I’ve been thinking about this constantly and it’s driving me insane about whether I’m a horrible person or not.

I’m a sophomore in college, and a couple months ago I went to a casual birthday party for a friend with a decent amount of people there. I’m not super sexually experienced or anything, I’m not a virgin but my first time was not that long ago (like a year and a half) and other than that all I’ve really done was make out a couple times. Anyways, at the party I was having a pretty decent time, drinking and playing some games, etc. Eventually I was decently drunk but not drunk enough to black out or forget too much of anything like that. 

Anyways, as I’m standing at the table playing this game, a girl i’ve never seen before comes over next to me and starts playing. Eventually the ball gets to her and she’s doing pretty bad so I make a small lighthearted joke about it and the game continues, etc. Well, eventually the game ends and the she introduces herself to me and we start talking. Within a couple of minutes she starts dancing on me and, without being able to believe my luck at how quickly this is happening, I reciprocate. Eventually she asks me where I live and I guess I was drunk enough to think we were on my floor so I say “just down the hall.” A minute later she asks if I want to go to my room and I say sure.

We start walking to my room and eventually I realize we’re not on my floor, so I acknowledge it and she seems a little surprised but I ask her if she’s good and she says yeah so we keep going.   (just up 2 floors). Well... we get to my room, pretty soon we start kissing, and things go from there. At one point she asks me if she can see her phone for a second to text her friends (who are probably a little concerned), so I hand it to her and tell her what room we’re in so she can tell them. I take that opportunity to text my roommate not to come in for a little bit. After that she says okay, hands me her phone to put back on the table, and we resume kissing. At this point, clothes start coming off and all that. 

During all this she’s acting perfectly normal, it’s only been like a minute since she spoke to me clearly and she certainly doesn’t seem super drunk or anything like that. In fact, I assumed she was less drunk than I was and kind of felt as if I was just along for the ride (not that I was complaining!). At this point a lot of our clothes are off but at that point I was specifically reminding myself that I would not have sex with her because I didn’t have any condoms at the time. In fact, she asked me if I had any and I said “no I don’t, sorry.” I was just making out with her in sort of a “missionary” position for like a minute until I decided I should go down on her or something considering my lack of condoms, so I did.

I did so, and it was pretty normal almost all the way through. She sounded like she was enjoying it, etc. Eventually she even put her hand on top of my head and kept it there for a couple minutes, which I felt good about. At the end, though, I started to feel a little pressure on my head. Eventually it built up a little bit and i realized “wow she must be trying to guide me, I’m dumb” so I let her move my head back up to her where I was looking at her again. Retrospectively I should’ve been more dubious or whatever you would call it, but at the time I kinda just assumed she was taking a more dominant role now and things were moving on so I went with it. I got up on top of her again like before and was right about to kiss her when she looked like she realized something and asked where here phone was, so i reaches over and handed it to her again. This is where I really screwed up and it makes me cringe just typing it in retrospect, but at the time I decided it might hot if I did a something while she was texting her friend so I kind of just tried to do something with my fingers, slowly at first and then a little faster. All of the stuff in my room happened in the span of like 20 minutes, and since she hadn’t really hesitated to communicate with me the whole night, like when she struck up a conversation at the beginning or asked if I had a condom, I just wasn’t thinking in a very cautious way.

All of a sudden she loudly says STOP!! and scares the absolute shit out of me so I immediately get off, apologize, etc. and she asks me where here panties are so I hand them to her and put on my own pants. She walks out of the room and I feel really terrible because I don’t know what went wrong so I kinda just sit there for a minute before I decide to go on a walk to try and make myself feel better. Eventually I go to sleep and I wake up the next morning and try to tell myself it happens, everybody makes mistakes in the sack sometimes, now i know. Well, about a month later i see a letter with my name on it sitting on the floor as I’m going to the bathroom.

I opened it up and my heart literally just stopped for a couple of seconds because something I never thought would happen to me happened and now I’m the type of guy people (including me) express their disgust with all the time. The letter was her saying how she can’t believe I sexually assaulted her, how she now had anxiety from the experience, and how I was the “most unfeeling person she had ever met.” I was completely shocked as she relayed her side of the experience, which apparently was that she became very scared at some point while I was going down on her and I guess when she put her hand on my head it wasn’t so friendly after all. I literally felt sick when I realized that, from her perspective, I basically forced myself on her after that because I thought that’s what she wanted. The worst part is that I didn’t even realize until she told me to stop. The letter describes her going home to her parents because of the experience and the knowledge that people out there have this perception of me actually makes me want to die.

I had to go in the bathroom to read all of it cause I didn’t want my roommate to see me hyperventilating like that but it was bad man. That feeling has never left me a month later and it seems like every single waking moment where I’m feeling a little happy my brain will just bring up that letter again and i’ll end up going through that whole night again in my head trying to make sense of it all. I’m on a trip with my parents right now for Christmas Break but I’ve literally not been able to think about anything else and i can’t help but feel like I have no future anymore. I have tons of (normal) problems to sort through in my life right now but career paths and everything else are starting to feel so meaningless when i feel that i can never look at myself positively again. I haven’t even told anyone about this in real life because i’m too afraid of what will happen to me at a place where it’s super common to spread rumors about any guy who’s had allegations like this. I’ve heard about an alarming amount of allegations and it’s not like I even go to a super fratty school which encourages that kind of rape culture, my school is generally known for having happy students but it seems like super often i hear about another guy i know of getting dragged by my friends for having some type of bad experience with a girl. I used to participate too but now I’m questioning everything around me and i can’t express it to anyone else because i’m scared of losing the ability to have any meaningful relationships with people. What if everyone i meet always has that thought of me as a rapist in the back of their mind, just like I’ve had with guys i know of who have been accused? The school I go to is really small so that’s not even a very paranoid thought. This experience is like a wedge between me and every person or goal I care about and i’ve honestly never felt so alienated in my life. 

I don’t know if what I did makes me a bad person or not, and I can’t help but feeling like I might deserve all this because of what she must’ve gone through but it’s up to you guys to decide now or at least give me some input because I literally can’t sit here one more second without getting it off my chest somehow. Sorry for the length but there it is.

