How Do I Know My Boyfriend Has Never Hurt Another Woman?

In a society that puts profit before people, it’s hard not to feel broken-hearted. Landlords split friends, nuclear families isolate parents, bosses burn out workers. But fear not – Red Flags is here to tend to your troubled hearts. 

In Novara Media’s anti-capitalist anti-advice column, resident therapist Sophie K Rosa marries their ongoing training in psychoanalysis with ideas from their book, Radical Intimacy, to respond to your questions. Unlike other agony aunts, Sophie doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but they could help you unlock new ways of thinking. 

To submit a dilemma to Sophie, please fill out this form.

[Editor’s note: This article involves discussion of rape.]

Dear Sophie,

How can I come to terms with the fact that I can never know my boyfriend’s past? I have dated my current boyfriend for a few years, and he is incredibly loving and kind. I am immensely glad to see the narrative around male violence against women and girls become wider in recent years, and that more and more women are turning away from the pressure of heterosexuality. [My boyfriend] has also expressed these opinions, and often takes an interest in my experience with men day-to-day to better understand my perspective.

In keeping up with this news, such as Gisèle Pelicot’s case [the French woman who over a period of nine years was drugged and raped by her husband and men he invited to rape her] or the recent Fernando P case in Germany [a German man recently jailed for over eight years for drugging and filming himself raping his wife], I have developed a dreadful feeling: I can never know about my boyfriend’s past, or indeed his thoughts about me.

In the UK, women are far more likely to be abused by a man she knows, in her own home, than someone she does not know. If these cases of male partners abusing their significant others are increasing, sometimes without her knowledge, how am I supposed to feel safe in a heterosexual relationship?

A close friend of mine was sexually assaulted a few years ago by a man she did not know. He was let go [by the police] due to lack of evidence and is likely walking free to this day, possibly with a girlfriend or at the very least, female friends. None of whom know about what he did to my friend, and possibly to other women. How can I know that my boyfriend has never hurt another woman before? Every day, I am plagued by the thought that the man I love and live with would hurt me given the chance, or has hurt another woman in the past. I struggle with intrusive thoughts about this, and it is ruining my relationship. As you discuss in your book, therapy can only help to a certain point – when it can’t change the social conditioning that men clearly experience to see women as inferior, how can I ever overcome these feelings?

– Plagued by Doubt

Dear Plagued by Doubt,

I wonder how it felt to write this down. Everyone has unthinkable thoughts; thoughts that exist beyond the realm of tolerable reality, inching us towards horror. Probably, few admit it to others, perhaps hardly even to themselves. Some of us are plagued by apparently unthinkable or ‘intrusive’ thoughts. And it can be difficult to discuss such psychic plagues with others; to open ourselves up to another’s interpretation of our darkest recesses is a treacherous, courageous, thing.

I only remember a couple of moments from my first analysis, at around 19. One was when my analyst told me something along the lines of: thoughts aren’t the truth. As a young person drowning in unwanted, troubling thoughts, this was a revelation, and a relief. Thoughts do mean something, but we can’t always – or even often – take them at face value. The trouble is, no one – not even a therapist – can tell you definitively what your thoughts mean. Only you can conclusively ascribe your thoughts meaning.

Taking a different example, some people – especially people who sometimes are diagnosed with, or understand themselves in terms of, obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD – are troubled by thoughts of their own potential for violence. They might have thoughts like, “What if I throw my baby down the stairs?” Such thoughts are sometimes called egodystonic, meaning they conflict with a person’s conscious ideas, values or self-concepts. How people relate to such thoughts differs vastly: some might ignore them; others might brush them off without too much worry; others still might be deeply distressed by them. Tendencies towards anxiety might, in some people, compound such intrusive thoughts. Our varied psychic structures could at least partly explain why we relate to comparable thoughts, much like experiences, differently. Your thoughts, situated in real-world violence as well as your own psychic reality, are a source of real suffering. Therapy might be one place to better understand yourself in this way.

We create our thoughts, in a sense, but what exactly they are made up of might be obscure: our early life, later experiences, relational dynamics and social factors might all be at play. It sounds like the latter could be particularly influential for you here; far from irrational, your mind’s questioning is situated within social realities. In a post-#MeToo era, many women are asking themselves similar questions – not only about men per se, but about the men they know and love. And given the realities of gendered and sexual violence, combined with its graphic coverage in news cycles, including the cases you mention, more shocking than this questioning might be the fact that women ever feel safe at all in heterosexual relationships. I would guess more women than we know are silently harbouring the most terrible question: am I truly safe with the person I love?

The contemporary French philosopher Manon Garcia followed the Pelicot trial, and wrote a book around it. Like many of us, Garcia was harrowed by its details, searching for liberation from its apparent implications. Pelicot’s husband Dominique found at least 70 local men who were prepared to rape his unconscious wife. I feel my heart hasten and my stomach jump with fear as I lay out that fact. The fact of patriarchal violence changes our physiology – of course it might saturate our thoughts. Witnessing the case unfold, Garcia writes that “one question keeps nagging at me, haunting me, returning when I least expect it: Can we live with men? And if so, at what cost?”

You write that you are glad that “more and more women are turning away from the pressure of heterosexuality”. I wonder how that gladness exists, when you yourself are so conflicted. I, too, have noticed such a cultural turn: social media influencers are exalting the benefits of “decentring men”; questioning whether having a boyfriend is embarrassing; and openly proclaiming misandry. Heterofatalism is seemingly popular – despite the author of the 2019 essay that coined the term, gender theorist Asa Seresin, warning against it. On the possibility of heterosexuality changing for the better, Seresin writes, “even if it [couldn’t], we would have to believe it could, because tens of thousands of women are currently dying of it every year”.

Writing (cis, straight?) men off might be appealing – whether as a means of self-preservation, managing anxiety, protest, or retaliation – and I think this appeal speaks to the particular impossibility of contemporary heterosexuality. In our fantasies, we can annihilate men, our oppressors. Condemning all men – rather than understanding the patriarchal conditioning to which they are all subject, and which some act upon in horrific ways – could indeed be a functional split, in psychoanalytic terms. That is to say, it might be a workable defence against the ambivalence and loss that relationships with men might entail. But this might amount to “living in the repetitive temporality of trauma”, writes philosopher Judith Butler, who reminds us that “none of us was violated by an entire class, even if it sometimes feels that way”. Your psyche has associated your boyfriend with trauma, it seems. He might be a man, but he is not Man. What else is he? Surely, he is encoded with patriarchy. What else do you see in him?

The burden of not knowing permeates your letter. You ask: “How can I know that my boyfriend has never hurt another woman before?” Yours might be a classic post-#MeToo reckoning. Patriarchal abuse is not a matter of bad apples. How can you know the man you love has never hurt another woman before? How unbearable that you need to know, and that you can’t.

We can know someone through experience, through words – but this doesn’t amount to knowing them totally. The other will always elude us – and that is inherent to desire, psychoanalytically speaking. It might also be the source of great anxiety. What to do with what we can’t know? Your psyche has come up with one response.

You write that your boyfriend is “incredibly loving and kind”. What about this word, “incredibly”? Is he too good to be true? I ask this not to question the sincerity of his love and kindness as you experience it, but to suggest that he cannot be all good – no one is. Your love for him surely contains ambivalence – which is to say, some hate. I wonder what exploring this side of your feelings might do to treat your thought plagues.

You might never know for sure whether your boyfriend has hurt another woman, but you can know whether he has hurt you. Does your boyfriend, like most people, sometimes display sexist behaviour? At the very least, I imagine he could be guilty of not satisfactorily recognising your experience under patriarchy, of not sharing in the cognitive dissonance that this gender dynamic entails for you.

I wonder if you want something more from him than his sharing your feminist opinions and taking an interest in your experience. It seems to me that many feminist men have conveniently forgotten that feminism means more than reading a book, washing the dishes and not participating in sexual violence. Being a feminist involves inconvenient, humbling, caring solidarity; dismantling cisheteropatriarchal systems of power, including those which are mobilised internally. True solidarity involves men facing the discomfort of feeling, thinking, speaking, listening, acting and relating differently.

Speaking of solidarity, I wonder if you are involved with any feminist groups or organising yourself. Could channelling your own feelings into action free up some space in your mind?

Attending the Pelicot trial alongside feminist activists, Garcia notes how horror can transform into the galvanising experience of mutual recognition:

“I devoured every article I could find on the subject … all I thought about was her, then, that bedroom in Mazan. And now, on this fine winter’s morning in Provence, I can see other women here are just as caught up in the trail as I am, and feel just as strongly as I do that something of their own lives is at stake.”

Like Garcia, you feel something of your own life was at stake in that trial. So do I. I think your letter will speak to many more women than you might expect.