Note: The following essay contains descriptions of sexual assault and abuse.
They sent me off to be raped, with a party and a tube of K-Y Jelly.
The lubricant was to reduce the intense physical pain they explained I would endure while being penetrated by a stranger-turned-husband, without foreplay, without consent. Every month. Until death do us part.
The party — a low-budget wedding in 1995 at a Brooklyn venue aptly nicknamed Armpit Terrace — was to distract me from the horrific reality of my forced marriage to the stranger.
“Mazel tov!” they told me, beaming.
In the reclusive Orthodox Jewish community in New York City where I grew up, choices about whether, when and whom I would marry did not belong to me. At home and at the all-girls religious school I attended, where I learned to cook and sew and keep house, I was groomed from early childhood to expect a teen marriage to a stranger my family and a matchmaker would choose for me.
I was allowed to meet the stranger several times before my engagement, but I was not allowed to be alone with him nor to have any physical contact with him. I was a clueless 19-year-old who had never been allowed to “talk to a boy,” and suddenly I was given a matter of hours, over a period of a few weeks, to answer my family and his family and the matchmaker and everyone in the community standing there, tapping their feet, looking at their watches, waiting for me to tell them: You’ll marry this man we chose for you, right?
“No” was never really an option.
During my six-week engagement, I still was not allowed to be alone with the groom nor to have any physical contact with him, which left more time for me to begin experiencing the myriad other abuses that come with a forced marriage.
First, a virginity exam. The groom’s rabbi sent me to an Orthodox Jewish gynecologist, where I was instructed to disrobe, get on the examination table and put my feet in the stirrups. The doctor inserted her gloved fingers into my vagina and confirmed that my hymen was intact.
“Mazel tov!” she told me, beaming.
I attended one-on-one bridal classes, where the curriculum centered on the requirement that I have unprotected sex with my husband on my wedding night and on a monthly basis thereafter. A lifetime of rape.
Yes, the rapes probably would hurt, the bridal class teacher explained. Hence the K-Y Jelly.
“Mazel tov!” she told me, beaming.
My stranger-turned-husband turned out to be violent and abusive. I learned this exactly one week after our wedding, when he became enraged because he had woken up late, and he punched his fist through the wall — hard enough to leave a sizable hole.
His first threat to kill me came only days later. Soon these threats became more frequent, specific and gruesome. He was brimming with creative ideas for how he would end my life, and he took the time to describe them to me in vivid detail. A lifetime of fear.
Yet I was trapped.
