Is withholding information that would reverse consent assault?
Hi everyone!
Recently I(22 F) have been thinking a lot about something that happened in a previous relationship and would like some input on it. For context, I should mention that when I was 16 I was sexually assaulted(not by the partner in this relationship I am talking about).
When I was 19 I was in a year long relationship with a guy I had known since I was 10. Our relationship was not very healthy and neither of us were happy for the last half of it though we loved eachother a lot. We no longer talk to eachother and haven’t since a couple of weeks after the break up, but we have mutual friends from our childhood and have seen eachother at parties since the break up. About 8 months into our relationship we got into a fight resulting in us having a serious conversation about our relationship. He told me he was unhappy to which I asked him if he wanted to break up and he said “I don’t know”. We continued to talk about it and I asked him again later in the conversation if he wanted to break up and he gave me the same response. The conversation concluded in us deciding to stay together and work on our relationship.
Four months later, he broke up with me, and this felt very sudden for me. A week or so after us breaking up he told me that when we got into that fight and had that conversation about our relationship four months prior, he knew he wanted to break up with me but couldn’t figure out how. He said that he loved me but didn’t want to hurt me and was afraid of how I would react. It feels selfish that he stayed with me because he was scared but neglected me for those 4 months.
Within a week of him telling me that I began to feel so violated and betrayed by him. For 4 months I continued to have sex with him while he withheld information(that he didn’t want to be with me and intended to break up with me) that would have reversed my consent. I know myself well enough to know that if I had known he wanted to break up with me I wouldn’t have continued to consent to having sex with him. He knew that I had previously been sexually assaulted but evidently was not mindful of how his actions would impact me given my past. He also had previous partners who had been assaulted so I know he was not new to this.
It has now been two and a half years since we broke up, but the whole time this has been something I have continually revisited. It is painful to think of that as having been assault as I loved him so much. Would you consider this to have been assault? If so, should I tell him about how I feel?
Posted Jun 13, 2026, 11:39 PM UTC