Malleable

This is not a linear narrative.  It also is, despite its truth, incomplete.  Even incomplete in all the sexy details.  So much is unwritten.   I find myself wanting to detail some of those left behind moments.  I want to continue this journey and this exploration, here.

After that desperately sad conclusion, you may have found yourself idly wondering, is that really it?  Or perhaps not, perhaps my terrible story was convincingly bleak, that you were sure this blog would never be updated again.

So what comes from this incomplete accounting of what is a real life?  What has happened since May is…accurately an evolution.  An evolution that is positive, sexy and incredibly interesting.  In some ways, life is simpler and less extravagant, in other ways more complex and stranger.   I want to write about it.  I also want to write about some of those unwritten tales.   I have many times started writing, and then stopped.  Because it seems like such a big task.

How do I reassert the narrative flow, my voice, this story?  A story which will never be accurate when discussed here.  Do I continue with a flourish?  I could satisfy your curiosity about just how many rules there are, starting with Rule 7.  Do I continue with a relationship state of the union, that explains why I have a hard time remembering what Rule 7 is these days?  For the record I just looked it up and it is S-E-X-Y.  Personally, I love the idea that I am telling the truth here.  But, you, my audience, will never know THE TRUTH.  You’ll just know a slice of it.  The question of narrative honesty only matters to a point.

I don’t know exactly where to begin (again).

I will leave you with a few details.  Our story is not over.  We are still living a life. Together, but changed.   I started that older post with this thought, “He and I never intended to have the kind of relationship that we have now.”  In part, that still feels true. However, were I to write that post now, about the present, I would talk about intention.  I would talk about challenges.  I would talk about acceptance.   I would talk about malleability.

I would also tell you some sexy sexy things.

 

This is our life

He and I never intended to have the kind of relationship that we have now. Our dynamic has evolved. And along with that evolution we have had to consider the question of whether this behavior, his dominance, my submission, is just a game or is an intrinsic part of our relationship and the way we interact.  I touched on this issue a bit in an earlier post, about a hiatus we had last summer.  But, that is hardly the entire story.

In addition to that moment, there have been a couple other defining moments when we have considered the depth/breadth of our D/s relationship.  The most memorable relates to what has become an albatross of a task for me, memorizing the rules.  To be fair, memorizing the rules is incredibly sexy.  How hot would it be to recite these incredibly humiliating, ridiculous, degrading rules while he fucks me?  I should also point out that memorizing the rules, is a suggestion of mine.  I introduced that task.

Over the summer, we had a deadline for memorizing the rules.  I was supposed to recite the rules, verbatim.  For each word I missed there was a pretty extreme consequence.  The details in some ways aren’t important, the bottom line is, I failed at the task miserably.   I think that while I managed to recite some of the rules, the vast majority I had significant issues with.   And then we were faced with a real question – did the punishment stand?  I had performed so badly that the consequences were long term and probably not entirely healthy for us.  A larger issue as well, was my lack of concern for not memorizing the rules.  Going into the deadline that we had agreed on I knew I was going to do poorly.  There were things I could have done to carve out more time for the task.  But I didn’t.  And that disregard for the task also raised an interesting question.  Did the actual doing of the thing matter?  REALLY matter?  Was it acceptable for me to just ignore a request from him, especially one like this, just because I didn’t want to do it, or make time for it?  If it is acceptable to ignore requests or punishments…what does that mean for the truth of what we are doing?   Does our relationship have these two separate threads, the D/S thread and the “normal relationship” thread?  Is there something to bifurcate?

During a pretty heated (and fairly sexy) conversation the night of the failed rules recitation, he growled at me a phrase which has subsequently been repeated many times between us…”There is no meta.”   That phrase succinctly conveys our commitment to not bifurcating our relationship.  We don’t think about the D/s side of things as simply a optional/trivial/non-integrated part of our relationship.  It is not just a sexy game that can be ignored when it is inconvenient.

This is our life.

The Hiatus

In late July he and I were having a difficult week.  In retrospect, I can’t recall the exact flavor of the whole thing.  I seem to remember feeling frustrated by some scheduling logistics, and all the conversations around that topic were exasperated by his being out of town.  This is not really the point.  The other thing going on that week were two really sexy requests.  1 – I was instructed to call him once a day and leave a voicemail about how much I wanted his cock in my mouth.  And 2 – I also had to follow any instructions that anyone else gave me.  Unbeknownst to me, he also told a couple of key folks in my life about that second bit.  However, one night, in that atmosphere of sexually charged behavior but also emotional intensity, and yet another challenging conversation…we decided to take a hiatus.  Which is to say, put a brief pause to the power dynamic in our relationship.

On the surface, it sounds like a reasonable idea.  Take a pause.  Breathe.  Have a conversation about the underlying tension (even if it wasn’t hugely significant).  Have that processing conversation without the background of his control over me and my acquiescing to invasive humiliating requests.

It was not a good idea.  From my perspective, I felt incredibly disconnected from him and our relationship, in this moment when I needed comfort and connection.  The day after our decision I woke up in the morning, and felt adrift.  Ungrounded.  I later found out that he felt the whole thing was similarly painful.

This episode has been a topic of much relationship chatter between he and I.  How did we get here?  Neither of us is a “lifestyle” person really.  Although, apparently we are the evidence would suggest.  Apart from getting off on all the power play we do – it has become this fundamental part of how we relate.  Don’t misunderstand, we talk like a normal couple.  Our communication isn’t steeped in the formalism of our dynamic.  My life is conducted with the same mundane routines as everyone else, mostly.

The brief (or not so brief) moments in my day where I am incorporating his dominance over me are moments I need.  It is also a part of how we work together.  At its most simple, I think our dynamic is just fun.  It is a silly, ludicrous, intimate game that takes the mundane and makes it sexy.

But it is more than that.

The intention with which we are conducting the sexy side of our relationship brings the rest of our relationship into focus.