doing a relationship

Joscelin and I had some good talks after my last post.

First, since it came up, I should clarify about Joscelin’s collar.  The reason he’s not currently wearing it very much is that it started leaving a red mark on the front of his neck.  This got a bit too obvious, so he stopped wearing it to let it fade, but it has faded extremely s-l-o-w-l-y.  He tried wearing it to bed one night over the weekend, and taking it off in the morning, but by the afternoon there was still a very visible mark.  So we’re trying to figure that out and may end up getting a different collar.  I’m not sure why this one is marking him now when it didn’t for over a year.  But anyway, the non-collar-wearing is a practical matter and not a relationship issue.

Anyway, in our conversations, one thing that came up is related to something that happened in my last serious relationship (which was some years ago).  I got to this point with that boyfriend where I liked him when I was with him, but felt really angry at him a lot of the rest of the time.  We would, for instance, have a pleasant phone conversation, and I would hang up the phone and say, “Fuck you!”  It was that extreme sometimes, though it wasn’t constant.  And I’ve noticed this happening a bit with Jos lately, though not to the same extent.

It seems like when I have bad feelings lately, they are always forbidden, not by him but by me.  I’ve made a decision to stop being a clingy neurotic basketcase, and unfortunately a lot of my ways of doing that are basically unhealthy.   For instance, in situations where I would tend to get my feelings hurt, I counter that by taking the attitude of, “Fine, whatever.  I don’t care anyway.”  This makes me seem sort of more sane on the outside, but on the inside it just makes me cold and distant.

So he hurts my feelings…and I don’t say anything.

He pisses me off…and I don’t say anything.

He disappoints me…and I don’t say anything.

If something happens where I think I have a very valid criticism or response, I’ll say something, but otherwise I’m just trying not to care about it.  And ultimately I’m worried that will take us to a very bad place.

So the talking helped in some ways, but I still have big, lingering feelings of insecurity that I haven’t been able to address yet.  I do not, on a day-to-day basis, really feel like Joscelin has feelings for me.  Rationally I am pretty sure that he does.  And there are signs of this (please don’t picture me in some kind of loveless relationship; I get lots of very warm hugging and “I love you”s in addition to any kind of reassurance I ask for).

But he doesn’t seem to think of me the way that I think of him.  I like actually spending time with him; he likes having me around.  I have had to basically force him to learn to do things like tell me when he’s leaving my presence to go do something else.  If I stop at his bedroom door to tell him something, this is often (obviously, clearly, distinctly) unwelcome.  (And then I’m trapped.  Do I tell him whatever I came to say anyway, in the face of his botherment?  Or go away, which will obviously lead to trouble?)  When he complains about not having time to do the things he wants to do, I don’t feel like I am one of those things.

And yet, when I bring this stuff up, though he’ll be very reassuring about it, and try not to make me feel bad, the actual effect is that he becomes more fearful/defensive/angry inside about having to sort of appear to feel certain ways all of the time.  His parents, especially his mom, went batshit whenever he was in any kind of mood or displayed any disgruntlement growing up, so when I am bothered by things he feels like he’s back in that place where he is only allowed to have happy, cooperative feelings.  Trapped.  And obviously that’s not workable.

In some ways the relationship is very workable when I just don’t care about any of this stuff.  I just went weeks without caring, at all, whether he spent any time with me in the evening.  I enjoyed it when it happened, but didn’t bother about it otherwise.  And I still felt warm towards him at times, and we seemed like good friends.  But there was no sex to it for me, and the idea that he loved me as anything more than a friend became sort of foreign.  And then I have these angers, where everything seems symptomatic of the way I am not a priority for him.

I don’t really know how to do a relationship.

leaving him alone

I wrote last week about the problem of my clinginess.  On the advice of a friend, I proposed to Joscelin that we spend two hours together on both Saturday and Sunday doing something that allows us to talk (like taking a hike or whatever).  This would be in addition to our Saturday night date, which usually includes dinner and hot sex.  And my friend also advised that I work really hard at leaving Joscelin alone during the week.

So far, so…OK.  We had the two talking dates, and that was great, and I’ve pretty much left him completely alone all week.  Any time we’ve spent together has been at his instigation.  I have found other things to do with my time.  (It’s not that I don’t have hobbies, etc.  I’d just rather talk to him.)

Tonight I was in a cranky mood already, and when he came home and told me two stories – one long and involved – without asking me anything about my day or letting me say much in between, I got crankier.  And during dinner when he asked me to get up and get him a napkin, I managed to call him “Sir” but I started to feel angry.

I admitted after dinner that I was angry but didn’t know why.

I had some punishments coming to me for some forgetfulness, so we handled that.  I told him beforehand that I might freak out, and he said he’d be there for me if he did.  I took the punishments silently, which was part of feeling kind of angry and defiant.

But I felt better afterwards, and we hugged a little bit, and I left him alone.

And he followed me to my room, not because he actually wanted to be around me, but because he was freaked out because I obviously wasn’t really doing that well despite saying that I was.  And, you know, I couldn’t completely reassure him.

On my way out of his room, moments earlier, he had told me of his plans to stay up until 10 PM so he could play some Eve Online since he hasn’t had much time this week.  And inside, I just could not fucking believe that after not spending time with me for the past three days, this was what he felt he hadn’t had enough of.  Playing Eve Online, which he does every night.

So, but he freaked out a bit, and I didn’t say anything like “What the fuck is wrong with you that what you miss is a computer game and not me?” and I felt better and better and we just talked in a friendly way and I tried to be reassuring.  I asked him to trust me.

There is really no other way forward.  He needs the time; I need to respect his need for the time.  If it bothers me, it bothers me, and we might need to adjust it at some point, but that point lies on the other side of this discomfort.  He needs to be brave enough to take the time that he needs even if I’m not 100% OK about it, because what is the other alternative for him?

What’s unfortunate is that my way of adapting to this is to basically turn off the relationship part of my brain during the week.  I think that’s why his dominance during dinner made me feel angry.  I’m not really in relationship with him right now, in terms of my feelings – or I wasn’t, at least – and to be called upon to serve just felt inappropriate.  (It was not actually inappropriate.)

So, that’s kind of where my feelings stand.  I’m uncomfortable, but I’ll get over it.  I’m doing my best to leave him alone so he can come to me when and if he wants to.  And, IMO, he needs to accept that space and make use of it, and trust me to deal with my own feelings.

And, honestly, most of this week has gone really well for me.

the scene that almost wasn’t

Last night, Joscelin began our scene by asking me to get something to use as a dropcloth (!), which he then draped over the foot of the bed.  He had me lie over the foot with my feet on the floor and most of my body on the towel I had brought.  And he gagged me.  I had shackles on my wrists, and these were attached by long chains to the eye bolt at the head of the bed.

Right away, I noticed that this was hurting the arches of my feet.  I don’t have very sturdy feet, and resting on them with them spread at all can be a problem, plus we had hiked earlier in the day.  So when he started to attach my ankle shackles to the corners of the bed, I pulled the gag out, safeworded (just so that I wouldn’t be blatantly disobedient in removing the gag), and let him know.  It turned out that he did intend to keep me in that position for a while, so he had to rethink.

He moved the towel up the bed then and had me lie down on it, on my back, with my knees drawn up.  He was trying to put a chain between my wrists and behind my knees, with my feet off the bed surface, and he was trying to get this chain as short as possible.  I didn’t really understand what he was trying to do, and I kept kind of “forgetting” parts of my body in space.  Some of the positions he put me in were straining.

At some point, the lock that was on my left wrist shackle scraped my leg a few times, and I let him know about it.  He fixed it, I assumed by replacing the lock with something non-sharp like a carabiner.  But a few minutes later, as he was having me hold my legs and arms in some impossible position while he fiddled with the chain, as I was already shaking a bit from the strain of it (but assuming that soon a chain would be attached and I could relax and let it hold me), the lock again scraped my leg, a bit fiercely.

“Ouch!” I said.

He didn’t respond.

“Ow!”

And then I kind of lost it.  I said something like, “God damn it,” and I dropped my feet and arms and said, “Do you mean for the lock to be scratching me?”

And he said, “No, I didn’t know it was.  You should have told me.”

And I said, “I did tell you, like five minutes ago.”  And then I think I moaned loudly in anger and tears.

He lay down next to me, but where I couldn’t see him.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s all right,” he said.  “Thanks for letting me know.  I’m just thinking about how I want to proceed.”

So I lay there, feeling a little guilty for having lost my temper over something so stupid, worrying a bit about him and whether he was really all right (because having your bottom blow up at you is not very nice), but also extremely headspacy and kind of blissed out and very content to just lie there.

A couple of minutes later, he reassured me that he was just thinking about what to try next.  But I also heard some sighing that sounded like he wasn’t doing so great.  I asked if I could go to the bathroom and he said yes.

When I came back, he admitted that he wasn’t doing so good.

I wanted a scene more than anything – I was completely primed for one – but I knew I had to completely let it go.  When your top is broken you have to really shift your mental focus onto your partner and not be a self-centered asshole.  So I lay down next to him and apologized again for hurting him.

“I’m not hurt,” he said.

“Are you angry?” I said.

“No, I’m not,” he said.  And then, “Yes.”

And, amazingly, I stayed perfectly calm and all right and just talked to him reassuringly.  He was angry that I’d felt the scratching and hadn’t said anything (which wasn’t, in fact, true; I had said something, assumed it handled, then not felt anything more until the time I blew up).  He felt like I was actively resisting him by not moving my body in ways that would be helpful for what he was trying to do.  He felt like I wasn’t telling him things he needed to know.  He’d started getting rough with me, which was a really bad sign.  He was frustrated.

So we just talked for a few minutes, and I did my best to take care of him and make him feel better.  I was compassionate and clear-eyed – kind of my best self.  It was good.

When things were clearing up, I said, “Master, I want to ask you something.  If this – me, everything – were just a simulation.  If this were the holodeck.  What would you have happen right now?”

“Funny, I was just thinking of telling you that,” he said.  “If this were the holodeck and you were my holoslave, I think I would want to try something like a hogtie.  If that worked, I would just sit down and watch you writhe for a few minutes, because that would be hot and also really relaxing.  And then I would try some ideas I have about hurting you.  If it didn’t work, then I’d go right to hurting you.”

“Well, Master,” I said.  “I would love to be your holoslave.  But!  I want you to know…if the fact that I’m a real person changes your answer to ‘I’d rather just watch a movie’ or something, I will totally understand.”

“No, let’s do it.”  So we talked a little bit about what he had in mind.

Next I was face down, again on the towel.  I was encouraged to please, please let him know if the bondage was making me uncomfortable or about anything else he needed to know, even if that meant being a little less headspacy.  I agreed.

He put our spreader bar across the top of my thighs (right where it made my orgasm-deprived self crazy to press back against it) and attached my wrist and ankle cuffs to it.  It was somewhat like a hogtie, but not pulled together as tightly as a hogtie is, and thus not much of a strain.  But the position of the spreader bar did make me wiggle in helpless lust, so that was all right.

Then (always my favorite part) I got beaten with a variety of implements.  He beat me harder than he ever has so far, and I writhed and screamed into my gag (replaced after the hog-binding was finished) quite a lot.  I knew he wanted to see the writhing, and anyway couldn’t help it much, so I let myself struggle as far as I could without actually getting severely out of position and without panicking.  I also wanted it, badly.

He used candle wax on me for the first time, which was scary because I wasn’t sure, before the first drop hit my skin, that that was what he was doing.  So I screamed a lot.  It burned (not that bad) and it was hot in the room and more than burning it itched like a motherfucker as it cooled.  One drop fell into the crack of my ass and I then I really did holler.  He took out my gag and I confirmed that that area was too much, and he wasn’t sure how to avoid it, and I suggested he put a cloth there, and he did, and then proceeded.

Only once the gag (which was the plug gag) was out did I realize how comforting it had been, having something to bite on and struggle with and to prevent me from speaking words.

After he unchained me, he fucked me, gagged again, reminding me I would not come that night.  When I said “Please” through/around the gag, he told me not to ask him again.  And then he came, and took off my gag, and told me it was aftercare.

“Please,” I said.

“Are you asking me to let you come?”

“Yes.”

“I told you not to do that,” he said.

“I know, Master,” I said.  (I had known.  I deliberately disobeyed him.)

“Lean over the bed,” he said.  “I’m going to punish you.”

And I did, and he got the crop he’s been punishing me with, and said, “This is not too bad.  This will be 3,” which was more than I had expected.  And the three came and they were pretty hard and hurt a lot.

When he let me get up, I crawled back into bed and started bawling like a baby.  It was really primal crying, the kind that you do every so often where you cry about that really fundamental thing that you don’t usually think about.  (I’m sure someone will know what I mean by that.)

He held me, and eventually asked, “Should I be concerned?”

“No,” I said.

“I just want you to love me,” I said a bit later, and he reassured me voluptuously.

And after a while I calmed down and was able to tell him how fantastic and mind-blowing the scene was.  And, even later, I was able to tell him how disobeying him right at the start of aftercare, and being punished, made me feel like I failed the scene, but that I had done it deliberately, and that I didn’t know what to make of that.

He was just amazing, like he is, and we had some chocolate ice cream with sliced strawberries.  And I went to bed horny.

housework

I’m not sure whether to tell this as a story, laying out the events in the order of their occurrence and the ideas in the order in which I discovered them, or whether to give more of an executive overview of the issue as I now understand it.  But Saturday night, Joscelin and I had a difficult conversation (tears or tear-equivalents on both sides) over the issue of housework.

It started when, after saying that I needed to bring up a difficult issue, I said something like, “When I ask you to do housework, it causes you so much stress and is so hard for you that it makes it almost impossible for me to give you any tasks.”

Let’s back up a little.  When Jos first moved in, I was a bit stymied about how to handle housework between us, and eventually we settled on just having me treat him as a slave there the way I do in other areas, so that basically it is up to me how the housework is apportioned.  In theory, if I want him to do something, I tell him (hopefully with some reasonable amount of forewarning so he can plan his life), and he does it.  And if I want to do something, I do it.

This is perilously close to the “standard model” where the woman is in charge of the house and she makes the man “help out.”  In theory it can be completely different, but you can’t play this close to stereotypes without feeling it.  Culture is fucking everywhere, man.

But my statement – that housework causes him too much stress, so that I can’t make him do it – made Jos feel terrible, and terribly threatened.  For the past few weeks, I’ve had him clean the kitchen every single day while I’m at work, and mop once a week.  And his feeling is that this has gone extremely well.  So for me to say what I did…well.  It was bad.

So in the aftermath of that statement, as I lay next to him somewhat curled up with fear, wishing for all the world that I could extricate myself from the situation somehow, rewind the scene and say something different, I also tried to think my way through what my real complaint was.  Had the kitchen task indeed gone well?  Did I have complaints about his handling of it?  Had he expressed a lot of stress and discomfort?  What was it I actually felt when considering giving him a task?  (Because something does hold me back.)

(Are you wondering how the housework actually goes between us?  Neither of us does much.  Jos does most of it.  My contribution these days typically consists of washing the towels every week and cleaning the bathroom every two or three weeks.  Sometimes someone vaccums.  He helped me clean my bedroom a couple of months ago, but typically we take care of our own rooms and laundry.  I haven’t touched the kitchen in weeks.)

I had nothing defensible to say to him, and I was quiet for a long time, pondering the following.  I resent that he [temporarily; new job pending] isn’t working, while I am working and going to school, and yet he doesn’t keep the house clean.  But our arrangement is for me to command him to do things, so if I don’t, it is theoretically all right for him not to do them.  Resenting your male partner for not “helping out” – typical powerless woman stuff.  What the hell.

He hasn’t expressed much discomfort or stress over the kitchen, though he does tend to do it late in the day and one day he had several errands and it slipped to a later hour in a way that didn’t affect me since I was at school anyway.  Having the kitchen clean when I come home every single day has been blissful, wonderful, convenient.

I think, leaving the irrational, culturally-determined resentment aside, it comes down to this.  When I give him a task, I fret about whether he’ll do it until he does it.  When he talks about how to arrange his time I have a buzz in my head worrying about whether he’ll get to the task I’ve assigned him in the time frame I’ve given him.  I wonder if he’ll procrastinate too far and then be angry or stressed about it.

And it is easier to do the thing myself, or just let it remain undone, than it is to do all that fretting.  Being a control freak is exhausting.  Besides the internal worry, I have to monitor myself not to nag him about it.

Jos doesn’t complete assigned tasks 100% of the time, but he doesn’t leave them undone in a way that has bad effects (e.g., guests arriving in 15 minutes with a 1-hour task undone), and his track record is pretty good – definitely good enough not to justify pointless worry over something that isn’t even going to matter much.

So it really is the control freak thing.

And, of course, realizing this while lying silently next to my devastated partner, with him occasionally giving me new arguments and thoughts and fears (“…if that’s what you’re saying, I’m 14 again and living with my parents…”) was just awful.  I would have given anything for him to have touched me in a comforting way, but I couldn’t ask, and he’s not comforted by touch, so it wouldn’t have helped to initiate.  (I had plenty of time to think my way through all of this.)

I finally said, “I need your mercy right now.”  And he did hold me.

I’ve written the above more clearly than I was able to think through it at the time.  I had a sense of betrayal of myself the whole time because I knew I would say (and believe, if necessary) anything to make things all right between us.  But I think what I’ve written here is the truth of the situation, and I was eventually able to communicate it to a reasonable degree.

In theory, if I give him a task, it’s just up to him to do it.  Either he does it, or I punish him.  (And I do punish him.  Tune in later for photo evidence.)  I don’t need to worry about it or try to manage him time with jedi mind-control.  (Sometimes what I do in my head around how Jos manages his time is kind of like what you do after you release a bowling ball and try to nudge it sideways by twitching your head.  The ball doesn’t know you’re trying to control it, and you don’t succeed, but somehow you hope to influence it merely by straining.)

Can I learn this trick?

the drama, general and specific

Last night I got home pretty late after school – around 9:20.  Jos was pretty tired and stressed, though things were looking up for him, so he was hanging out in his room playing a game.  I ate the dinner I’d brought in with me and watched Top Chef.  He suggested that we hang out a bit afterwards (at least I thought that was what he suggested), so when I got done with the show, I motioned him into my room and made him get naked and lie in bed with me.

I wanted to explain something from my math class that I thought was kind of cool, and he was reasonably into it, so I did that.  But he was tired and doing the thing he does when he’s tired and stressed and [my interpretation] doesn’t want to be there – sighing with nearly every exhale, punctuated with “oh god” or “oh fuck” in a sighing tone every 10 or 20 breaths.

I had wanted him to have an orgasm every day this week, but after the math conversation (which went fine aside from the continual sighing), I knew I couldn’t really participate in that.  Being intimate together drops too many shields for me to do it with someone who is so clearly expressing a desire to be anywhere else.  I thought about how to get out of it while doing the least damage.

“I think you should go to bed,” I said.

“That sounds like a great idea,” he said.

“Have a good night, sweetie.”

“Aren’t we forgetting something?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” I said.  Then, after a little whle, “I decided not to do it.”

He asked me if his being stressed and tired was hard on me (always a fear of his) and I said yes, some.  And then said it wasn’t so much hard on me as things were as that it would be too hard to continue and have any kind of sex.  We continued in that vein a little bit.

Now, for the past week or so I’ve been thinking about the sighing/”oh fuck” thing that he does.  I find it really difficult to tolerate and, honestly, it seems like something a person ought to be able to control.  I don’t intend to make him not express tiredness or stress, and I certainly don’t intend him to plow forward regardless of his feelings, but I think asking him not to do those specific things is more like asking someone not to actually whine.  You can feel whiny, you just can’t whine.  So I’ve been meaning to discuss it with him sometime when he wasn’t stressed.

I don’t know if my desire for that is really defensible.  I get comments here a lot suggesting that I restrict Jos’s ability to complain in various ways, and I think that’s just not fair or realistic.  Is this different?  He’s already stressed that his stress leads to me getting my feelings hurt.  Am I going to make it worse?  Am I trying, consciously or not, to force him not to express these feelings at all?

But I would rather him say “I can’t go out to dinner; I’m too tired and stressed” than go to dinner with me and then sigh for an hour (as happened a few weeks ago).  But, having said that, I then have to actually accept it if he tells me he’s too tired and stressed, and not respond badly to it.

Hopefully it’s clear why we need to talk about this before any attempt to implement it.

Now, returning to last night, when we were talking about whether his stress was hard on me.

“I’m afraid of you,” he said.  “I’m afraid of you all the time.”

“What are you afraid about?” I asked.

“I was afraid of you coming home.  I was afraid it wasn’t OK that I wasn’t spending time with you when you were watching TV.”  He went on a little more.  “I’m afraid of being wrong,” he concluded.

“What would happen?” I asked.

“Just being wrong, I think.  I think that’s enough.”

(I may have the order of events wrong.  I honestly can’t remember if the “I’m afraid” part happened before or after this next part.  This is my best guess.)

I thought about this thing I’ve been meaning to talk with him about, about the sighing.  Because everything else that evening was fine.  And I knew it was not the right time to say anything about it while he was in the middle of being stressed.  And I did it anyway.  I brought it up, while saying it wasn’t the right time, and while basically denying that I was even bringing it up.  (This isn’t an exact quote, but the effect was similar to if I’d said, “I’m going to talk to you later about the sighing that you do, because I want you to stop, but we won’t talk about that now.”)

Good job!  Way to be supportive!

He curled up in my arms for a few minutes and I tried to think of ways to make him feel loved and safe, because in that moment I only loved and accepted him.  Eventually he pulled away and became angry.  And he got up, saying, “Everything I do in this bed is wrong.  Everything is wrong.  Everything I express is wrong.  Everything is hurtful.  Everything is personal.”

I knew he was going to leave, and that was all right, but I couldn’t let the statements pass without correction.  “Neither of us deserve that,” I said.  And then, “I have a fantastic time with you all the time.  In this bed and elsewhere.”

So he left, and went into his room.  Later we IM’ed (yes, from adjoining rooms).  I IM’ed him to say I was sorry, that I had meant to be supportive and totally failed because I let myself have a lapse of self control.

He was really angry, though he didn’t say much in the IMs (but I could tell from the sounds of his movements in the house), and stressed and confused.

“I can’t tell if you continually mistreat me,” he typed, “or if I’m just freaked out or what, exactly.”

“I know,” I typed back.  “We will talk about this when both of us aren’t tired, and if I am mistreating you, I will do my utmost to stop.”

My saying that made him remember his trust for me.  Eventually we had a nice hug and I went to bed.

But this is an ongoing problem that we have, a kind of knot of interconnected issues that I don’t know how to pull apart.  Everything is worse when he’s stressed anyway; when he’s not, mostly we can handle all of this just fine.  But I wish there weren’t so much “this” to handle.

When he told me he was afraid of me, I wanted to say, me too, I am afraid of you all the time.  I am always afraid of his anger.  Afraid of rejection.  Afraid that he resents me.  Afraid that he doesn’t want me to touch him.  Afraid of him pulling away in any way.  I have noticed about myself in previous relationships that I seem to constantly monitor the emotional distance between myself and my partner, and become immediately afraid and hurt if that distance widens at all, ever, for any reason.

And he is terrified of hurting me.  And, you know, who can blame him?  I get hurt too easily.  I take fucking everything personally.  I am afraid of stuff (like being hated) that is never true.  How could that not get to him, given that he cares about my feelings?

He’s sensitive to my anger and irritability because he obeys me.  (Maybe he would be anyway.  I don’t know.)  I am sensitive to his because I’m just a big fucking wimp.  And both of us are naturally somewhat irritable.  And both of us get more emotional and think everything is going to the dogs when we’re underslept.  Both of us fear that we’re in trouble with the other one all the time.

He specifically asked me earlier this week to please not take things personally this week during his stress, to trust him that he was just trying to get his shit together.  Please.  And I promised to do my best.

So much for that.

As I lay in bed last night, I thought about whether I could calm the drama from my side.  What if I just stopped crying or visibly reacting to things?  What if I forced myself not to display hurt?  Wouldn’t I feel that inside too?  If I didn’t allow myself to respond to things, could I stop responding?

I remembered deciding in early high school that I wasn’t going to let my mom make me cry anymore.  And I just didn’t.  I turned that part of myself off around her and it hardly ever happened again.  Could I do that with Jos?  Except that obviously I don’t want to tune out emotionally.  I don’t want to get cold and just suppress hurt and anger.

But maybe it’s possible to do it another way.  Maybe it is possible to actually become easy-going, to let go a little bit.  Maybe I could let go of the bad stuff – fear, anxiety, clinginess, insecurity – without letting go of caring, loving, wanting, and intimacy.

Maybe.

the Saturday date

Joscelin and I have a standing arrangement for a date on Saturday night.  It is the one day of the week that doesn’t involve either working or getting up early the next day, for me, and it gives us a nice chunk of time in which to have good sex and heavy scenery and reconnect.  It’s really important to me, and I had to fight hard for it in the beginning of our relationship, and sometimes I went a bit crazy over it.  I’m not as crazy now, but I still think it’s important.

Jos agrees it is important, and he says that he looks forward to it, but unfortunately I don’t really feel those things from him.  Because I have kind of taken ownership of the Saturday Date, and become the enforcer thereof, most of what I hear from him is pulling away from it.  I hear a lot of stress over the time that it takes away from his work.  I hear fears about disappointing me by not being able to do it. So it tends to feel to both of us as though it is “my time” and not his or ours.

Last night, we got to our date a bit late and we just ordered some dinner in.  Jos was crazy tired and stressed, and eventually I made him lie down in bed with me.  I had no plans of doing anything stressful like a scene, because he really couldn’t (I felt) have handled it.  I just wanted us to spend some time together in an intimate way.

As we lay there, he asked me how I’d feel about playing Eve Online sometime during our Saturday date.  We play together occasionally, but not as often as we’d like to.  Yet he had asked me for an honest answer, and I’d promised to do my best, so I said that I’d rather not play it during our date.  I knew it was the wrong answer when I said it, but, you know, what are you gonna do?

So he said that if we did that sometime, he would feel as though he had some say in things, and as though the date was not completely my time, but also his time.  I acknowledged that, but there wasn’t much else for me to say.  And he said that the date often stresses him because of the lost time for working, etc., but that it is important to him and he looks forward to it.

This just brought up my feelings about being tired of being the Enforcer of the Date.  I hate it.  I hate the way it always feels like I want it and he resists it.  I hate feeling like I am making him give up time for me.  So I said something to this effect – that I am tired of being the enforcer, and feeling like I make him do this.

I watched him get visibly angry, and I pulled away from his body so that we weren’t touching.  I was afraid.  And I decided to not feel afraid, to be trusting instead, to remember who I was really dealing with, and I let my arm fall across him and I just watched him, and focused on trusting him.  And thought about him just dealing with his anger.

“If that’s your response then you didn’t hear what I just said,” he said.

So it went on like that for a bit; the idea of trying to recap it makes me feel tired.  But we were all right in the end and we had a little bit of sex.

But I so want out of this enforcer role about the dates.  But I don’t want to give up the dates, so I guess I’m just hoping for a consequence-free environment again – wanting to make sure we have the dates but without it being me who is responsible for making us have them.  Typical me.

I guess I would feel better if I heard positive things from Jos about them before hand.  Like “Are we having our date this Saturday?”  Or “I can’t wait to have our date tomorrow.”  That would be nice.

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.

troubles

Living with Joscelin has thus far been a mixed bag.

On the one hand, I love having him around.  I’m really happy to get to lay eyes (and hands) on him more often, and to just see his life first hand.  The thought of him not living here feels strange and wrong already.  I absolutely love this.

But on the other hand, I’m frustrated, angry, and hurt a lot.  And I haven’t been talking to Jos about most of this because he has no time or energy for dealing with anything and because he already has a tendency to feel possibly unwelcome here, or like he’s screwing stuff up all the time, and because I’m afraid he’ll get angry, and because it just in some ways is not occurring to me to talk about it.

I don’t really even know how to detangle all of it, but I’ll just type and see what happens.

First, I don’t know, and I don’t think he knows either, how my being his Mistress translates to this new situation.  He’s been at my house plenty, of course, but almost always specifically to hang out with me.  Living here is different.  If he gets home from work at 11 PM and says “I am going to make some chili and go straight to bed,” can I still make him do some task for me?  If I try and he says, “Mistress, I really can’t do that,” am I going to know how to handle that?  (At this moment, no.  I am not.)

And housework.  Counting the ~ 9 days that he stayed here a few weeks ago, and the 2 weeks he’s been here so far, I think he’s done the dishes two times, and both times were because I told him to.  Am I supposed to order him to do any housework that needs doing?  <passive aggressive tone> I kind of assumed he would try to act like a responsible housemate. </passive aggressive tone>

He violates little rules of the house all the time.  These are mostly rules we haven’t discussed.  You can’t steal my towel.  You can’t use a metal utensil in my non-stick pans.  You can’t leave my bag of chips open on the table.  You can’t block the counter where one of my cats gets her food.  We haven’t talked about them, but some seem obvious to me.  (I break what are rules for him as well.  You can’t leave dishes in the sink, apparently.)  (It’s worth noting that I’m rather a slob.  Don’t picture my slovenly, disorganized boyfriend coming in and messing up my pristine, well-organized space.  We’re possibly about equal in this way.)

And the thing is, even with the most trivial issues, my natural response is to basically carp or otherwise be a jerk.  I have to try really hard to be pleasant and neutral.  And he gets angry pretty easily, and doesn’t cool off easily.  And possibly because he feels like I’m in control, he expects all of this clarity and consistency and patience from me, when really I’m just mixed up and have no idea what’s going on.

I know I’m feeling a lot of powerlessness about everything.  Driving home the other night, it occurred to me that he might have eaten my leftover Chinese food from the night before.  I was preemptively angry about it.  He hadn’t, but in situations like that, the anger doesn’t go away immediately.  He didn’t come home until very late that night – I finally called him around 8:30 to ask what was up.

He doesn’t tend to think to treat me as a stakeholder in his life.  It doesn’t seem to occur to him (or not readily) that I’d like to know if he’s coming home or not.  (In many ways this is an unfair accusation.  But I’ve noticed it various times over the many months we’ve been together.  I think it’s a pattern even though it’s not as egregious as I think it is.)

My boyfriend loves me, desires me, is happy to be with me, and wants more time with me.  But I often feel rejected, hated, unloved, and ignored.  There’s a real mismatch between my feelings and reality lately.

I was generally much more secure before he moved in, probably because when he was around, it was to be with me.  Being around him while he kind of ignores me is basically new.  I know I’ll adjust, but I just haven’t yet.

Yesterday, I wrote a post here.  I mentioned it to him while he was still at work, but he didn’t want to read it there (understandably).  When he got home, I mentioned it again.  He played a computer game to rest before cleaning the kitchen as I’d asked.  My post was important to him and he read it later, but if it were me, and he’d posted, I would have been excited and would have read it right away, first thing.  I couldn’t have resisted.  I’m (stupidly, uselessly) hurt because that particular feeling isn’t mutual.

My desk is still in his room, so last night we were both in here, playing games separately, and when my post came up, he said something like, “I’m sure I’ll get to that eventually.”  And it hurt me and made me angry.

When I got up to go to bed, I didn’t say anything.  He asked where I was going and I said “to bed” and he followed me to that bathroom to say, “You’re not angry, are you?”

And I told him I was, over the post thing.  And he didn’t say much other than that it wasn’t true that he didn’t care or didn’t want to read it.

And I went to bed, and I lay there and I was angry, and then I was afraid.  And I wanted to ask him to come in and hold me and tell me he didn’t hate me, but I couldn’t, because he was already trying to chill out and have some personal time for himself, and I was just being insecure to kind of, I felt, get attention or something.  And I’d just been angry at him stupidly.  And passive-aggressively.

At times like that, I lose sight of the real person I am dealing with.  The real Jos is good all the way down.  He loves me.  He wants to be happy and to make me happy.  He doesn’t hate me.  He’s not never here because he hates me or doesn’t care about being with me.  I know all of this.

So I guess I’m just kind of a mess, is what I’m saying.  Between not having a clue whether and how to be dominant under these circumstances, and feeling insecure because my boyfriend is working too hard to ever be here, and dealing with the stresses of a new housemate, it’s just messy.

We were talking via IM today and I was admitting to having some problems, and he said, “I feel like you don’t tell me what you want before you get upset with me for not doing it.”

And I almost started to cry and I had to stop the conversation because I was at work and you just can’t have a tearful IM at work.  It’s too ridiculous.  (All I could think was, “Please don’t hate me.”)

And I told him, “This is the attitude I want us to have.  I want us to think that we’re both doing our best, but this is a difficult time, and we just don’t know how to do what we’re doing.  But we’re going to work it out.”

And he said that sounded perfect, and made him feel better too.

And it’s true.  We don’t know what we’re doing but we will work it out.  We always have.

fighting

I guess we weren’t exactly fighting last night, but it was something like that. And I’ll tell you upfront, there is precious little kink in this post – it’s just about normal relationship difficulties.

We were both tired and cranky. If we weren’t living together, we wouldn’t have seen each other. I rarely used to see Jos on a Monday night anyway. I am not a nice person to be around on a Monday.

Anyway, he had gone straight from work to his old place, and I met him over there so that he could load up my car with more stuff to be moved. I sat and read a novel while he worked, having vowed not to participate more than absolutely necessary in this move. (If I were moving, I’d have hired a mover, but I won’t pay for his move and he can’t afford it. I do not move things.)

When we got back to my place, I promised him that I would make three trips up the stairs to help him, and he could determine what we did with those three trips. But in the meantime, we went upstairs and both started making our own dinners.

So, I was kind of a dick. I actually thought it was going all right, but I gave him crap about his choice of pots and pans, and the order in which he was doing things, and when he asked me if I had a metal spatula, I said, “No, and if I did you couldn’t use that it in that [non-stick] pan. I’d kill you!” In my (slight) defense, I did all of this in a self-knowledgeable way, acknowledging that I was just being cranky, and slightly apologizing as I went along.

At some point he stepped out of the kitchen and I thought, I am making it impossible for him to be here. I went over and touched him and apologized, and said I did not want him to feel unwelcome or like he couldn’t be here. We had a little hug and went back to cooking.

After I ate, while his spaghetti sauce simmered on the stove, we went downstairs to carry the crap up. There was a small heavy box, two larger quite heavy boxes, a half-empty small file cabinet, the top part of a desk, a basket of laundry, and some files to carry up, roughly. We started trying to carry up one of the larger boxes together, but when we got to the stairs, I realized there was no way I could go up backwards while holding my half. If he’d gone up backwards, too much weight would have descended on me, so I don’t think that would have worked either, but the physics just didn’t work for me to go first. I could not physically step backwards upstairs while holding a box at that level (kind of low) and needing to be that close to him because it wasn’t a very large box (16″ x 16″ x 16″ approximately). I felt like I was letting him down as he hustled it up the stairs himself, and then took the other large box up. Eventually I carried up the armful of files instead, figuring I could at least save him a trip.

We rested upstairs a while – he went off into his room while I watched some TV – and after a while I went down and brought up the desk piece, which was very difficult – both awkward and somewhat heavy. (It took me forever just to figure out a position in which one person could carry it without risking breaking it, since several of the edges and sides are flimsy.) I was severely out of breath when I got it up.

Somewhere in here, Jos realized he’d left his backpack, with critical stuff in it, at the old place. I told him I would drive him over to get it. I was really tired but it was still the best choice we had.

We went down to haul up the file cabinet. I could pretty easily carry the lighter half, but the stairs were difficult again. We figured out that he could push it further upwards towards me and that would make it possible to carry it up, but after a flight and a half (out of two total), my grip began to slip because my hands were sweaty, so we put the cabinet down on the landing, and I thought I would throw up from how out of breath I was. While I panted over the railing, he took it up the rest of the way.

All of this time he was barely friendly, and that was hard. I felt like I’d let him down with the carrying up of things, but at the same time, I’d given him my three trips and done the very best I could with everything, so I knew the feeling was completely irrational and was sure he couldn’t possibly share it.

So I waited for him in the car, and he moved the boxes inside from the landing and came down.

“You’re not mad at me, are you?” I asked. I couldn’t think why he would be, so I figured I could get some cheap reassurance that he was just tired/cranky/bad-feeling and it wasn’t about me.

“Not really,” he said, in that tone-falling way that spells doom.

“So…kind of?” I ventured.

“It’s complicated.”

I drove in silence to his old place, trying to process and deal with this. I could have become either angry or tearful and I kind of resisted going in either direction, but I couldn’t actually imagine what he could be mad at me about when I had spent basically the entire evening doing nothing but being supportive and laboring on his behalf, despite my own exhaustion and whiny feelings.

“I’m just tired, OK?” he said after a while.

I touched him on the arm in what I hoped was a soothing way.

On the way back from his place, we talked a little bit more. I said that I was really trying to be supportive. He said something like, “I want you to know that, regardless of all of this, I still love you and long to serve you.” That made me cry a little bit.

Finally I said, “I can’t imagine what you could be mad at me about.” I felt it might be a mistake to say this, because he might answer me and it might be better if he didn’t, but I couldn’t not say it either. I had done nothing wrong.

He didn’t really answer me, just apologized (which he did a few times actually).

Back upstairs, he finally told me, “I was angry because I was terrified of doing something wrong in the kitchen. It would take an amazing act of courage right now for me to dare eat in the living room.” (That’s a paraphrase; I’m sure the exact words were different.)

To understand “eat in the living room” you need to know that I have a completely non-rational (as in, it does not even engage the thinking parts of my brain) problem with the sound of people eating. It’s worst with intimate partners and people I live with. It fills me with rage to hear them eat, or to hear other sounds associated with food (the crinkling of a chip bag, the sound of a fork on a plate, the little scraping noises of a spoon in a yogurt carton). It’s not something I can control except by introducing more ambient sounds (like the tv) or leaving. I can and do, to an extent, control my external responses to it, but I can’t control the feelings themselves.

So, yes, that makes me hard to live with, especially if you’re trying to please me rather than just being happy to ignore something that is fundamentally my own problem.

So I was sitting in the chair next to him, in the living room, and he was finishing his spaghetti and telling me this stuff about how I’d made him feel hours earlier, and I just felt like…well, like a horrible person that nobody should be forced to be around. And I recognized that thought itself as essentially self-pitying, and I didn’t feel that I deserved my own pity or anyone else’s. And that way of thinking is a kind of emotional fractal that is difficult to escape from. So I basically just closed my eyes and cried slowly, and kept forgetting to breathe, and then having to. And my head hurt and the back of the roof of my mouth hurt and my chest hurt and, well, you either know what crying is like or you don’t, I guess.

He went to the bathroom, and when he came back I felt him near me, and I just kind of crunched inwards all over from shame. He touched my leg in a kind way and I guess I jumped, because he apologized.

And we just talked for a long time. Eventually I could open my eyes, and I wrote some suggestions on paper for how he could deal with me. (I couldn’t speak them because (a) they would make me cry, and (b) I was afraid of his responses. But I am willing to get around feelings with techniques like writing on a piece of paper.)

One of the issues we talked about was how it is when he’s angry at me but I’ve already apologized. It’s pretty clear to me that apologizing does not obligate your partner to not be angry, but I also see why it feels mean to criticize someone for something they’ve already apologized for. That’s kind of a thorny issue.

At some point he said, “I need to confess something. And this is purely a confession, this is not about you at all.”

I’m sure he could see that I was tensing up all over with fear, because he reassured me a bit more before admitting that he hadn’t believed me about my trouble in carrying the stuff up. Well, at least that explains, I guess, why I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was letting him down, despite the fact that I really was doing my absolute best. I’m sure I sensed that he was angry that I wasn’t doing what I had promised, or wasn’t really helping, or whatever.

Eventually we had a long hug and went to bed, late, but feeling somewhat all right. I slept like a rock.

This stuff is hard.