that safe place

Sometimes I need my lover to hold me absolutely safe.  And I mean safe from judgment, safe from anger, and with complete acceptance of my flawed self.  When Jos did this for me Tuesday night, it took a toll on him.  He tried to reassure me without saying anything actually untrue, but found later that, despite his efforts, he had promised me things he couldn’t live up to (for instance, not to judge me in particular ways).

How can you reconcile this human need to be absolutely loved and accepted with the simple fact that your lover is a human being who of course will judge you, get irritated or impatient with you, notice your flaws and find them inconvenient?  When Jos is upset and needs comfort I am all about reassuring him that I am his friend, that I just love him, that I want good things for him.  But of course I can’t do that all the time.  Conflict is inevitable and just.

What I told him on Wednesday when he brought up his concerns from Tuesday (about having promised me things he couldn’t live up to) was that I just want him to have a safe space for me in his heart.  (He verified that he does.  Of course he does.)  And I want to be able to access that safe space.  But “promises” made during that access are unrealistic and aren’t meant to be enforceable.  “Don’t judge me” is as meaningless a request as “Don’t think anymore” or “Stop wanting.”

It is because it is so meaningless that I think it should be safe to ask for.  As long as all parties understand and know that it’s talking about a feeling in the moment and not about a real permanent thing, it’s a perfectly good thing to ask for and receive as a reassurance.  And sometimes it is exactly what one needs to hear.  At this moment I do not judge you.  At this moment I hold you safe.

how it went down

When I woke up Wednesday morning, I saw that Joscelin had written a post the previous night.  Neato!  He never posts!  I was excited to read it.

It was this post.

I was hurt and angry pretty much all day.  Once he logged onto IM, we talked a bit, and I let him know I wasn’t taking it very well.  I had school that night, so I wouldn’t get home until 9:15 or so, which was something of a mercy.  Every time I was alone all day, and occasionally when I wasn’t, I cried.

When I got home that night, he took a look at me and was like, “Wow.”  He told me he’d been really eager for me to get home all night.  He told me he loved me.  He wanted to talk (as did I, I suppose) so I changed into something comfortable and got something to drink and sat down.  It turned out that he’d written a follow-up post, so I went and read that as well.  It was not hurtful.

To make a long story short, I was just a basketcase.  I was able to say some rational things.  I agreed that he should have posted as he did, given how he felt.  But the post basically hit all of my buttons and fears.  I always have an underlying fear that, no matter how happy Jos seems, no matter how fantastic he says I am (and, oh, he does), he’s secretly angry, resentful, and building up grievances.  And, well…it’s hard not to have that idea reinforced by the post.

I did badly, but I did the best that I could.  I did not say the vast majority of the hurtful, passive-aggressive thoughts in my head.  I did not ask him the nonsensical but burning questions like “Why do you hate me so much?”  (That sentence, incidentally, sounds exactly like something my mom would say, which is terrifying.)

When I had become significantly better, we got into bed and I got comforted a bunch more.  I extracted ridiculous promises like that he wouldn’t hold various admissions against me later.  I cried a lot.  But in the end, I felt better.  Things were OK again.  We had a little sex.

Last night, I offered to buy him dinner, and I picked him up at his office.  (He usually takes the bus.)  Since I’m still teaching him how to drive, I let him drive us to dinner.  And he showed signs of stress right away.  I assumed it was about the driving, but wasn’t sure why, since he was driving well, and I wasn’t being more skittish or obnoxiously instructive than usual.  But he was clearly getting kind of freaked out, and this only increased as we crossed the parking lot to the restaurant.

I stopped in the parking lot to ask him what was wrong.  He said he didn’t know.  I gave him a hug, and confirmed that it was all right to go eat.

He was increasingly non-communicative in the restaurant, and kept shaking his head at himself.

“What’s up?” I finally asked.

“I have no idea,” he said.

“Is that true?”

“No,” he said, which made me smile.  He added that he wasn’t totally sure and wasn’t, in any case, sure how to express it.

So we sat in silence while I tried not to imagine him saying various horrible things to me.  Meanwhile we ordered and received food.

When he finally did start talking, he was angry.  He was angry that I’d reacted so strongly to the post the previous day.  He was angry that it was so hard for him to communicate his concerns to me and that he’d spent so long not doing it and that he was afraid he still wouldn’t be able to.

“You don’t want to go back there,” I said.

“I’m not not there,” he said angrily.  “There’s no back.”

I had decided that I deserved his anger and I would try to take it.

At some point, having expressed a bit of this anger, he said, “I’m sorry,” and he looked it.

“What are you sorry for?” I asked.  “What the hell are you sorry for?”

I can’t remember what he said.

“Don’t be sorry,” I said.  “If you’re sorry now, you’ll just be more angry later.  So stay angry.  Just stay angry.  Don’t be sorry.  I don’t need it.  It doesn’t do me any good.”

“Thank you,” he said.  He was clearly sort of impressed with my little flash of coolness.

“So just stay mad,” I said.

“It’s hard when you’re so reasonable.”  We laughed a bit.

Then the conversation continued.  I was having a hard time not crying much.  When we saw the waiter again, I asked him for a couple of boxes and the check, and we got out of there as quickly as we reasonably could.

At home, more talking.  I apologized for the previous day, while also saying that I actually did the best I could.  It’s hard to apologize under those circumstances, because you’re basically overtly asking the other person to accept you with your flaws.  But mostly I listened, which I’m glad I was able to do.  He said a lot of things, some of which were unfair, most of which he knew were unfair.  (He also declared some things to be unfair that I felt were perfectly fair.)  He felt a lot better afterwards.  The evening again ended in bed with a little sex, though he noted that he wasn’t sure we were quite done with this, and suspected that one or the other of us might have a little more to say.

I don’t know how I feel.  A bit tired, a little bit angry or something.  We used to have these conversations more frequently, where he would vent a lot of discontents.  They were hard on me.  I guess he stopped doing that on purpose and it’s been hurting him (naturally).  He has to communicate with me; there really isn’t another option, no matter how badly I handle it (which I will work on, but it’s not like I haven’t been trying).

At the same time, part of me resents that this has to happen.  I do not build up frustrations all the time and then need to periodically tell him all the many, many ways that he sucks and isn’t meeting my needs.  (To be clear, that’s not the intent of his communication either, but it’s definitely what I hear.)  And I seriously doubt there is anything I could do, or anything I could be, much less anything I am willing to do or be, that would remove his need to do that.  So I am just kind of trapped with having to periodically be vented at.  And having to take it and be cool or else I’m preventing necessary communication.  And having to not turn into an insecure basketcase because of it since otherwise we can’t have the good hot sex.

So I don’t know.  I guess we’ll muddle through for now.

another point of view

For a different take on our relationship, don’t miss one of Joscelin’s rare posts.

“I am your friend”

Friday night, Joscelin and I had a fun scene, but Saturday night was strange.

Neither of us felt that great, so we went to have dinner, and planned to come home afterwards and have some nice sex while avoiding any intense bdsm.  But at dinner, Jos felt increasingly bad, I guess, and went into a mode where every exhale was a sigh, and he didn’t really hear (or at least respond to) anything that I said.  And I basically got very irritated but didn’t say anything – just shut down and (not too obviously) stopped talking much.

On the short drive home, I proposed a stop at the grocery store, which instigated yet more sighing, and eventually I stopped at home, sent him up to get bags, and went without him.  I was pissed, but couldn’t figure out whether it was at all reasonable.  Yes, sighing with literally every breath is annoying, but was I actually just mad at him for feeling sick?  At any rate, the irritation wasn’t really going away.  I was glad to have left him at home.

Earlier in the evening, he had expressed hope of having some time to clean his room that night (and I had chided him that we had a date), so he worked on that while I was at the store.  When I got home, I put up my groceries and sat down to watch an episode of Project Runway.  I didn’t know if he would come out and want to have the rest of our date or what.  I kind of wanted to get out of the date but without having a fight or whatever.  I don’t know what I wanted.  (I also really did not feel good physically.)

Around the time my show was done, he came out of his room to resume our date.  We went into my room and I had us lie down together in my bed.  We got naked or nearly so.  He lay on his back and I rested my head on his chest with his arms around me.  It felt nice to touch and be touched.  It was warm and reassuring.

He started telling me about his evening, because he was distressed and wasn’t sure whether cleaning his room had been all right or whether I was angry that he’d abandoned our date or what.  He sounded like he was going to cry, though he never did.  I told him about my evening – the anger and so on – making sure to be clear that I wasn’t sure my anger had been fair at all, but that I was just describing my experience.

But the important thing that I said was this: I am your friend. I said it more than once.  I am your friend. I said it while I stroked his stomach with my hand.

I’m not sure I can explain why the words have the impact they do, but they feel important to say and to hear.  A friend is someone who cares about you.  A friend is not mainly about demanding or needing things from you.  A friend wants good things to happen to you.  A friend is there for you.

I really am Joscelin’s friend, and it helped him a lot to hear it.

dom killed the switch

My desire to bottom has been waning for months, and I have a hypothesis about why.

No, I don’t think it’s that dominating Joscelin has permanently changed my innate sexuality.  Nor do I think that I was a dom all along and not a bottom at all and just confused, though I kind of like that idea.

I think it’s that I’m just too fucking harsh.  You see, I used to have a particular idea of bottoming – the kind that appeals to me.  But the way that I top Joscelin is much more strict, difficult, and demanding than what I want.  And I think I’m basically too scared of myself to want to bottom.

It’s silly in a way.  It’s not as though, were I to bottom to someone, they would treat me like I treat Jos.  We would forge our own appropriate dynamic and do things that were mutually enjoyable.  But kind of the default idea of how it looks in my head has become what Jos and I do, and that is some scary shit.

There’s more.  It used to be that the mind of a dom was somewhat blank to me.  I didn’t really think, or need to think, about what they got out of it.  But now that I know how I feel, I wonder how anyone could get anything out of topping me the way I like to be topped.  I feel like they’d just essentially be either doing me a favor (which is fine) or trying to seduce me into something heavier, which gets into the scary zone.

Nonsense, of course.  But it’s kind of interesting to watch the process in my head.

thankful for the non-idiots in my life

The three people I am closest to in the world – Joscelin, my best friend, and my dear friend and ex-roommate – all have their good and less-good points.  But one thing I value in all of them is that we are capable of coming to similar conclusions about information, and all of us value fairness and accuracy in discussing factual and empirical and even interpretive issues.

We are all capable of prefacing a piece of information by saying “I think I read this somewhere credible but I have no idea where” or “according to a few studies I’ve seen recently” or “this is probably apocryphal, but a cute story” or in some other way giving indication, even in casual conversation, about our degree of certainty and the “sourcedness” of what we’re saying.

We are all likely to use definitions or criteria when we talk.

We are all willing to identify ethical values we have that are coming into play and that others may not share.

We definitely do not always agree.  Our values differ.  Our interpretations and guesses about some things do as well.  But we can always have a satisfying discussion that gets at the actual points of difference.

I am immensely thankful that I’ve been able to surround myself with people who are, well, not idiots.

chivalry

In Jos’s last relationship, one of the protocols was that he hold open doors for his mistress. When we discussed this very early on in my relationship, I asked him to please not do that. I said, “Of course I don’t want you to let go of the door in my face – just treat me like you would another person in general. Don’t go out of your way to open doors for me.”

When we go out, I almost always pay, for the simple reason that he is kind of a starving grad student and really can’t afford to go out at the frequency I prefer. At some point, I’d like for it to be more even. But the truth is, if I had to choose a direction of imbalance, I think I slightly prefer this one. (It’s hard to say because, frankly, money is nice too. I like to keep mine. But psychologically I prefer paying to being paid for.)

Once, the guy at our local bdsm club who I call Diet Pepsi Asshole (after a different angry incident) yelled at me, calling me a “fucking idiot” when I ventured to say that I am not a fan of chivalrous behavior. Most other people in the room also disagreed with me, though much more politely.

Axe recently had a post about a bit of (perhaps) intended findom gone awry, and a commenter named MJ had this to say, among other things:

I’m not entirely sure why for female domination there is an implicit expectation (in heterosexual relationships especially) that the female dominant is supposed to be paid for by the male submissive and not vice versa. While in female sub and male dominant relationships, the expectation is reversed – either the male sub typically provides for the female sub and/or has strct control over their finances/financial choices. Since I’ve mostly been involved with the queer community when it comes to BDSM, this dynamic is totally blurred and depends entirely on ther pairing, but as a female dominant that has been pro/non-pro and has played with female/male partners, I’ve found that my female subs expect/hope to be cared for/’spoiled’ financially while the male subs expect the exact opposite – and I’ve always wondered…. What accounts for this difference and am I unconsciously enforcing it somehow? Why is financial dominantion such a feminized kink, why is there sort of a tacit expectation that the male sub will overly indulge/gift/etc.

And, yeah, that. What is with that?

In the vanilla dating world, when a personal ad says something like “I want to treat a lady right” or anything about spoiling, I am so not interested. It makes me feel really icky.

Anyway, that’s just something to know about my relationship with Joscelin. We don’t do chivalry. I’d rather do it than be on the receiving end of it.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I have nothing against people pursuing their own preferences in this realm. Everyone is different. Duh.)

perfection

Last night, Joscelin and I had our first intense pain scene in quite a while.

I had suggested earlier that we start around 9.  And around that time, he walked into my room, freshly showered, naked, and collared, and knelt at my desk with his hands behind his back and his head down.  I told him to close his eyes and wait for me to return, and I went and brushed my teeth.  (I’m so considerate.)

I stood in front of him where he was kneeling, put my hands on both sides of his head, and said, “The way you came in here and presented yourself?  Naked, kneeling here, in my service…that was beautiful.  I really like that.  Thank you.”

He had a hard-on.

I had said earlier that I would restrain him, but that I had no particular plans after that.  So I had him lie on his back in the bed.  I put shackles on his wrists and ankles.  I attached the spreader bar to his ankles, spreading his legs, and then I used a few carabiners to attach his wrist shackles to the eye bolt at the head of the bed.  I then allowed him to adjust his vertical position on the bed to whatever felt most comfortable before I connected a chain from each end of the spreader bar to the corresponding bed post, under the bed, to make sure his legs couldn’t move anywhere.

When I’d had him lie down, I’d asked him how he was feeling.  And he’d told me he was feeling really great, and added that if we were going to have an intense scene, this would be a good time for it.

There is something just fantastic about the way he looks with his hands held above his head.  It’s much sexier than having them pinned out to the sides, somehow.  And it looks (and is) very helpless.  I spent some time just talking softly to him and kissing him and touching his chest and arms.  I bit the inside of his left upper arm, in a very controlled way, which hurt him pretty bad, but I was listening carefully for how he managed it.  He breathed very well and I praised him for that.

“Is this going to be bad?” he asked.

I thought a minute, and then said, “Yes.”

“I’m afraid of you.”

“Good,” I said.  “You should be.  But you’re staying very calm and I appreciate that.”

I was turned on, and dizzy from the exchange we’d had.  I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, peering down into the storage box that contains all of our toys and implements, considering what to hurt him with, and how I wanted to do it.

I chose this doubled-over leather strap that I know is disproportionately loud compared to how much it hurts.  I knelt at his side and told him I was going to start a bit slow.  And I started beating the insides of his thighs with it.  His breathing was incredibly steady and controlled.  I made sure to praise him for it.

I know that one of his fears is that I don’t want him to manage things.  He feels (and we talked about this after the scene) that I push him to “fail” (by which he means lose control).  And it’s true that I often do push until he can’t handle it and is just panicked, but I don’t view that as a failure.  It’s just what I want sometimes.  But I was trying not to go there.  It seems like I don’t really get what I want by going that route, even though it feels like what I want.

“Mistress?” he asked.  “Does it serve you best for me to handle this the best I can?”

“Yes,” I said, looking him in the eyes.

“Does it really?”

“Yes, really.”

He said later that it helped him.

I was starting to hit him harder with the strap.  I listened carefully to his breathing and responses and timed the blows slow enough that he could handle them without panicking.  I could hear that I was hurting him.

After a couple of minutes, I stopped and said, “You can rest for a little while.”  I was ready to hit him with something new, but I wasn’t sure what yet.  I lay down next to him and stroked him some more, and kissed him.  And then I picked out the wooden cane from the box.

“This will hurt more,” I said.

I gave him a few lighter taps on the inside of each thigh, and then began to hit him harder.  I was again listening carefully to his breathing, and making sure to wait long enough between strokes that he was able to stay relatively calm.  He was sweating a bit.

“Mistress, if I don’t moan a few seconds after the stroke, will you still know that it keeps hurting for a long time afterwards?” he asked.

“Yes, I will,” I said.  “Though I wouldn’t have remembered that if you hadn’t said it.”

“It’s not always true.  It depends on the circumstances.”

“All right.  But yes, I will know.”

He told me later that what happened after this was that he didn’t feel he needed to communicate with me by intentionally moaning, and when he stopped doing that, somehow a natural level of moaning asserted itself, and then he found, or felt, that this was enough to communicate with me.

I kept hitting his thighs pretty hard, and I kept it firmly in mind that the pain from the strokes was lasting, and I kept paying very close attention.  I had my left hand covering his balls so that I wouldn’t hit them.  I really didn’t hit him this way very many times – perhaps 10 or 15 on each thigh.  That can be a lot on the receiving end, of course.

Then I said, “I want a really good one, one on each side.  But I will give you plenty of time to recover and feel it inbetween.”

I think he whimpered.

I did the left thigh, a heavy blow, using something close to all of my force.  And then I watched and listened to him process it.  It was so hot, just savoring that.  (Writing this is making me dizzy.)  When I felt he was ready, I laid the cane across his right inner thigh, and said, “Here comes this one.”  And since I was on that side of him, kneeling on the bed, it was a really wicked stroke – I was able to get a lot of force into it.  It broke his skin in the manner of a hickey, leaving two red trails.  He moaned fiercely.  I was done.

I told him I was finished hurting him (or he asked; I forget which) but that I would make him fuck me.  I carefully unchained him, and then he was freezing cold, and I covered us both with a sheet and blanket and held him super close.  I was full of savage tenderness towards him.

After a few minutes, we fucked.  I made him come on my signal (though I also made him fuck me hard, so he actually came a bit early, but I was willing to make the trade-off).  I wanted to rip his arms off during the fucking, but instead I just pulled him towards me and kissed the fuck out of him.

When he was able to pry himself off of me, a bit after coming, I said, “This is aftercare now,” and he thanked me for the clarity.  We lay really close together, face to face, and he was full of mixed emotions, and we both felt amazing, and we had the conversation I mentioned earlier about how I “push him to fail,” and I cried just slightly, but I wasn’t feeling bad, just tearful.  I got him some chocolate chips that were like rapture for him to eat.

The whole thing was just fantastic.  Perfect.

bondage

Last night, Joscelin practiced tying me up.  It didn’t go completely well, either in practical or in emotional terms.

At some point, I was standing up, and he was trying to do a kind of chest harness, and then he worked on something with the ropes on the outsides of my arms.  When I felt something like a tourniquet around my left upper arm, I said it was kind of freaking me out.  He was trying to get specifics from me, but I couldn’t actually see how the ropes were positioned, so it was difficult to ascertain if the right arm was really different.

He was already frustrated by finding that, for instance, I can’t put my arms behind my back with my wrists overlapping.  And he was kind of teasing himself about the different little mistakes he was making, and I was doing the same.

“I’m not like this,” he said.  “I’m not an asshole.”

Assuming he meant that he thought he was being an asshole, which wasn’t like him, I said, “I don’t think you’re an asshole.  You’re doing fine.”

“I’m not like this when you’re tying me up,” he said.

“Oh.  That’s what you meant,” I said, realizing that he was calling me an asshole.  I started to cry a little.  He was behind me, taking the ropes off.

“I need to be alone,” he said.  And then, “Do you need me?”  And then, “That’s great, tell you I need to be alone, then ask if you need me.”  He was holding me warmly from behind.

“I’m OK,” I said.  “I’ll be OK.”  He kept holding me, so I added, “I promise.”

He went into the living room and I flopped onto the bed.  I could have gone into the spiral of “he hates me, he’s mad at me” but sometimes in serious situations, I just don’t go there.  Instead I kind of catalogued responses to things he might say.  Responses like tell me what you want me to do.  Or, no I didn’t.  I figured he would probably come back angry and I would have to calmly respond to whatever he said to me.  I got up after a couple of minutes and started surfing the Internet.

When he came back, he said, “I wasn’t being fair.  I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK,” I said.

We talked just a bit more while he read a bondage book, sitting on the bed.

“I feel like I have to be a bad-ass,” he said.  He was feeling pressured to be good at the bondage.

“I know the feeling,” I said, smirking at our shared experience.

“I don’t know why you saying that makes me so angry,” he said.  Oops.

“I don’t expect you to be a bad-ass,” I said a moment later.

“I don’t expect you to either!”

“I know that,” I said.  I resisted the urge to snarkily note that he’d have to be an idiot to expect me to be any good at ropes, given our experiences together.

“Did I misunderstand what you said?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “It wasn’t like that.”

After that, we continued with the bondage, and things went pretty smoothly.  At some point he was again making a joking remark about himself.  I opened my mouth to speak, then thought better of it, and he pressed me to tell him what I was going to say.

“It’s just, as you’ve observed with me,” I said, “when you joke and cricitize yourself it encourages me to do the same thing.  And it seems like it’s being hard for you emotionally when I do that.”

“Thank you,” he said.  “Thank you for saying that.  Seriously.”

I spent the rest of tying-up being as docile as I could manage.  Near the end, I noticed I was angry at the way he was treating my body – without regard, it seemed, for the sensations things would cause.  He moved rope too fast.  He handled my leg like it was a stick.  He didn’t realize that putting pressure on the back of my knee would make me jump.  I didn’t tell him about this anger until today, because it just didn’t seem productive.

He eventually tired of working on the bondage, and showed me part of what he’d done, which I was able to imitate reasonably well.  And then I bound him a bit, trying out the new eye bolt at the head of the bed for the first time.  When I got his hands bound to it, I left him that way for a long time, eventually giving us both orgasms with my vibrator.  I considered hurting him, but I was too emotionally fragile from the fight earlier.  When I looked him in the eye and thought of delivering pain, I felt I could cry at any moment.

When I loosed his hands, we had a lot of snuggling, and finally went to bed ridiculous late – like 4:30.

It was interesting and, I admit, somewhat gratifying to watch him have some of the same struggles with rope that I have.  The feeling that your partner is thwarting you with their body and giving you constant criticism as you’re working on things.  The pressure to get it right.  The plain difficulty of making ropes and bodies do what you want.

accomplishments of the day

It’s been a big day here in the Dev & Jos household.

First, I did a lot of math today.  I needed to catch up in my Discrete Math class and I basically did.  It involved figuring out some difficult things from the book, and I had a lot of frustration.  I pressed on and got it handled, which was pretty cool and somewhat amazing.

And second, we now have an eye bolt at the head of the bed, approximately level with the bed.  I had to buy a power drill, bits, the bolt, and a stud finder.  I marked the stud edges with a pencil using the finder and drilled the hole.  Jos screwed in the bolt.  We then tested it by attaching some chain to it, putting a bar through it horizontally, and having Jos pull the bar with his feet braced against the wall.  It stayed put, so the odds that it will come out when his hands are chained to it seem quite slim.

Neither of us is very competent with this type of home improvement stuff, so it was a cool accomplishment.  And it’ll be really awesome having it.

And now I’m pretty tired.

Recently, I tried tying Jos up and, although I was basically successful and he was blissed out by it (seriously), I realized, damn, I really suck with rope.  It’s very hard for me to learn how to do any tying up because I can’t really see what’s going on, even with a very good demonstration.  I just can’t seem to process the spatial information very well, and remember what to do.

So I tasked Joscelin with learning how to do it, and teaching me.  He asked if he could practice on me, and I said yes.  I remember when my dom boyfriend (oh so long ago) used to tie me up; I could happily spend hours being a rope bottom.  It’s like getting a massage.

So, once Jos gets back from his exercise, he’s going to start trying to figure out some ties, and I’m going to just loll around and be used as a dummy.  Sounds perfect.