes.
And yet, if you would have worn the things, would that make you a slut like the girls in his youth group? What qualified them for being slut? Talking to boys, flirting is the qualification for the sluts and teases in our youth group, you know, comprised of high school girls. It made those girls sluts for flirting with the high school boys that are the same age as them in the youth group. But it was somehow not inappropriate, right?
For him to be flirting with a 15, 16, 17-year-old girl that is a member of his church youth group. I don't think he would ever define what he was doing as flirting. So it was under the guise of what? I'm like a big brother? Yes. They actually, he had a nickname. She called him Uncle. So he was essentially like a protective older brother in both his mind and hers, I'm sure.
Would you say that she was one of the people that came to church physically the way that he was describing? No, not at all. She was always dressed like me, jeans. And I mean, she would wear nicer shirts than I did, but she's by no means a promiscuous or, um,
I don't know how to describe that because I'm talking about a teenager. Right. She has no culpability here, but it's not as if she was fitting this mold that he was describing as because it sounded like he lifted her up on a pedestal and thought she was the best human ever and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I was wondering if she sort of met the standard that he was implying was meant for you.
No, she dressed very, she dresses very conservatively, which I think is amazing because it's what makes her comfortable. And that's wonderful and valid in every way. But he did also attempt to dress me in the exact clothes that she wore down to saying, hey, she looks good in that. You would too. Let me buy it for you. I burned those clothes. I did not wear them.
That happened multiple times? A couple, yeah. How did that make you feel? It made me feel like I could not be my own person, and he actually wanted somebody who was not me. There's another layer added to it because this girl, her mom, and I all look incredibly similar. We could...
It's kind of funny. Her mom looks fairly young. Her and I could be sisters. The young girl and I could be sisters. And so we would often trick new people to the church into thinking that we were related. It was a really funny joke and a great memory.
But he compared me to her in looks all the time. And trying to dress me like her really made me think that he found her attractive and I would be attractive if I looked more like her. Of course. Yeah. Which was by design. Yeah. And her mom, actually. He mentioned her mom once while he and I were having sex. That ended it. I was done. He mentioned her mom during sex with you. Actually, of course, with me. This is...
Very wild experience. The sexual abuse was challenging for me to actually pinpoint because the messages that we receive as young girls are our bodies are for male pleasure. And so growing up and being told to protect my purity and things like that really led to a lack of understanding of
of what a good sexual relationship entails. So I went into marriage and this man, it was my first sexual experiences, my first overt sexual experiences. And so I just accepted what was happening. He initially made me feel pretty good in the beginning. And it went downhill from there.
One of the secrets that I was told to keep was that we had sex before we got married. And I was told that revealing this truth would damage his reputation to the point of no return. Because as a pastor, he was held to a much higher standard that involved chastity until marriage. But listen, we were having sex within two weeks of dating.
So I was just really excited to be desired in the beginning. I had not known sexual pleasure before that. I didn't know that women could feel sexual pleasure before that. And so I did not understand that it could actually be better. I thought this is as good as it gets.
But he turned out to be very controlling around sex. He was controlling of my body, about what I did with my body, about what I wore on my body. And if it came to a head and I didn't want to have sex but he did, we were going to have sex quite consistently. He would wake me up in the middle of the night and say, I can't sleep tonight.
Can we have sex? And I would tell him as politely as I could to fuck off. And it didn't work. Never did. What you're describing is rape. Yes, absolutely. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm not going to say sorry for being emotional because fuck that. Right. Right.
I have been a victim of sexual assault in my life. Thankfully, it only occurred one time. I'm so sorry. Thank you. But the thought of the women that are out there, even now, that are being sexually forced into sexual relations because they feel that they are the property of their husbands just breaks my heart.
And the fact that that was your first sexual experience breaks my heart. No woman should have to go through that. And I'm just really sorry. And I'm not going to apologize for being emotional, but I'm sorry to be emotional when this is your opportunity to share your story. And I don't want to make it about me. It just. No, this is about this isn't just about me either. This is about every woman. So true.
We didn't start off great, but since it was my only experience, I didn't have anything else to judge it by. So since I had no paradigm, nothing, I had no way to judge my experiences against any past experiences, really. I mean, my first boyfriend we were exploring together, so neither of us knew what the hell we were doing.
But here comes my new boyfriend who is making grandiose claims about his sexual history and how he's a pleaser of women and what? It's bullshit. But anyway, he didn't know that it could be better. I didn't know that I could orgasm. So I started feeling...
over the course of our engagement that maybe my body just couldn't get there or maybe it happened and I had missed it. And in talking to him about that and telling him, you know, move your hand a little to the left, that feels uncomfortable. He would point blank, look at me and say, I know what I'm doing. Just let me do it.
Lots of times. So I learned pretty quickly that I needed to fake an orgasm in order to let the discomfort pass. And then he would be able to pat himself on the back and, woohoo, I did it. Which he did not do. Ever. Even once. And all of that before we got married. There's one story. I mean, it's not graphic. Okay.
I was giving him a blowjob once in his bedroom in my mom's house, and he got a phone call from his adoptive dad's brother. Normal people, when they're in the middle of a sexual act, would probably ignore the phone call. But he said, this is important. Don't stop. And he answered the phone, and I stopped.
Uh, and then later he told me he cornered me later cause I had stopped and gone away cause I was pissed. He answered the phone. He cornered me later and said, I was really upset that you stopped. Why did you do that? I had to go and finish myself in the shower afterward being really passive aggressive. And I told him that I didn't like he had answered the phone and then I walked away and he didn't ever bring it up again. It's kind of strange. Um,
I guess it's probably a result of my healing that I don't feel like I'm super affected by these stories that happened in my life. I've separated myself from them enough that it almost feels like it happened to somebody else. Hey, actually, maybe that's not a sign of healing. Maybe I should go back to therapy.
We should all go back to therapy. I think that's a disassociational state that you're talking about, which is what you do when you're being sexually – when you're being raped repeatedly, you start to be able to mentally put yourself in another place as a way to protect yourself. So a lot of it gets blocked out by design because it's too much to bear. You know what I mean? Yeah. I'm going back to therapy. I'm really –
I'm realizing I thought that I was healed from that, but it's just protecting my emotions from actually thinking about them too deeply. You've already been through so much and all of the emotion, all the emotional stuff is so much to unpack and work through alone. You know, it makes sense to me. And this is true for all of us. Sometimes it's not the time to get into it. Sometimes it's not to dig into that stuff. You can stop me if, um,
It's triggering for you two and we can take a break because. Oh, thank you. I wouldn't necessarily call thing night. After our photography session, we had a few hours to ourselves before we had to go to our reception. And so we went to our apartment together. Brand new husband wanted to immediately leave.
Rip my clothes off, not wait for me to feel aroused, and just get in there and get it done. So I stopped him, and I said, whoa, slow down, we have a lot of time. And the event itself is pretty blurred for me, because the emotions got so desperately high during that 15-minute period that I had to block it out for basically my entire marriage. Otherwise, I would...
not be in a happy place. So he is attempting to just without caring for my pleasure at all. And so I pointed that out to him, perhaps unkindly, but I really feel like I'm justified in it and said, and I said, I'm not just some hole for you to fill. I'm your wife. And he took a few steps back from the bed and then said,
Almost started to cry. And he told me, that's what my mother used to say to my father. And I don't know if that was something that really happened in his life.
But it served the purpose of making me feel guilty for what I said rather than him having to acknowledge what he did. And in proof of, yeah, on your wedding night, the first time that you have sex with your new wife, you're not going to care about her at all.
So then we spent quite a long time. I was crying and apologizing. I don't feel like I had anything to apologize for, but I was apologizing to try to mend the bridge. And I don't remember anything else of what we said. And suddenly an hour has gone by and we're late to our reception. And I...
can't go out in public looking like this. My hair is a mess. My face is blotchy. And so he gives me some time to cool off before we put on our game faces and go back out to see our friends and family. And then I discover that I don't have any of my supplies that I would need to fix my face and my hair.
So we have to call my mom to bring them to us. And he got on the phone with her and berated her for not having brought those things to begin with. So he interrupts whatever she was doing at our reception waiting for us to yell at her for something that she could not have anticipated us needing. And then she rushes over and brings me the stuff. I'm hiding in the bathroom. He doesn't let her in. He just takes it and closes the door.
Then I take another half an hour to compose myself, think, what am I going to do if somebody asks what happened? Because, okay, it's a common thing. You're a new couple. Everybody knows that you just had sex. So they want to talk about you just having sex. Do you think you recognized at the time that you were pretending already? I recognized that I was putting on a happy face for that night, but I did not recognize yet that that was my new life.
Next time.
Something Was Wrong is written, recorded, edited, and produced by me, Tiffany Reese. Music by Glad Rags. Thank you so much to each and every survivor for sharing their story. If you'd like to support the growth of the podcast, you can leave us a five-star review on iTunes, support the podcast on Patreon.com,
Thank you so much. They think they know me, they don't know me well.
you think you know me
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