nu·​ance

Noun

• a subtle distinction or variation
• a subtle quality
• sensibility to, awareness of, or ability to express delicate shadings (as of meaning, feeling, or value)

My 2nd husband* and I grew up in radically different circumstances. He was the child of millionaires, I once lived in a house that had been condemned and had no running water but for the hose the neighbor ran to our intake pipe.

He had been good looking and privileged, I had been awkward and unpopular. He went to arguably the best private high school in the region with the children of other wealthy and often famous families. I bounced through no less than 9 public schools before 10th grade. He was gifted a brand-new car at 16, I drove my dad’s 25 year old Plymouth without functional reverse and failing brakes.

Aside from the economic differences, there were other considerations. I lived in an urban setting with a radical left anti-capitalist mother, while he was raised on a 40 acre rural property by people so conservative they thought Rush Limbaugh was a pansy.

This is not to say his childhood was without difficulty and trauma, it is merely to say we lived very different lives prior to meeting one another.

Of course one way in which we lived different experiences was through the lens of our opposite genders. He was – like many of his class and age – utterly blind to his white male privilege. This was both passively experienced and culturally reinforced by his family of origin. Their devoted belief that their financial success was a result of their worthiness was deeply ingrained in him; it was part of the fabric of both his identity and how he interpreted the actions and circumstances of other people.

Many of the implications of these differences between us didn’t become clear until we had been together long enough to commit to building a house and life together. We wanted the same things in life, we loved each other passionately, and it just… kinda… didn’t come up. Until it did.

He was a person all but incapable of nuance. He saw the world in extremely clear-cut terms and was all but impossible to sway to a new opinion once one was fixed. I am convinced part of this was due to a degree of neurodivergence, but much of it was also born of having moved through life with a stunning lack of systemic opposition to his ambitions.

He was utterly confounded by my upbringing. He never could quite reconcile how I had emerged from such profound deprivation to become a reasonably successful professional person. He always attributed it – not to the food assistance, college financial aid, subsidized childcare for my daughter and other entitlements I received – to some exceptional quality of mine that allowed this to happen. No matter how I tried to explain that these programs had worked exactly the way they were supposed to, he was never convinced.

After a point, I realized he didn’t really care to understand. That no amount of new information presented would move the needle on his positions and thoughts. So, I gave up. When he said things that were factually or materially incorrect, I simply let him. When he explained my own experiences back to me through his own filter, I didn’t argue. I knew there was no point, and I had tired of trying to get through to him.

Until one night.

He was a heavy drinker. I often couldn’t tell when he was drunk, but very frequently when we had some kind of conflict, he would admit to being “wasted” or “trashed” I understood this as the excuse it was, but it nevertheless surprised me the number of time he was in the bag and I didn’t realize it until later.

One night, while we were being intimate, I set a boundary physically due to some discomfort I was experiencing at the time. At some point, he crossed that boundary. I was so surprised and upset, I didn’t say anything at the time.

When I brought it up in a discussion we had about it soon after, he gave me the “I was super drunk” line, though he did apologize both profusely and sincerely. I tried to explain to him how traumatizing it was. That even though I knew he loved me and hadn’t meant to hurt me, it had damaged the unequivocal trust I had had in our physical relationship up to that point.

He was genuinely confused about why that might be true. How one event in the context of years of respect and trust could be so harmful. And so, despite my better judgement, I tried to explain.

I explained to him the experience of being a woman engaging in any degree of physical intimacy with men. I told him about how many times I had given a pushy guy a blow job rather than risking the possibility of being violently sexually assaulted. I told him about the times when I had pretended to enjoy a sexual encounter in order to get it over with to escape a frightening situation. I told him how many men I had let kiss me when I didn’t want to, because I was afraid that resisting would lead to far worse. To being grabbed, touched, and hurt by people who felt they were entitled to my body, and my response pretending to be a willing participant, lest both the aggressor and I had to admit what was really going on and reckon with that.

Though I knew he believed me – in the sense that he didn’t think I was making it up – he was utterly unable to comprehend that all of this had happened to me; a strong, assertive woman who he had always considered immune to intimidation.

And then I said, “I guarantee you have had women in your past ‘give in’ to you when they didn’t want to.”

His fury and indignation were immediate. He would never force a woman. He had never NEEDED to pressure a woman into sex. This suggestion was a direct threat to both his ego and his image of himself as a “good” guy.

I told him that even if that was true (I believed he believed it was) that it might not have been clear to him at the time that he was being placated. That men his age were not trained to care about or even meaningfully consider what consent really looked like. That they were products of rape culture just like the rest of us.

“I HAVE NEVER RAPED ANYONE!”

When I tried to clarify that I wasn’t calling him a rapist, that I was simply trying to give some cultural context for why he might not see the encounter the same way the person on the other side had, he flatly refused to consider my meaning. To attempt to grasp the distinction between being a rapist and having been raised in rape culture.

He then went on to tell me how offensive he found this idea because of an event that had really haunted him in high school; about how an accusation of sexual impropriety had cemented his belief that women exaggerate or make these things up all the time.

His tone changed when he started to tell the story. It went from one of righteous indignation to a mocking amusement. He detailed how, at a party with a bunch of friends, a girl he had been hooking up with “got more than she bargained for**” once their clothes came off. He said, “I know she had a good time. It was totally obvious” But that for reasons he could never understand and completely unfairly, she had gone to school and complained about the whole encounter. Never explicitly saying he forced her, but complaining about his behavior in vague and indistinct ways.

Even conceding the possibility that he didn’t hear the exact nature of her complaints (she did go to a different school, and he only heard about it indirectly) there was no doubt in my mind that he felt like the wronged party in every sense.

I paused in the wake of this story. I was stunned to realize he had produced this story as evidence in his favor that he was innocent of any kind of sexual coercion. For me, it only underscored how his perception of events was so profoundly informed by rape culture. That to him, the lack of a forceful and explicit “No” in the moment completely absolved him of any sense of wrongdoing. That consent was granted continually by her lack of active opposition in the moment.

I looked at him and said, “I have been that girl. I am telling you, she didn’t want what she got. If she had been happy about what happened between you, she wouldn’t have gone to school and told everyone she wasn’t. Sometimes, women say yes – or, they don’t say no – even when they don’t want to because they are scared, even if you weren’t trying to scare her intentionally. You are a physically imposing person with a very forceful personality. You have no idea what her life experience is like. You don’t know if she’d ever been allowed to say no. You assume you did nothing wrong because that is what you were taught to believe. I am not saying you did something you were consciously aware was wrong, I am saying you didn’t have the full understanding of why the fact she didn’t say ‘no’ wasn’t the same as her being an enthusiastic and completely willing participant.”

I tried everything I could think to say to make him understand. It didn’t work. No matter what tactic I took, he was never able to grasp the nuance I was trying to communicate. It was – unsurprisingly – part of a broader pattern that ultimately contributed to the demise of the relationship.

Seeing this post today brought this conversation back to me in full force:

In the case of my then partner – who I knew had reasonably good intentions – I was looking for ways to help reconcile his lack of understanding with a person I was trying to share my life with. With additional experience I know that regardless of the culture they were exposed to, there is enough information available now to confront those assumptions and accept responsibility for amending their understanding and actions.

What we now understand about the multi-faceted nature of consent should become a gospel that all can commit to. No matter what may have been promoted as “true” and “real” in the past, we now understand enough to know and do better. We used to know the sun moved around the earth, after all. The differences are so enormous that a nuanced view isn’t the least bit necessary.

*We had a wedding, but for administrative reasons, never filed a marriage license.

**He couldn’t resist the chance to emphasize how big his dick was, even in this moment.