QUESTION: A month ago, my boyfriend and I got very drunk and he started taking pictures of me while we were having sex.
It was all very funny until I woke up the next day and asked him to delete them, and he refused. He kept teasing me and said that now he could do anything he wanted to me because he always had this hold over me, and threatened to put them on Facebook.
I know he was only joking, and I don't think he'd ever do it, but I now feel paranoid about these pictures. When I ask him to delete them, he just laughs and turns it into a joke. What can I do?
Yours sincerely, Carys
ANSWER: There are some people who use teasing as a way of communicating. It seems to be one of the only ways they can make emotional contact with others. Giving someone a dig in a tender place and getting a rise out of them is a way of getting emotional attention. A bit of knowing laughter and a complicit acknowledgement of what's going on makes them feel close, but if that's not forthcoming, a spurt of anger or, even pain, can also make them feel more secure and, in an odd way, loved.
I have a near-pathological horror of any hint of teasing and I either burst into tears or throw a wobbly of major proportions. Criticism I can take, or even grumpiness or anger, but teasing is like torture. Reason goes out of the window.
In your case, however, this is not mere teasing about your propensity to be late, or the fact that you're fussy about how your eggs are done. Your boyfriend has got a major hold over you and he obviously loves not only the power that this gives him, but also the way he can get you emotionally close, even in anger, and upset at the drop of a hat. He only has to point to his phone with a wink, and I imagine your blood pressure rises at once in a vertical line.
Many people advise that the best thing to do with teasing is to ignore it. “Don't rise to the bait,” they say. But we all know what happens then. The bait gets bigger and bigger and more and more cruel until, eventually, you can't help but lose it. And I suspect that, however hard one tries not to rise to the bait, there are tiny evidences of discomfort that can't be disguised. Slight flushing of the face. Pupils going a different shape. Slightly different tone of voice.
So the method you need to employ is coldness. That is the opposite reaction to what teasers want. I would say, calmly and rationally, that you don't like being teased and if he goes on like this and refuses to delete the photographs, it's over. If you can summon up the inner Scottish headmistress. This is the tone that's needed. He'll probably give in, but, later, he may well say he was only pretending. At this point, you walk out.
The other thing you can do is to call his bluff. Describe the situation in front of mutual friends. Say that while having sex, he took some photographs of you and refuses to delete them. They will be horrified and he will be unnerved at being socially shamed.
You could, also, simply pinch his phone and delete the photographs yourself.
Legally, he can't put them on Facebook. But do you want a man around who threatens such a thing, even in joke?
I'd drop him like a stone.
The Independent