domination & submission

“Domination & Submission” must be the most generic post title ever, but it’s exactly what I intend to write about.

You see, I face a bit of a conundrum in my romantic life. I’m single right now, and starting to feel more interested in dating/playing than I have in a while, and and as a free and unfettered (so to speak) person, I can think about what I want. I’m clearly kinky – I probably wouldn’t do that well with a non-kinky partner at this point (though I wouldn’t mind just getting laid sometime). But there is a conflict at the core of my sexuality.

When I am going to have an orgasm, whether during partner sex or masturbation, I think about being dominated or helpless or being punished or used or something along those lines. Even if a partner is pleasuring me and I am not actively fantasizing about something else, and even if that partner is submitting to me at the time, I am almost always imagining that I’m helpless about what is happening to me in that moment.

And yet…and yet.

I am not romantically attracted to mandoms. I’m really not. I don’t enjoy seeing myself as a submissive. I don’t aspire to be good at being a submissive or at bottoming. And the bottom line is I just don’t love men who are dominating me. I can be in thrall to them. I can adore them. But I can’t love them in the way that I want to love someone.

Not all mandoms turn me off. Joscelin didn’t, when he was dominating me (which happened a few times during our relationship and then again at the end, which was deep and intense although it didn’t last all that long). But the ideal sort of mandom (as viewed by the bdsm culture) doesn’t appeal to me at all, and even the best mandoms – even Joscelin – I don’t really like when they are doing their thing. It’s unfair but true.

I was talking to Joscelin about this earlier, and we were trying to ponder whether there even is such a thing as the “culturally ideal mansub” for comparison. The best I could come up with as a romantic image is that idea of a guy who is like a knight who wears a lady’s favor. And honestly even though that is not exactly up my alley, I do like it. I like devotion. I like devotion aimed at me. I like it very much.

I suppose having different romantic and sexual interests is not that rare. I have a close male friend whose sex fantasies usually involve something like a gaggle of young volleyball players romping with him, but who in reality is only romantically interested in middle-aged hippies. I’m not actually interested in dating a filthy pirate who threatens to beat me if I try to get up from the rum-soaked table onto which he has pushed me. Is it really so extreme?

Submitting threatens me and makes me angry.

When I was submitting to Joscelin last year, as I said above, it was very deep and good. These days he has another submissive, who he just started with a few weeks ago, and during our conversation tonight, he said something about the event that made me back out of what we were doing. (Short version: I kicked him and he got very angry and I freaked out a lot.) He said, “I was thinking about that, and I realized, I would never have responded that way to [the New Girl]. But then, she would never have done what you did, either.”

He doesn’t normally compare me to the New Girl (since he’s not a dick), but the truth is, whenever he talks about dominating her, I do the comparison myself, and I’m often angry/defensive/hurt. Because I actually think I was amazing as a submissive to him, and I don’t know if he thinks so (or, as I would say in my head, “realizes it”). So when he said this, I naturally went very quiet, and when he started to continue, I said, “I can’t have this part of the conversation,” and eventually we moved on.

It still upsets me to think about. But I’m also upset on a meta level. Why do I feel defensive about what kind of a submissive I was? I don’t aspire to be a good submissive – the thought makes me retch. Why is it that just because I submitted to him I will now apparently forever buy into this thing where he gets to judge my value as a submissive, and I can be compared to these other submissives, and things like that? Yuck.

I bring this up not because it’s a big deal, the conversation we had – it wasn’t – but because it is kind of an example and indicator of how I feel about submitting and why I don’t want to do it.

On the other side of things, though, when a man submits to me, I do like who I am. I like being a sadist. I like power. I like caretaking. I like having someone in thrall to me, or expressing devotion to me. These to me are beautiful things. A man who responds to me in this way is beautiful and precious to me, and that’s a way of loving that I…love. I like the person that it makes me. I want to be a fuller expression of that person.

So, yeah…bring on the submissive men. Because I’d rather have the romance, beauty, and the bigger picture than the slightly more intense orgasms I can get from being dominated.

concerns

Is it difficult now to keep up with who controls whom in my relationship with Joscelin?  He’s in charge these days, and for the foreseeable future, if the whole thing doesn’t blow up.

I want to post about what’s going on right now. The truth is, I don’t know if I’m allowed to write this post.  I am under some new rules that I don’t really understand.  (I was given ample opportunity to ask about them, but I have so many questions and concerns that it was impossible to exhaust them, and like mushrooms they continue to pop up.)  Certainly I am not allowed to freely discuss my concerns or negative feelings with Jos right now, but I’m not sure whether that extends to blogging or not.

In theory, two new rules were added yesterday.  I’m not sure I can state them correctly, so I’ll give context for them, but for me, they actually make even less sense in context.  It’s possible I also completely misremember them, since they are muddled together in my mind.  These are the third and fourth rules in our system; the first two, as stated before, are

1. Be transparent.
2. Give willing and gracious submission.

Rule #3

The context for this rule was that I had been thinking about what is best to do when I feel like Joscelin is being unfair in a particular moment.  The truth is, we strongly share the same sense of fairness, and given a few hours or a day, we almost always (perhaps actually always) agree about things that have happened between us.  But in the moment, either of us might be wrong.  So I asked Jos for permission to, when I think he’s being unfair, simply submit to him anyway, and then bring it up the next day if I still see it the same way.

He was concerned that I might never bring it up the next day.  I proposed some countermeasure to his concern, but I’m not sure what.  I think the rule inspired by this says something like this:

If I have a concern (such as about fairness), I must either ask whether I may bring it up later, or ask to bring it up at that time.  When we do discuss it, Joscelin will ask me questions that I am to answer as simply as possible, and let him guide the discussion.

Points of uncertainty:

• Is this even what the rule says?
• Am I allowed to defer bringing up a concern without asking permission to do so?
• Does he prefer me to mention conerns on the spot or to not do so?

I have a concern about this protocol, which is that, even at this moment, working through my current outstanding list of concerns in this way would take, I think, hours, and I’m not actually sure that the process would ever terminate.  Ultimately I don’t think the relationship can possibly work if I can’t speak freely about what’s going on with me.

(I want to just trust Joscelin to figure this stuff out, or to make it work, and focus on giving him my willing and gracious submission, but, per the transparency rule, I’m not even allowed to simply not bring up my concerns at all – I think – and also I’m afraid moment-to-moment and don’t know which behaviors are allowed/encouraged/forbidden.  There are actually things I think may be mandatory or forbidden and I don’t know which.)

Rule #4

Two nights ago, Jos and I were talking about his strong preference that I make a point of submitting to him first and then raising concerns later.  (I’m not really clear anymore on what we discussed, but it was something like that.)  When thinking about that, I worried that I would “get out of” things by just crying or freaking out.  Last night I tentatively asked Joscelin to forbid me to cry (around/because of him) except with permission or during aftercare.

The fourth rule:

I may not cry because of Jos’s actions except during scenes (aftercare included) or out of joy.

But there’s more.  A bit later I asked, more for reassurance than anything, whether I was allowed to express negative feelings like anger or sadness (for instance, by saying “I feel angry”).  And Joscelin said that for the sake of “simplicity” (?) the answer, for now, was no.  I guess this is probably an addendum to the third rule rather than to this one, though that’s how I interpreted it at the time.

Overall, I don’t feel like I know how I’m supposed to proceed, even though we discussed this endlessly and I had (as I said) ample opportunity to raise concerns (which I did).  Last night I sat and wrote up a long list of concerns I had at the time, but I’m not sure I didn’t already violate a rule by saving them for later without asking for permission to do so.

I want – I really want – to just give this a try and see what happens.  I hope that I can do that.  I’m just sort of overwhelmed with confusion and distrust and anger.  I’ll be underslept today because, once I woke up this morning, I had too many feelings to get back to sleep, and I couldn’t shut my thoughts off. I’ll need to bring these up with Joscelin when he gets up, I guess, but I’m trepidatious about that given that I feel like the conversation would need to go on for hours just to address the current list, and I don’t have hours to spare because I need to get a lot of schoolwork done and I’d rather not be a wreck.

Perhaps I can ask permission to remain silent about these issues and just see what happens.

is it OVER over?

When I wrote my last post, I was feeling extremely regretful about the end of our relationship.  Part of why this happened was that I saw Joscelin in headspace.

A couple of days after we broke up, Jos went to a party, where he met a woman I’ll call X.  He’s been spending a lot of time with her and they’ve had, I guess, a couple of scenes or so, plus a lot of talks.  Anyway, I came home from working in my office at school pretty late, and when I came in, they were sitting on the couch, and she was holding him, and he was gone.  (It looked like aftercare to me, though I later learned that it was the scene itself.  I hope I didn’t interrupt it in that case.)

This filled me with caretaking urges, and I asked X if they needed water.  She asked me to get some for him, and I did.  X is very cool, y’all.  Anyway, I sat down in a chair nearby.  I was just filled with warmth and tenderness.

She said something to me like, “Thank you for everything you’ve done to make him what he is.  He is so beautiful and sweet.”

“He was like that when I got him,” I said tenderly.  (It was such a great thing for her to say to me.  I love polyamory people.  Holy crap!)

I left after a bit (after letting her know she was absolutely welcome to spend the night, which she did) and they went into his room, and then I was utterly crushed by loss.  I haven’t seen Joscelin in real headspace like that in so long, and I had kind of forgotten the vividness of it, and I mourned that in a serious way, as is reflected in my post.

It’s strange/dangerous to admit this on a blog that Joscelin reads, but last night I formed a serious intention to get back into a relationship with him.  I would give it time, I thought – perhaps this summer would be a good time.  In the meantime I would just be the cool, warm, awesome person I am.  That this would work seemed plausible enough to calm me completely and leave me pretty cheerful.

I don’t think it will work, though, independent of whether I could get Jos to come back to me or whether he would just break up with me again when trouble arose or whatever.  I don’t think it’s a good idea.  I don’t think the relationship could have kept working, or can work again in that form, and I don’t think that’s something that will change.

One thing that happened between us is what has happened in everything long-term relationship I’ve been in: my sexual desire died.  It took longer with Joscelin than it ever had before, because he’s been by far my best lover, but it still happened.  Before we broke up, it was hard for me to work up any enthusiasm for having sex with him at all.  I think in some ways the secure availability of sex is the ultimate turn-off for me.

Now that we’ve broken up and my sexual future is uncertain, I’m brimming with horniness, including towards him.  I’m even masturbating more.

It’s a really stupid thing, and makes me wonder who could possibly ever want to actually stay in a relationship with me long-term.  I guess I need to become a lesbian and find a partner who is okay with Lesbian Bed Death.  (“Why did I choose you?  Oh, you’re great and all, but mostly I’m hopeful that you won’t really care when I stop wanting to have sex.”)

I basically told Joscelin this the weekend before we broke up.  Before we had sex (!), I admitted, “I don’t feel like I really care if we ever have sex or a scene again.”  What a thing to say to someone.  I think the D/s was broken from his perspective anyway, but that doesn’t exactly give one hope, does it?

Like I said, now I’m brimming all over with sex.  But I’m also feeling all right about the break up, as long as I don’t dwell on the painful parts (which definitely exist).

We still share a bed.  This morning, I woke up a few minutes before he did, quite horny.  When he woke up, I thought, damn, this would be a nice time to have quickie sex with him on top (physically and bdsm-wise).  I thought he would probably reject me, but I took a chance, and, after mentioning being horny, said, “If you wanted to pin me down and use me for a quick and dirty orgasm…that would be great.”

A long pause, and then he said, “For serious?”

“Yes,” I said.

Another long pause.  Then: “Take your clothes off.”

So I did, and we did, and that was very hot.

I am not sure how often he might be interested in having sex or scenes with me (we’ve already agreed I am not going to dominate him…there is just too much pain there), but our life together is feeling pretty sweet again.  There will be more to process on both sides, but the relief of the pressure to be certain ways, have and create certain feelings 24/7, etc., is welcome.   Still having my very sexy friend is wonderful too.

I’ve comforted myself with two perhaps odd thoughts lately.  The other night, lying in bed with him, I was thinking of the times I used to look into his eyes, and how much I loved him, and the thought that this was lost, forever, made me cry.  But then what I told myself is, those feelings came from me.  They are part of me, not part of him.  And insofar as that is true, they are not lost to me after all.  I still have that part of myself.

After I got so sad about the loss of his beautiful submissive headspace, I realized that is not really lost either.  As his friend I will get to hear about this, and sometimes witness it, for many years to come.  It is moving even when not directed towards me.  I can still enjoy my friend emitting his lovely colors even if it’s not for me.

All of that is how I feel today, anyway.

some of the brunt

Tonight was hard, and then nice, and then really good.

When I got home, I had some stuff on my mind about my life, and Jos and I talked for a while.  He was really tired and so was I.  At a certain point he snapped at me for something I said, saying, “Don’t do that.”  He apologized right away but I got hurt.  I don’t deal well with being snapped at.

After that, the conversation went to the dogs.  I was kind of trying to keep it up but he was really checked out and I was tired.  He had been playing a video game that I’d made him pause to talk to me.  I didn’t want to go be in my room.  I was too tired for anything.  He felt trapped.  He got intermittently angry.  So did I.  (Through all this, we weren’t talking much – it wasn’t like a heated argument or anything, or hardly an argument at all.  More like two tired people being miserable in each other’s presence and not sure how to get out.)

We started to get a little bit better – kind of remembering how to like each other – and I suggested that he finish his boss fight while I ordered a pizza, and then once the pizza came, we’d watch our scheduled TV show.  (I don’t want to bore you with all the negotiations before that.)  He thought this was a fantastic idea, as I’d known he would, and that worked out well.

During the show, after he’d eaten, I had him kneel long enough (facing the TV) to get pretty uncomfortable.

After the show, I played Mario Galaxy while he watched for a while, and then he went to bed.

And then he came back out, knelt, and started kissing my feet.  It was good.  He asked me if I would tease him a little.  As a favor.

To be honest (and you always know that phrase spells doom, right?), I didn’t really want to.  I was tired and just wanted to play my game.  But I couldn’t bear to say no.  And it wasn’t so much that I didn’t want the teasing as that I was self-conscious about being put on the spot.  Requests to display domination or be sexual are often hard for me to easily process.

I sat forward in my chair and started messing with him, though, and it was…nice and then really nice.  He was very responsive, and I also did things that straight-up felt good to me, sensual, like sucking on his nipple.  (Mmm, nipples.)  And touching his cock.  And a lot of kissing.  I got very wet.  It was pretty deep for him also.

And suddenly I was truly exhausted.  I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes, and couldn’t tell whether my dizziness was from headspace or arousal or exhaustion or all three.  And I was thirsty.  I sent him to get me water (twice, actually).

It got kind of awkward for me near the end.  He was in the submissive space of wanting more and more and I was pretty much done, but not sure how to dismiss him without hurting his feelings or making him feel unwanted.  I want to talk to him about situations like that and see how we can work it out, or how he feels about them, because it’s not like I want to say “hey, don’t linger,” and make him all scared every time he’s with me, but it would be nice to just acknowledge between us that that sometimes happens, or something.

But overall I was ragingly aroused, just tired.  He was loopily tired too, of course.

I can tell he’s making a real effort to express his submissive impulses rather than not, and it’s great.  I really, really appreciate it.  He risks feeling rejected every time he does it, I know, and that is so hard.  But it is so good.

I did make a concrete suggestion tonight, which is that sometimes when he wants to kneel, he should consider kneeling and stroking or kissing my feet or legs instead of just kneeling.  It always feels wonderful and I’m less apt to feel pressured by it.

He thanked me a million times and it was a strange feeling for me because, on the one hand, I know that feeling, I have been there, and I can appreciate it.  But at the same time, what do you say?  You’re welcome?  That makes it sound like it was a favor, which it really (ultimately) was not, and is not.  A half-naked person present himself kneeling at your feet is a gift.  And yet there are only so many times I can say, “No, thank you.”  Another thing to talk about, perhaps.

At any rate, that’s how my Friday night went.

sex, and a crisis

Joscelin and I spent all day Saturday together, basically having a holiday from life, and then late this afternoon, he came to me, as I watched football, knelt, and let me know that, if I wanted to do anything with him at some point, whatever it might be, he was available.

So a bit later I got some chains and I bound him in a pretty uncomfortable position (wrists and ankles chained behind his back and connected between his legs to a cock ring) and left him on the living room floor at my feet for quite a while, moaning and grunting in discomfort, while I played a video game and watched some more TV.

When I unchained him, we went to my room, where we fucked.  The fucking was intense and awesome – we talked about his helpless position and I hurt his nipples – and then I asked him to distract himself so he could fuck me better without coming, and so I could zone out and just feel the lovely sensation of getting fucked.

At some point it became too much for him and he told me wanted to come, and he begged me to let him come, over and over.  And I said no over and over.  He said that he wanted to disobey me and come anyway, and I told him not to.  (He has never done that.)  He was really unusually frustrated.  When I told him to stop, he protested heartily, even slipping back in at one point.  I think there was some roaring.

I was going to have him fuck me with his fingers while I made myself come with my vibrator, and I usually put nipple clamps on him for that, but when I went to put them on, he begged me not to.  He seemed sincere.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s not a limit,” he admitted.

“I know,” I said, and put them back down on the table.

He got a little bit upset, distraught maybe, and ended up asking me to put them on him, but I didn’t.  I had my (very explosive) orgasm and then we went into aftercare.

Immediately after lying down he started to cry, and he cried for a long time.  I wanted to hold him tight, but he often doesn’t want to be held in situations like that, so I only touched his arm or head a little bit.  I was keeping myself very calm.

“What are you feeling?” I asked at one point.

“I can’t tell you,” he said.

After a long pause, I said, “If you can’t tell me, it sounds like you should tell me.”

“I can’t tell you yet,” he said.

“OK.”  So I waited.

A long, long, long, and emotional conversation ensued.  When he distracted himself during the fucking, he thought he kind of fell out of headspace, so that he wasn’t where he should have been emotionally to cope with the denial.  And then everything became, for him, a referendum on his submission, and it seemed like I was angry or disappointed a lot of times, even though he didn’t think (as he told me this) that that was true.

“Oh god,” he said at one point.  “You’ll empathize with this.”

“What?”

“I’m thinking about you being angry at me.”

“I’m not.  At all,” I said.

“I know.”

But he was really emotional and distraught.

“I’m going to choose one point on the circle and start there,” he said.  “And when I get to the end” – he traced the circle in the air with his finger – “it’s going to be kind of scary.  But when I start, it’s going to be terrifying.”

“All right,” I said.

I can’t remember the whole circle to distinguish it from the rest of the conversation, but the start, the part that was supposed to be terrifying was something like, “I have always felt there was something missing between us, a deep feeling of partnership that I don’t have with you.  And I had that within two weeks of meeting [his first real girlfriend], and it was why I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.”

I was able to stay really calm through all of this, and able (amazingly) to remember that he was talking about himself and not about me.

He tensed up some more at one point, crying a little, and said, “I’m thinking about how hurt you’re going to be about this when you stop having to take care of me.”  (He knew, of course, that was I staying ultra-calm because we were in aftercare and I was trying to take care of him.)

“You’re, like, playing over what you’ve said to me and hearing how it sounds?” I guessed.

“Yeah, maybe…something like that.”

Jos has a problem, or the sensation of a problem, that I don’t know what to think about.  It came up today and it comes up very occasionally – maybe twice a year or so in a big way.  It seems to be something like this

• there is something missing in his feelings towards me
• he felt that missing thing with the other girlfriend, but maybe just because she was the first one?
• or maybe it’s that he’s only afraid that if I knew what he felt, it wouldn’t be enough for me
• but he’s crazy in love with me and deliriously happy being with me
• or maybe it’s that he is afraid his submissive kind of love is not what I want
• if I understood the submission and the way he really felt, would it be what I want, or just weird, bad, unwanted?
• maybe his fear about that is why he doesn’t feel the deep partnership, and if he could relax then he would feel it

That may have been the content of the circle he described.

I don’t know what to think about this.  Nobody has ever loved me the way that he does, truly, and everything I’ve seen from him tells me that it’s everything I need.  Yet when a man tells you there is something missing in his feelings, I think you should listen.  (In general I think you should always listen to emotional bad news, because it’s probably being understated.)

And yet I know he is also, as he puts it, “a guilt bucket,” and inclined to think that whatever he feels is wrong.

“I’ll never regret this.  Any of it,” I said.  And what I meant (which he understood, but you, dear reader, may not) is that, whatever he feels, and however it turns out, it’s been good for me, it’s been wonderful, and there is nothing I could learn about his feelings that would make that not so.

He felt healed by me saying it.

As for the submissive feelings…I do think that Jos has submissive feelings that aren’t the kind I have when I’m submissive, and that are part of his love for me, and that I don’t fully understand.  But every glimmer I see of those feelings attracts and makes me want more and more of them.  I really do not feel there is any cause to worry that Jos has submissive feelings that I would find unwelcome.

Of course, not finding someone’s feelings unwelcome is not enough, is it?  If you tell someone you love them and they say that’s all right with them, you’ll probably be devastated, and so it’s not really enough for me to be just generally down with Jos’s submissive feelings.  But the evidence from our history and the feeling in my heart is that I want and love those feelings, and don’t merely find them acceptable.

I hypothesized to him that one of the feelings he worries about is his feeling of subjugation to me, which is a kind of alienating feeling that is not really intimate in nature – his love towards me as a distant or impersonal (it’s hard to put into words) tormentor.  And I said that he probably thought I would not like that feeling because it is not intimate and loving in the normal way.

He confirmed that he does have that feeling, and he does worry about it in exactly that way.  And I confirmed that I don’t understand that feeling as a form of love, that at best I can understand being willing to be made to feel that way because you love someone.  And I hurt him by saying that, but we both know this honesty is the only path forward.  But hurting him made me cry from pent up emotion over the whole conversation and because, in that moment, the idea of him being hurt through (perceived) rejection of his submissive feelings was just a horrible thing to contemplate.  I never want that.

“We just leveled up,” he said afterwards.

I feel spent, drained, like I spent all day crying.  But I don’t think things are bad or that there was any actual bad news in all of that, and fortunately it is bedtime.

thoughts on a scene gone wrong

Thumper’s recent post about a scene gone awry (“Punishment and the Reluctant Rabbit”) brought out all of my inner judginess and triggered an interesting (?) train of thought.

In the post, he talks about his recently faltering service to his wife Belle, and the fact that they were planning to have a scene that night.  This was apparently understood to include things Thumper would enjoy, rather than being, as much of their sex is, mostly about Belle’s pleasure [though carried out in a way that Thumper finds satisfying].  (I hope I’m not totally fucking up my summary here.)

Anyway, a few things went wrong.  First, Thumper wasn’t in a good place for the scene that was about to enfold:

By the time we were in bed and the kids were sleeping, etc., I wasn’t in the mood for a whippin’. I still wanted the other part of our “special time” very much, but just as easily I could have gone to sleep.

…

I knew I wasn’t really up for the hitting part, but the subspace brought on by our relative physical positions fought my urge to say something.

Then Belle unexpectedly brought punishment into it:

As she was hitting me, she berated me for my unacceptable service lately. She called me out on laundry I had fallen behind in and generally criticized my lack of focus on her. In between whacks, she said she had grown accustomed to my service and felt it should resume. So, as opposed to the way I had been beaten in the past, this time we were cloaking the event in the cover of a punishment. My discomfort grew. I thought this should have been hot to me, but in combination with my headache and overall tiredness and previous desire for a more loving encounter, it just made me feel worse.

But Thumper didn’t safeword:

I told her I couldn’t take it anymore. She assumed it was part of the game and told me I could always safeword my way out. I did not want to do that. It wasn’t that she was hitting me harder than I could stand. It wasn’t physical pain I was struggling with. So she kept hitting me. Finally, I sat up and said I did not want to be hit anymore.

And Belle handled the aftermath this way:

She left the room momentarily and I curled up on the bed, desperate for some tenderness (aka, aftercare). She came back in…

I can’t remember her exact words, but she accused me of only wanting to be hit when the manner in which it took place was one I was comfortable with. That’s a fairly sophisticated charge for her to throw at me. On the one hand, no, I don’t want to always be comfortable with the way she smacks me around. It’s entirely acceptable to make me uncomfortable. And no, I was not suggesting she should not be able to punish me. But, on the other hand, it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I thought she’d hit me in a loving way, not a punitive way. I wasn’t trying to top her from below. I hadn’t pulled the plug in a state of pique over not appreciating her set-up of the scene. Not at all. I just hadn’t been capable of doing it.

I’m not sure she bought it. After our short conversation, she told me to get the lotion. She wanted a foot massage.

Topping/domming is hard work and I’ve certainly been in a situation where I didn’t know how to take care of Joscelin.  If we can take it as read that to be critical of other people’s best efforts is basically shitty, these were my thoughts, roughly in order:

1. If you’re not up for the scene that is unfolding, you have to tell the top.  We are not mind-readers.  (This is part of why, though it may seem that Joscelin is too stressed or tired to have a scene inordinately often, I work hard on not giving him any grief about it, and on not even feeling a way that would make me give him grief.  If you can’t have a scene you can’t have a scene.)
2. You can’t spring a generalized punishment on someone in a scene.  That is all kinds of bad head-fuck material.
3. That situation where things are wrong for you and you’re not sure exactly how or why is exactly what safewords are for.  That’s the type of situation, as a top, where you have to trust that your bottom will safeword.
4. A top has to act responsibly.  When a scene crashes it is not the time to criticize the bottom – doubly so if the bottom is submissive to you.  Nor is it the time to initiate a detailed or difficult conversation.  Assuming you yourself are reasonably OK (put your own mask on before assisting another passenger), you really need to focus on taking care of the bottom.  And if you did get hurt in the crash, about all you can do is mutual hugs and reassurance.

Now, because I have what some would say is a warped view that says the top needs to be more responsible than the bottom (a position with which Joscelin would not agree), I find myself blaming Belle for the way things went.  Yeah, Thumper didn’t communicate what he should have, but Belle didn’t pick up very well on the communication that was there, and what she did in the scene was (IMO) kind of obviously not a good idea, and she didn’t provide aftercare.

All of that comes partly from my idea that if you’re going to dominate someone you should learn what you’re doing and try to do it right and be careful with the trust that is placed in you.

But then we get to this point: Belle is only doing any of this at Thumper’s behest, because it’s the kind of sex that turns him on and satisfies him.  The deal must implicitly be that she’s not supposed to be required to be super excellent or have studied under the Finest Masters of the East.  She’s basically doing him a favor, even though it’s a favor that is extremely important to him and thus (probably) to the marriage.

(Of course, I have also made a huge number of egregious errors in the course of my relationship with Joscelin, so where the fuck do I get off judging people anyway?  But let’s conveniently ignore that for now, if for no other reason than that it makes the blog more interesting.)

This of course brings out my inner curmudgeon, who says, “See?  This is the problem with having your vanilla parter do d/s.  You have no recourse when they screw it up because you basically made them do it, and thus have to be grateful for whatever you get, all the while taking care that you don’t scare them off the whole endeavor.”

The main thing that forces me to be any good as a top is that, if I’m not, I can’t get the really good stuff that I want.

Also floating around in my head is the idea we have that because Thumper is a man and Belle is a woman, she can’t really harm him – she isn’t the dangerous one – and thus her screwing things up doesn’t bring up the kind of protectiveness we’d feel if a man were doing it a woman.  And how messed up that is.   (Or maybe that’s just me and other people view the situation equally.)

Ultimately, of course, it is (always) about the individual couple figuring out what works for them, and Thumper and Belle seem to be going about that in all the right ways, with good communication, learning, and tons of hot sex.  So it’s not like one setback or bad time says anything at all (because, as I said, I’ve had plenty myself).  They’re doing it right.

fear

On our way to Thunder tonight, perhaps at dinner, I want to talk to Jos and ask him to work on something.  Specifically, I want him to work on being less afraid of me.

Wait, Dev.  Don’t you want him to tremble when you loom over him, whip in hand?

Well, yes.  But that (perhaps unfortunately) is not what I’m talking about.

I am talking about the times I stop in his doorway to say something to him (such as “Hug me, I’m going to bed” or “Oh, I have to tell you this thing that happened at work”) and he immediately fears that he in trouble.  I am talking about times like the other night when he was kind of mumble-cursing and I asked him what was wrong, and he said, “I’m convinced that you’re furious at me.”  (I wasn’t mad at all.)

Is this something about me?  I am an irritable bastard (as is Jos), but I don’t think I am angry all that often, or that subtly.  I do not recall previous boyfriends or roommates living in fear of me in any way.

Is it the d/s?  Surely that contributes.  After all, without d/s, your partner might be angry, but they don’t necessarily have the kind of authority that can result in you legitimately being “in trouble.”  (I realize this is not actually true.  There is a whole cultural thing about being in the doghouse or being made to sleep on the couch to suggest otherwise.  But surely it’s a bit less true when you’re not actually doing d/s.)

I really feel, though, that although my personality and our d/s are contributing factors, the biggest factor is Joscelin himself.  I think he still feels like when he was living with his parents as a teenager and was continually at risk of being in trouble over…well, almost anything, including a sulky or disagreeable look or any other hint that he himself was angry or unhappy.  I think he feels like our apartment is full of lines that he might cross, rendering me angry.

I want to say, like, so what if I am angry?  Everyone gets angry.  It’s not so bad.  And, if he’s in trouble (in a d/s context), again, well, so what?  So he gets punished, which is hot, right?  I mean, he does not actually want to be punished, but overall it’s more hot than not.  It’s no disaster.

I’m relatively sure that I should be assuming more responsibility for this, but I’m not sure how to try any harder than I already do.

Two recent conversations may shed some light on this.

A few days ago, after the whole vanilla incident, Jos said that my having reassured him that I don’t want vanilla sex kind of made him feel like, ok, it was all right to enjoy this with me.  I want that feeling to spread – I want him to feel like our whole relationship is there to be enjoyed.  It won’t be 100% enjoyable but it is fundamentally about enjoyment.

A couple of weeks ago, one of us (probably me) joked that we should just break up.  The conversation went something like this:

Me: We should just break up.

Jos: OK.  But can we still live together?

Me: Absolutely!

Jos: And be friends?

Me: Of course!

Jos: And can we still have hot bdsm sex?

Me: If we want to, then whenever we want to, yeah!

Me: … oh my god, why does that sound so great?

Jos: I know

Me: It sounds better than now!  What is that?

Jos: I don’t know

Me: Wow.  That just sounds so good.

This suggests to me that we’re getting a bit too caught up in troubles and drama and worriful things and we might need to relax and just kind of have a good time together more.  (People, we met in a dungeon.  We were friends who sometimes had scenes for months before we ever started dating each other.  We don’t have kids or a mortgage.  Where does all the stress come from?)

I want to ask Joscelin to try to just remember that I’m his friend.  That he likes me.  That I like and am crazy about him.  That living with a friend who is nuts about you and with whom you can have kissing, hugging, hot sex, skin touching skin, and all of that, is supposed to be fun and nice.  That he shouldn’t take me so seriously.  That I’m mostly only scary in the fun way.

That I’m his friend.

an unexpected insecurity

As he settled in above me, about to start fucking me, Joscelin said something like, “I feel bad that I always make us do it this one way.”

“What way?” I asked.  I thought he meant the position we were in (pretty much standard missionary), since we do always fuck that way.

“Like this.  For you.  Me as your slave.”

I think I looked at him quizzically.

“As opposed to vanilla,” he said.

And wow did that ever come out left field for me.  It didn’t require any exaggeration or “spin” for me to reassure him that I have no desire to have vanilla sex.  There is, seriously, absolutely nothing about vanilla sex that I don’t get in the sex that we have, and the sex that we have has so much other “extra” stuff that makes it good.  The idea of having vanilla sex with anyone other than perhaps a hot new lover is b-o-r-i-n-g.

The only flavor I want other than this one is the one where I’m the slave.

(This thing about vanilla sex – that it’s basic and boring – is obviously not true for a lot of people.  I think it is like spicy food.  Food doesn’t have to be spicy to have all kinds of rich, delicate, beautiful flavors.  People who don’t like spicy food just…don’t like it.  But for some people who do like it, food without that zing just can’t compete.)

We were talking about it a little later – about that sudden insecurity on his part – and he was kind of saying he felt bad or strange (or something, I forget what) about needing that reassurance.  And I said something like, “All submissives feel that way, don’t worry about it.”

And I thought, my fucking god, that really is true.

Now, maybe it really isn’t true, and I’m going to offend someone by having asserted it.  But what I said to Jos, and this seems true to me, is that every single blog I’ve read written by a submissive person has included them worrying about imposing their sexuality on their dominant partner.  (Now that I write that, I think Maymay might be an exception.  Alexis too, for that matter.  Maybe Dw3t-Hthr.  So I’m full of shit.  But I certainly do see it a lot.)  And it doesn’t seem to matter as much as you’d think whether the partner was cajoled into being someone’s dominatrix wife or was a self-proclaimed dom all along.  And when I am submissive to Joscelin I feel this way too – worried that I am making him do a bunch of things he doesn’t really like just to satisfy my submissive desires.

One of the most noticeable things the last time we switched was how much of an insecure basketcase it made me.  As insecure as I can be sometimes as a dom, I am a bastion of confidence and certainty compared to when I submit.

What is that about, anyway?

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.

self-confidence and reassurance

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.