dailyO
Variety

This man's Twitter thread on guilt and helplessness he felt after his wife was raped will make you cry

Advertisement
Parth Arora
Parth AroraAug 26, 2016 | 21:16

This man's Twitter thread on guilt and helplessness he felt after his wife was raped will make you cry

Twitter user @AngryBlkManDC shared what happened to his life after someone threw a matchstick at his meticulously constructed safe life. Picture for representation.

The stony silence that falls the moment the word "rape" is mentioned is perhaps an indicator of just how difficult it is to talk about it, especially if it becomes a personal tragedy to befall anyone. Mostly, it is women who get raped, and even though there are some among us bold enough to talk about it in the open, there's a heavy lid on what the (often male) partner goes through, because, well, "it is not about him, for once".

Advertisement

However, what remains bottled within, what stays pent up because society refuses it a space for self-expression, becomes an emotional morass, a vortex of pain and guilt that eats up many a man, and woman.

As most of us struggle around life, not liking ourselves enough, battling loneliness, with an yearning to seem authentic, to feel real things, to connect, we often miss out on the stories that lie in the shadows. Shadows of unimaginable pain and hurt, gashes so deep within our integrity and being that they black out every other feeling, feeling that someone else felt when the Big Hurt came our way.

Nowadays, the struggle is in the attempt to gather your slowness, to gather your thoughts while we're all running towards something, running from something. Some of us meet people with whom we can share a life with, who belong to the same mental landscape as we do for a brief period, which is otherwise like an assembly line of heroin shots, adrenaline and addiction, all day, every day.

Sometimes we are lucky enough to marry them, and over time, with proximity, comes care, which then turns into a home, surrounded by walls, flanked by giant plans called life. All of it just to make that someone feel safe.

Advertisement

So what happens when someone throws a matchstick at your house of cards, your meticulously constructed "safe life"?

Things burn and everything turns to dust.

Also read: Sex means rape for most men

Have we ever asked how does a person feel after his beloved is raped, or sexually assaulted?

A man who frequents Twitter and goes by the handle @AngryBlkManDC shared what happened to his life after someone landed a brutal blow to his life of lucky togetherness.

He spoke about how his life changed after his wife was raped 18 years ago, in 1998. In a series of tweets that went viral, he poured his heart out and shared how his relationship with his wife deteriorated as it was eaten away from within. Wracked by guilt and pain, he spoke about how he couldn't function overwhelmed by the shame of not being there for her when she really needed him, physically.

Guilt and humiliation devoured his relationship with himself, over time spreading to what he felt about his wife, bringing that to a gradual but inevitably tragic end.

When the Bulandshahr rape made the national headlines, I was haunted for weeks thinking about just how awfully helpless we can feel in the face of such brutality.

Advertisement

We speak about the immense tragedy the mother and daughter faced, and of course, it was a thing too horrible for words to accurately convey.

But what we didn't at all speak about was what the husband and the father went through, who had to stand there and bear witness to what those assaulters, other men, did with the women they deeply cared about. Just tied to a pole, looking at them getting raped, looking at them screaming, unable to do anything.

In a way, they are victims of rape too.

rape-embed_082616064340.jpg
 

Coming back to @AngryBlkManDC, he spoke about the devastating complication of feeling like absolute shit because you couldn't help another human being, a human being you loved more than any other person in the world. @AngryBlkManDc authentically broke down everything we thought we knew about how "tough cookies" function, bringing it a full circle to the morose lonely state we were born into.

This is his story. Read his tweets to the very end of this thread.

Last updated: August 26, 2016 | 21:49
IN THIS STORY
Please log in
I agree with DailyO's privacy policy