Dear Carolyn: I have been with my boyfriend for a year and a half. I have been incredibly happy and secure with this man — to the point where I could see myself marrying him.
He denies it all, and he encouraged me to talk to anyone he is close with now or was close with in the past — all of whom say he has always spoken on the importance of taking consent very seriously.
I’m taking space from him to process my feelings and come to my own conclusions, but I’m struggling with how to handle this. Is there a correct way to approach it?
— Conflicted and Confused
Conflicted and Confused: Who is this survivor you are inclined to believe?
You mention a close friend who has heard from “a few girls” who have heard things from other people. It may all be true — having “spoken” on consent “very seriously” is hardly exculpatory — and facts can be hard to get, but I doubt you’d be okay with it if you were socially tried and convicted yourself on innuendo alone.
Granted, context and history matter. The number of women who have been reflexively disbelieved, dismissed, blacklisted, slut-shamed, mocked and retraumatized for reporting a man’s sexual misconduct is a persistent outrage. (Swatches from the grotesque social wallpaper of bias against women: “Globally as many as 38% of all murders of women are committed by intimate partners,” according to a 2021 post by the World Health Organization. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention includes exes and puts the U.S. figure at “over half.”)
But: The corrective for that molar-cracking outrage is not reflexive belief of accusers. You don’t fight bias with bias.
The answer is to hear out the accusers and the accused, women and men. The answer is to follow up on these accusations, find their sources and judge the situation on the merits alone.
Let your personal experience inform your judgment, yes — and context and history, too — but don’t let any of these influences supersede your judgment.
So, again: What survivor, of what? The “correct way” to approach this is to track the rumors, ethically, to the truth. Ask your good friend to put you in touch with the accusers, as you vow to keep their confidences. (A reputation for integrity never goes to waste, does it?) Nod to the unseemliness of prying, and promise to take no for an answer; these are private lives, after all, and possible traumas. But also give voice to the unfairness of letting hearsay stand as fact. If they’re serious in their concern, they’ll give you a serious answer.
This exercise alone will give you more information than you have now. Combine that with what you already know about your boyfriend — does he have any friendly exes? — then ask your gut what it thinks. Then trust it. Then remain open to new information anyway, because that’s just key to living well.
This is not the place to look for comfortable answers, but we owe ourselves and each other the difficult work.
That said, a last word: We’re morally obliged to be fair in weighing accusations, but we do not, ever, need to be fair in our criteria for choosing — or rejecting — a mate. We’re the ones living our choices. Our reasons are reason enough.