Every relationship, romantic or otherwise, has an assumed base level of consent. There is always going to be some level of interaction which doesn’t require constant asking in order for the relationship to work. i know we are in an era where we are somehow expected to ask verbal permission every time for everything, but that is unrealistic.
For people who are dating, sleeping together is usually an assumed level of consent. If I’m dating someone and they are already asleep and we usually share a bed, it is not necessary for me to wake them up in order to sleep in our shared bed.
Some couples have a baseline consent of cuddling together. One of my best friends will lay her head on me without asking permission, and that’s somewhere around our baseline consent level. Some people would want verbal consent every time, but we are both comfortable with that without needing to ask 30 times a day. After a while, it evolves to be an assumed level of consent.
The problem with what people are expected to do now breeds an unstable and unrealistic relationship model. It is up to each couple to determine where that line is. I cannot say that a line which has worked in one of my relationships is the line which every couple should use. It’s both unrealistic and patriarchal.
The way we can determine whether someone is consistently violating another’s consent boundary is if there is a consistent and egregious moving past the established line for that relationship without verbal consent. It’s more complicated, but its also more realistic.
There also needs to be a statute of limitations for most transgressions, because we cannot live our lives worrying if a relationship we had 20 years ago will someday come up and claim things which might not be true. It’s complicated. We need to stop pretending this is a simple issue.
Consent can of course always be rescinded, but I think we need to seriously think about how to design a reasonable way of looking at consent and I do not think we have reached it yet. There is more work to be done.