A few weeks ago, I was feeling insecure, and Joscelin gently said something like this: “You have to know inside of you who you are, all of the wonderful things about yourself. And if you don’t, that’s not something I can give you.”
Last night, in the course of a long conversation, he admitted to sometimes getting angry when I become insecure about his feelings for me. He feels ignored, because the signs that he loves and likes me are so many and obvious.
He doesn’t seem to struggle with these particular insecurities himself – he seems secure in my feelings about him. But where he struggles I do not, and that is about his sexuality. No amount of reassurance over our 2+ years together has sufficed to remove his fear that his submissiveness and the things he enjoy are (intrinsically?) unappealing, or not sexy.
The better our sex gets for him, the more he suffers guilt and worry after scenes. It doesn’t matter how many signs there are (verbal, physical) that I’m into it. It doesn’t matter that he likes topping me exactly the way he likes to be topped by me (thus proving that it’s at least possible to enjoy from the top’s side).
He said yesterday in the car that he feels increasingly in my debt, a debt that he can’t repay. And I think (as I said then) that this is not only incorrect, but dangerously, corrosively so. I think it’s the kind of thing that would eventually destroy a relationship.
He has always struggled to understand my motivations, what I get out of this, what my sexuality feels like from the inside. I think I still feel like an alien to him in this way. (He doesn’t feel like an alien to me at all. I feel like I understand him truly from the inside out, at least in this domain. And even though it feels to me like the top intrinsically has more empathy towards the bottom than vice versa – maybe just because that’s how I am in each role – still, I’d think he’d understand more by now.)
Providing a lot of reassurances about what you feel all the time is hard work. And of course I want to reassure him as much as he needs, but…yeah. (I know he feels the same way about my need for emotional reassurance.) And I don’t know how to be any more reassuring.
I wish that Jos would simply view his sexuality as intrinsically sexy. I wish he would feel sexy all on his own without needing a partner to validate it. And I wish he would feel that if his current partner didn’t share this view, then the partner was (for his purposes) wrong, and should be (however reluctantly) replaced with someone more compatible.
You can’t go through life thinking your sex partners are doing you a damn favor.
3 responses so far ↓
Pastrychef // 16 June 2009 at 7:54 am
This issue is one you might want to explore with a counselor of some sort-perhaps Jos needs to hear the reassurance from someone who isn’t invested in the relationship.You could each try listing what are the best/worse things about each part of the dynamic-why you like topping, why you like bottoming. Then compare lists.
And at bottom if you didn’t like your life you would change it. Somewhat like your “not my problem” mantra he needs a “She’s still here, doing this” mantra.
Sometimes the unexamined life is just so damn tempting.
subversive_sub // 16 June 2009 at 11:51 am
I’m nearly four years into my relationship, and I *still* sometimes have that indebted feeling when we play, like he’s doing me a favor. To me, topping just seems like…so much work. Even though I feel and see that he really does enjoy it, even though I know this is an intrinsic part of his sexuality just as bottoming is to mine, those thoughts still creep in from time to time — generally when we’re doing things that are more about me keeping still and taking it (say, flogging or spanking). Like, “You’re doing all this stuff to me to make me feel awesome, and I’m not even touching you. Are you *sure* this is what you want? You’re not just being nice?” :)
The Way Things Have Always Been « beyond the hills // 16 July 2009 at 11:02 am
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