Lesson 2: "Don't act like you don't want to when you actually do"

I couldn't understand the importance of having your feelings acknowledged by the person you have a relationship with until someone did acknowledge them. 

I don't know why, but my coping mechanism for when something bothers me is to stay silent. To this day, whenever I don't feel comfortable with something that has been said or done, it is really hard for me to do something about it in fear of being told that I'm wrong for feeling that way. Again, I don't know why, I guess it had something to do with the rigid education I received when I was young, but I am not entirely sure. 

The seriousness of the matter lies in the fact that, whenever one of my boyfriends did something that went beyond the boundaries I had been trained to maintain, I did not feel at ease telling them that what they had done had upset or even hurt me.  Let's consider a specific case I still remember very clearly.

I was hanging out with my boyfriend and his friends at his house while his parents were out of town. My mom let me attend just because my boyfriend and I weren't going to be entirely on our own, so I tried to keep things as calm as possible because our parents had trusted us to behave correctly. At first, we were simply chatting and watching a movie in an entirely chill way. Nevertheless, my boyfriend started throwing hints at his friends to leave the room, not the house per se, so we could stay on our own to kiss and whatever else that could happen whenever parents weren't around checking on us. 

Before getting entirely mad, I told him that it was rude of him to tell that to his friends when we were all hanging out but they simply told me not to worry about it and that they were entirely okay with us \"seizing the opportunity\". I wasn't really in the mood to do anything and what I wanted was simply for him to take me back home, so I told him that I wasn't feeling like it. I thought he was going to understand and stop pressuring me, but he simply told me:

\"You know you want to, you just feel uncomfortable with my friends being there, but they already told you they don't care\".

He kept insisting while I kept telling him I didn't want to and, after getting tired of arguing, he burst out a \"don't act like you don't want to when you do\". I got really mad about it but ended doing whatever he wanted to do in complete silence. I knew he wasn't going to give in until things were done his way, so I was the one who ended up ceding. When he was satisfied, I got out of the room and couldn't even look at his friends in the eye. As usual, he didn't even take me back home so I ordered an Uber and cried all the way home but never told him anything about it.

I know the fault was not entirely his as I was the one who stayed in silence. But, what is the problem here? He already knew I was uncomfortable EVEN THOUGH his friends said they were okay with it. The problem does not reside on how his friends felt, but on how I felt. 

The non-toxic thing to do when you acknowledge someone else's feelings and when you claim that you love them, after being told that they aren't comfortable with the circumstances and any of their alternatives, is to simply stop insisting and to recognize and accept the limit this person is establishing.

As I talked about in the last lesson, I ended up breaking up with him (thanks be to God) but I got so used to this dynamic that I thought this was the way all men functioned. Three years later, when I finally got the courage to be vulnerable with someone else, I got surprised when this man openly told me that he wanted me to tell him if I didn't feel like doing something or if something bothered me because he didn't want to hurt me. 

It was so weird for me because there was this time when I wasn't feeling like hanging out and I thought he was going to get so mad at me for it, but when we met the day after, he was so chill about it and, when I asked him if he was mad, he simply said: \"why would I be? You are not forced to do anything you don't feel like doing\". At that moment I realized that I was so used to so many toxic patterns in my relationships that I found it weird for a person to understand and accept how I felt.

In conclusion, run away from people who keep pressuring you even though you have told them over and over again that you don't want to. They don't care about you and they aren't really \"helping you do what you know you want to do\", they just want you to say it is okay so they don't consider themselves toxic or even abusive. 

Keep this in mind: agreeing because the other person won't budge doesn't mean you're giving your consent.