If I could pinpoint where our issues began, I would have to say it was our sex life.

Shortly after Marco and I started seeing each other, I went onto the Depo shot. I was tired of having to remember to take my birth control every day and thought the shot would be easier. The thought of having fewer periods was also very appealing. However a few months after my first shot, I began to notice some negative side effects. I was putting on a lot of weight, and my hair was falling out. I was also, spotting all the time. Something that was supposed to make my life easier was doing the exact opposite.But the real bummer with the shot was it completed obliterated my sex drive. I went from wanting sex everyday to only being in the mood once a month if I was lucky. And to make matters worse Marco seemed to take it personally, even more so after we were married. I tried explaining to him that it was one of the shot’s side effects, that hopefully it would pass with the rest of them. However, I could see the disappointment written on his face every time I rejected his advances. Eventually, I got fed up with dealing with all those side effects and told my doctor that I wanted to switch back. It just wasn’t worth the trouble. I wanted to take a shower without pulling out fistfuls of hair and to not have to wear pantyliners every day. I wanted to be able to have sex with my husband again.Understanding my frustrations, my doctor put me back on my original birth control pills. She told me it would take six to nine months for the shot to totally leave my system and to just be patient. After that, things should return to normal. With time, my hair stopped coming out, I was able to lose some of the weight I had put on, and my periods became regular again. And yet the full nine months passed, and still I had no drive to have sex.

I wanted to be able to have sex with my husband again.

In the beginning, I tried to force it. I wanted so bad to have that part of our relationship back. Sex with Marco had always been good before, and I missed that intimacy. But no matter what we would do, I couldn’t get my body to cooperate. I just wasn’t into it. I felt nothing when he kissed me or when his hands roamed my body or tried to bring me pleasure. More and more we had to use lube just so he could be inside me, and often I was so ill prepared that I’d be sore for days afterward, which did me no favors. It was just an endless cycle of disappointment.The lack of physical intimacy began to take its toll on our relationship as a whole. As much as I tried to assure Marco that it was me and not him, that of course I still found him attractive and desirable, he was at times very skeptical. “I’ve put on too much weight haven’t I?” he would ask after trying to get me in the mood or “what can I do different? What I’m doing is obviously not working…”. Each time I would kiss him and tell him we would try again another time. This couldn’t possibly last forever. But I wasn’t entirely truthful either. There were things he was doing that I used to find sexy that were now turning me off. He used to grope my ass or my boobs randomly. Sometimes when he was in the room when I was changing, bending over to pick something up near him, or even just when I was passing by. Marco would even do it when other people were around like our friends or even family. It used to make me laugh and playfully roll my eyes. But after a while of not being in the mood, it just got annoying.At first, I tried to gently tell him to stop, “not right now.” But he never seemed to get the hint. In fact, this behavior increased as our dry spell dragged on. It even began to make me really uncomfortable. It at times seemed almost aggressive to the point that I started to change in my walk-in closet instead of in front him. I got tired of something as simple as changing clothes feeling like an unintentional strip-tease. One time I was changing from my work out clothes and as I took my sports bra off he came up, grabbed my breast and went “boobies!” I snapped and told him to stop, that it wasn’t funny. And there it was again. The disappointment.I was left with that unshakable feeling of guilt. It was all my fault. I put that shit in my body. I was the one hurting our relationship. It didn’t occur to me then that his actions were unsettling me or that he wasn’t listening to my wishes. To make matters worse after the whole Billy Bush scandal with Donald Trump, Marco started trying to touch my vagina randomly and yell “Grab her by the pussy!” Neither of us were Trump supporters and we both found him to be utterly repulsive, but for some reason Marco thought it was absolutely hilarious to do that. I tried on multiple occasions that I didn’t find it funny in the least and that it was actually a huge turn off that he did that. But he would just shrug it off and tell me to lighten up.It didn’t end there either.

I was left with that unshakable feeling of guilt. It was all my fault.

Marco had always been more of a partier than I was. My body’s tolerance for alcohol is shitty and often I’d wake up the next day feeling horrible and/or being ridiculously sick. Marco, on the other hand, had been drinking since he was fourteen and could drink all night long without having to pay the consequences the following morning. So on the weekends, after what was usually a stressful week at work, he would want to cut loose and go out. In the beginning, I didn’t think much of it. I thought it was normal; he was still young and fresh out of college, that eventually the going out would slow down. It never did though. Every weekend, like clockwork, he’d be asking me if I wanted to go out with him to our favorite bar near our apartment. More often than not I would decline, feigning fatigue from the day or just not feeling up to it. I would encourage him to ask one of his guy friends instead and tell him to go have a good time without me, but that if he came back too drunk to sleep out on the couch so he wouldn’t keep me up with his snoring. You see his drinking had encouraged another nasty habit of his. He would pressure me for sex when he got home. “Come on babe it’s been ages” or “I just miss being close to you. I just want to feel your body against mine” were the usual phrases he’d use to try to guilt trip me. I remember one time we had his brother and his girlfriend over for the weekend, and we had been celebrating our engagement with champagne. Marco had also had beer earlier in the night so he was pretty drunk by the time we went to bed. Not long after we had settled in, he had pulled me to him and I felt his erection against my backside. He told me how sexy I was and how long it had been, pleading with me to let him make love to me. We lived in a small one bedroom apartment, and his brother and his girlfriend were sleeping just on the other side of our door in the living room. It would be all too apparent what we were doing in our room, and they were only in high school. I wasn’t comfortable with it and told him as much. That didn’t seem to deter him though and he started to rub insistently against my butt, continuing to try to convince me into it. Finally, I turned around and told him that it wasn’t going to happen and that it really made me uncomfortable that he wasn’t listening to me. He knew all about my assault and how my partner respecting my boundaries meant to me, and I reminded him of this. That finally seemed to knock some sense into him, and he stopped, holding me close and apologizing profusely. “I never want to be that guy. I never want to hurt you.”I would like to say it never happened again-that it had been a drunken lapse in judgement on his part. However, similar scenarios played out every time he got pretty wasted. Hence why I made him sleep on the couch most of the time he went out. And things only got worse as we planned for the big wedding in June of 2017. Wedding planning can be incredibly stressful for some people, and we were no exception. With budget constraints, his family trying to apply for visit visas into the US, and the endless tiny details, we started to fight over such miniscule things of our everyday life like how the dishes were done or his dirty laundry lying around the floor of the bedroom. Most days I was happiest when I got the apartment to myself for two hours after I got off work and before he would be home. It was just me and the cat, and for two blissful hours I wouldn’t have to worry about my personal space being encroached upon or cleaning up the mess he always left in his wake.  As the wedding drew closer, people close to us began to see the strain between Marco and me. When I was approached about it, I would just wave it off and blame it on wedding planning. “Once the wedding is over things will go back to normal,” I would tell them. I think I was also, just trying convince myself of that. I wanted things to go back to the way things had been before the damned Depo shot, back when things were easy and simple. But already the uncertainty had begun to creep in. As time went by, it got harder and harder to think of what had drawn me to Marco in the first place-of the reason why I had fallen in love with him. All of his quirks that had once made me smile now rubbed me the wrong way. His inability to be serious about anything was no longer cute, but frustrating. His constant need for me to take care of the housework and pick up after him not endearing, but inconsiderate. The more he made me feel guilty for not sleeping with him, the less I actually did.I wasn’t being heard or respected. And I began to question myself a very unsettling question.Just who have I married?-Khaleesi