A few weeks ago, I started dating a guy called Fred. We met at a friend’s party during my year abroad and started meeting up, going for meals and coffee until eventually we got together. And then I realised that, when it came to the bedroom, he was a bit of a dick.

This really, really took me aback. We’d been getting on so well, spending hours just chatting to each other every time we met up. He made me laugh, he seemed to get me, really listening when I spoke and asking me to expand if he could sense I was holding back. Basically, he didn’t fit the profile of ‘I am going to treat you like a piece of meat in bed’. We’d bonded over talking about meditation and Buddhist philosophy for Christ’s sake.

When we kissed for the first time though, I realised he was holding my face quite hard. It was like he was worried I might move away and he needed to hold me still. He clutched my neck. He wasn’t strangling me – I could still breathe. But he was exerting quite a lot of pressure and I wasn’t into it.

This is just one example of the kind of things which made me feel more and more uncomfortable. I liked this guy. I wanted to be with him. But the way he was going about it made me nervous and increasingly scared. I generally like being with someone who’s decisive, but it’s always come with trust. Previous experiences were enjoyable for me as well, and not just a way for the other person to get what they wanted.

I didn’t have sex with him. Even though I’d been thinking about it all week, there was something in the way he seemed ready to flip me over and fuck me like a leaky surfboard that made me put the brakes on.

I was sure there had been a misunderstanding at some point, and that this was a temporary glitch. He’d done nothing to hurt me, after all. But he wasn’t listening to what I wanted, and seemed to be enforcing what he wanted. So the next time we saw each other, I told him that sometimes he held me a bit too hard. He sighed, exasperated, and told me I was the first women to complain. He had a lot more experience than me anyway, so what did I know? He then started making jokes about how he was supposedly ‘brutalising’ me.

The experience gave me a glimpse of how hard it can be to speak up when someone is not taking what you want seriously – especially if you want to be with that person, however misguidedly. I seriously doubted my automatic unwillingness to sleep with this guy and my concern for how he was treating me, because it entirely went against the connection that I’d thought we had. Unfortunately, there’s no fog horn to sound the alarm. It’s just you and your feelings versus the other person – you have to listen to yourself and choose when or whether to say ‘no’.

The topic of consent is very black and white, and so it should be. No means no. But I’m not talking about strictly non-consensual sex. If I’d had sex with this guy, it would have been consensual, but it would have also been very traumatic. It would have involved me silencing my own alarm bells because… because I didn’t want to make this an issue, because I wanted to follow through with what I’d started, because I wanted us to be together and for our sex life to be easy. And I wonder how many women do go through with things they don’t want to, without saying anything, and are left feeling violated.

It’s a judgement call. Sometimes we may feel awkward or unsure at the beginning of sex, but then go on to enjoy it. The important thing is feeling that the other person respects your body and will respect your wishes, whether they differ from theirs or change during sexual intimacy. Being open about how you feel will ultimately only help your relationship or, like in my case, reveal flaws that you needed to see.

Some names have been changed