We are good together, just not right together

T found for himself a new girlfriend. She seemed exciting, full of promise and limerence, all of the things that he wanted it to be. He’s easing out of his shell of pain at having lost his most beloved, and I was happy for him that he seemed to be finding love.

These girls all had something in common, however. They all wanted monogamy. T didn’t take this request lightly; several trips out by himself, sleeping by himself, smoking, freezing in the spring cold, and thinking. Like Archimedes emerging from the bath, as I drove in to his city after a long separation, he delivered his decision. I fairly tore it out of him, I’ll admit. I had pleaded with the universe to provide, fantasized that everything would turn out as I’d wanted it to. I’d built up a dream inside my head of how it was going to be. T wasted no time in smashing it, as I asked him to.

So it was over the phone that he delivered to me the truth, that he couldn’t see himself turning down what appeared on its surface to be a perfectly functional relationship with what seemed to be a perfectly lovely woman, simply because she wasn’t willing to compromise for his polyamory. He told this to me in all gentleness. He said it with great concern and care. And though our relationship had been based on the known fact that I’d very soon be moving a six-hour drive away, though we had stipulated at the very beginning that anybody had to be able to end it at any time for any reason with no hard feelings, or it wouldn’t work, I was absolutely crushed.

In looking back, I understand fully why this happened. He made gentle comments at the time that we appeared to have become a little bit too attached. I took this as a heavy blow. I reacted irrationally. I took it personally. I was wounded in every possible place that my heart could think to be wounded. It means he doesn’t love me! It means he doesn’t want me anymore! It means he’s breaking up with me! It’s not him, it’s me!

This was all magnification, of course, and he was very careful to disperse any misconceptions that he could detect in his apartment with me wavering between anger and grief and sadness, the whole thing steeped in tears. He hugged and stroked and soothed as best he could. He still loves me, it’s just not the same when we’re not living together, when he’s looking at other women in the absence of living with a warm girl in his bed, when I live a figurative world away, when I’m suddenly suffused again with love, real love, true love, this love that I put on like warm socks, that I wrap around me like a fuzzy blanket, this love that is the way I imagine a strong narcotic must feel, even after this many years.

This is the kind of love that has ever made me want to put down the exogenous things that make me able to ignore all of my pain, that has made me want to pick up my problems and solve their puzzles with all their difficulty, to do the real psychological heavy lifting that even my adult parents are too weak to do. I know this like I know that breathing keeps me alive, like I know my heart pumps blood, like I know what pain feels like.

The truth is that T and I were something to each other during a very conveniently timed point in our lives. I was alone, absent my love, gone for six months being psychologically and physically beaten, and he, fresh from having his best beloved torn off of him, wound all raw and bleeding.

He took care of me at my most vulnerable, and I nursed his wounds at his most wounded. We did share a bond, indeed, there was something between us. But he’s right when he says that we became too attached; we both assumed that it would be like that forever.

It wasn’t going to be.

Once I could swallow the truth that we were never going to be what we were, that our attachment was situational, that the grief was going to come one way or another, and that the longer I delayed it the more painful it was going to be, I was able to let go. He was never mine in the first place, and I was grieving his absence as if he was, as if I didn’t have a beautiful blue-eyed man at home who loves me and knows it like he knows he is alive.

This attachment, that the Buddha points out is the source of pain, was what I had done. I had not intended to do it, and did it mindlessly. Now, mindfully, I had to let go of my attachment to this idea that T and I would be this perfect couple that lasted forever, the idea that coalesced out of soothed tears, when I was living frustrations in my relationship with Master, when I was terrified of the idea of him leaving for six months, when we were chafing at relationship imperfections, when I was afraid he would return as this changed creature full of vexation and cynicism and bitterness.

I had a comfortable landing pad in a period of emotional strain. And yes, I did wonder at times if T was really a better alternative to my Master, with T’s ability to comfort me, and Master’s stress and my stress snowballing into conflict, and me seeking refuge in T, and Master’s leaving-soon causing him to interpret my seeking refuge as avoiding him, it was bad scenes all around.

I think I became a little fixated on that attachment with T, to the point where, even when we moved away, even when living with Master (and Master living at work, training,) I was still fixated on T, still seeking my refuge. I was stressing myself out trying to be the ideal fiancée, the ideal proto-wife, the ideal sub, the ideal girlfriend, instead of being myself.

I grew to let go of T. We drifted apart for a little while, and it wasn’t really a sad thing. I think we needed our space to grow into our own, and I needed to really build my relationship with Master, to grow together as a couple. I fought against that a lot.

I have a lot of psychological demons, and I’ve spent a lot of time running from them. A lesser man would have left me by now, and it’s true when Master says if he didn’t love me, he wouldn’t be here. Not that putting up with my bullshit is all that epic a battle, but that this many years, this many hours, this kind of tears and listening and trying to grok when he so clearly isn’t on the same page I’m on, let alone the same book, he tries, oh, my, how he tries. That’s what makes all of the difference.

In T’s absence, I found myself at first not coping well, until Master very appropriately tuned me in. I sobbed. I was falling apart. I had nothing left. I didn’t know what to do or how to be. I have written about that breakdown elsewhere. About the very soul-deep discovery that what Master wanted was me, and how that was exactly what I didn’t want to give him, feeling it was the most heinous thing to give him in the world.

With this realization and working at telling him and showing him and sharing with him who I am, who I really am, not the façade that I put on for him, we’ve grown together in our intimacy. Things are better, more whole. I feel his love, this love that I didn’t think existed at all.

So T’s girlfriend turns out to be a crazy bitch, and we drift back together. We talk, over several drinks, late into the night. We lay out the groundwork. About how his withdrawal of consent had a little bit to do with the fact that he didn’t feel comfortable having be as a fuckbuddy, thinking that he was emotionally taking advantage of me. Now he’s realized how I’m a big girl, really, and I can make my own decisions; I don’t need him to decide it’s too painful for me to be his fuckbuddy. I’ll decide that on my own, thanks.

We’re amused, both of us, at how in laying the groundwork, we are dancing around one another’s boundaries, we are trying not to step on toes, we are so careful not to push. It’s indeed part of why we are so good together: how careful we are to not force things, to not push buttons, to ask permission instead of telling and to negotiate before jumping in feetfirst. So we dance, again, and negotiate new boundaries, and I find myself out in a camping trip, just me, and T.

At first I’m excited somewhat, but I remember our first encounter after renegotiating the boundaries and I find myself also somewhat anxious. I found things far less satsifying than I remember, and I chalk it up to no privacy, to not having explained things to his roommate-brother, to awkward, hasty ninja-sex in a too-cold room under unromantic pretenses.

I discover during this trip that what we had was somehow less than I remember. Magnified by emotion at the time, my feelings excoriated by the experience of being left alone and vulnerable, his spirit rubbed raw by the loss of his most beloved, his need to nurture and support soothed my fear of Master’s changed-nature and my own apprehension at moving far-far away. I remember this incredible closeness and this loving environment that had me seriously wondering whether Master was really the Right One, especially during a time when his stress and my stress had us fairly at each others’ throats.

I sought refuge in T and that didn’t help things with Master, but this is only something I can see when stress-free and not immersed in anxiety about the future. What seemed to be so perfect at the time actually had its own undercurrents of dissatisfaction, subtleties that I ignored because I had bigger things to worry about. The bigger things are gone, on this camping trip. All I have to focus on is ‘us’, myself and T, and how, while we are still ‘us’, there’s this sense that this is never, ever going to be … enough.

It’s fun! Don’t get me wrong. We enjoy ourselves and enjoy each other and do have a lot of fun playing around and take good care of one another. However, I find myself instead of stressed and being soothed with the balm of this comfortable presence, I’m now unable to ignore the fact that the sex is, at best, somewhat mediocre, the funnest part being able to watch him have fun, not necessarily the act of intercourse in and of itself. And he’s trying, in the process of foreplay, to tweak buttons that he knows are tweakable, but he’s doing the sexual equivalent of rolling his face on the keyboard to try and write poetry. He pinches because he knows I like pain, but he isn’t Master, and it doesn’t come in the context of pleasurable pain, it’s just pinching. He doesn’t know me like Master knows me. He can tease me to new heights using the tools available to him, but he can’t be Master and try and use Master’s tools. It just doesn’t work.

So here I am, standing back and staring at this exchange, going, this is it? This is what I was so crushed about losing? Which is only part of the equation, because I was crushed about losing so much more than that. I am just only now recognizing that the only thing I really did lose was that mediocre sex, because we’re still us, good friends, whether we are having sex or not. That said, we will never have the emotional bond that my husband and I have, we will not grow together emotionally in the same way that I will with Master, and he will not grow to know me in a way that a man who’s shared my bed and my body for eight years can.

And that’s what makes all the difference.

A gasp, and then I come up for air

We come together, our first night, no less than four times. It is desperate at times, frenzied. No slow, calculatedness to it. Pure lust, simple desire, enough power and passion in it to blow a house down.

My voice pleases him, its higher and higher pitches as he continues his assault. My dream comes true, that evening, as he has me dressed in cuffs. They are clipped, wrists to ankles, and he wraps tape around my head, creating a hasty bit-gag in my mouth. It is my bridle as he fucks me with wild abandon. The look on his face has changed, is no longer the whimsical happiness I am used to. His teeth are set in determination, bared with passion, his new muscles jumping as he yanks repeatedly on my body, riding me to his completion.

I am home.

It pleases him, this usage of my body. He giggles at following me into the shower, pointing out his red handprints on my ass. It’s a pleasant feeling, to be helpless, and it’s equally pleasant to be mounted and ridden without bridles and cuffs.

He delights in my new talents, in how well-trained I’ve become in his absence, that I can take all of him most effortlessly. I am shaking with my need, and he is pleased, fairly humming with his pleasure. We are learning too, our little cycles and silliness that we want to eradicate. He has come back trained in his own way, more ready to deal with these things, more willing to negotiate, to apologize, quicker to acknowledge his flaws, less easily frustrated with me, and all my frustrating little quirks.

Most of all, he’s come back. It’s the littlest things that I’ve missed, his silly faces and our in-jokes. I’ve missed antics and wrestling and play most of all. 

There’s still adjustments, of course. His job takes up a majority of his time, and is extremely draining. I’m finding myself having to jostle for time. What time I get is precious, though, and he is better in his own ways. More vocal about his love. More appreciative. More thankful, in many ways.

Any love that I forgot about with him gone so long is being experienced anew. New love? Is woven in with the more familiar. And the mellowness is helping us develop ourselves more easily than we did before. Topics that were touchy, that result in tears, that could have been the topics of a fight, are instead the topics of serious discussions, weighty thoughts and weighty words but handled gently, instead of with frustration and anger. 

This feels good. It feels like a future, like a life, like we are building on what we have, like there’s a strong foundation under my feet. I’m strong. And I’m finally alive.

All manner of newness

A lazy summer, missing the Master, has left me mostly uninspired. Six months minus the love I’ve known for years. It has been conspicuously quiet around here. Just me, T, and the kitty.

The last few months have had me scratching at an itch. Master has forbidden me, you see, to engage in any non-vanilla activities. My kink button is screaming to be pressed, down, hard.

Last night I opened my drawer, the one brimming with leather and bristling with buckles. I ran my hands over His tools, untangling the doe-skin flogger with my fingers. My fingers itched to shackle myself, my inner mind craving the presentation of it, limbs bound, holes lubed, the selection of toys lined up at the ready. I sighed deeply, for these things are not for T. Only my Master and I. The drawer remains closed.

So I throw myself at T, my hunger burning in my throat, and I engulf him, swallow him whole. By the end he can’t stand, can’t walk straight, sweat pouring off his face and splattering my breasts. I am sated, but not satisfied. My hunger has retreated to the pit of my belly, where it remains, itching, until I can stand it no longer. Sex is incomplete; I must have his hands around my throat, must feel my resistance slipping from me like an exhaled breath. I crave the headspace. The rush.

Three weeks until I see my Master again. I have been instructed to bring my assortment of toys, enough toys to make airport security do a double take. Toys, and lube, lotions and cuffs. I feel like it’s Christmas, and I can’t wait to unwrap my present. I have been spending hours dreaming up scenarios, his hand twisted in my leash, yanking my collar at his will.

Master hasn’t been helping my desires. He and I have been exchanging naughty text messages, discussing my upcoming training. A new province, a new home, a new life, just me, and my Master. His kitten, his pet, his wife-to-be.

new beginnings

“I’ll just have to be a better benchmark,” he said to me, and I’ll never forget how he said it. Matter-of-fact, unshakable, as if he just-knew his love would be enough to conquer everything.

I took his virginity with no reverence, and he gave it to me guiltlessly. I was awestruck by this person who gave sex a large measure of respect, without outright telling me how ‘bad’ a thing it was. He had no experience and all the experience I had was with selfish partners who had even less experience than I did. Now I had a lover, and no idea what to do.

Points for enthusiasm?

I know I loved him like I’d never loved anything before, and he loved me back. We functioned on a crippled form of sexual communication — my telling things was stifled and he only responded to the messages he received. I’d doublethink my desires. ‘I shouldn’t [ask for something different] because it’ll [insert reason I made up].’ I had absorbed that women’s-magazine bullshit about pleasing your man producing a perfect relationship. I was castrating our sex life, and he was none the wiser. I thought it was normal. He didn’t know any better.

We talked about all kinds of ideas that came into our heads; we really were two peas in a pod. He professed to love me so much that he would do anything — anything — for me. He came out and said outright that if there were someone I wanted besides him, we’d talk about it. I agreed, not fully understanding. It wasn’t until in thinking about it later that I fully realized the gravity of the situation — a man who was offering to fulfill my every basic desire, and this included in the sack!

He knew I’d had relationships with women, but in his matter-of-fact way he said he didn’t care one way or another because he loved me how I was. I told him I thought I was bisexual — he said he knew I wasn’t going to run off with a girl and get married and leave him, so I could have all the girls I wanted.

This man surprised me at every turn. I was a girl who trolled the internet learning about sex the hard way — filtering out the meaningful facts from the mythical bullshit. I trolled four sexual health forums for close to two years, mostly answering questions, but learning amazing amounts as I went. This sex business was really controversial within everybody’s head … maybe I wasn’t alone in not understanding my sexuality.

I consumed pornography at breakneck pace and masturbated as appropriate. The day I figured out how to give myself an orgasm was a red-letter day and I’ve worked hard at having them often, ever since. I was consuming written erotica in genres considered out-of-the-mainstream — specifically bisexual and orgiastic pornography. I dug out my rape fantasies from childhood and young adulthood and watched rape-fantasy pornography. I didn’t breathe a word of this to my boyfriend.

One day, I was at his house, sitting at his desk, playing on his computer. We were getting ready to go out, and I was surfing his internet history. I came across a porn site he’d used, and followed some of the links he’d followed, interested in what turned him on. I named a category in a light voice, laughing, pretending mischief in searching through his sexual desires.

I was unprepared for his reaction, though in hindsight it should have been expected. I was pounced, nearly knocked off his chair bodily with the force he used to grab the mouse from me and close the browser.

Our eyes met and I could taste his fear, hear it in the quivering anger in his voice. I don’t remember the specific words in the conversation, but I remember him feeling as if his privacy had been invaded because the girl having sex with him wanted to know what turned him on when she wasn’t there.

I think that’s when I realized that what we’d come to was effectively a sexual crisis. He wanted things I hadn’t considered, and I wanted things he’d never thought of. We were both too terrified of alienating the other person to ask each other, and this was the way our society intended for us to develop sexually. So I grabbed him, and we got in the car, and drove.

We talked deep into the night. At first it was fear and anger and privacy issues, but eventually the walls came down, and the truth came out. I’m afraid to ask you for this because I’m afraid I’ll gross you out. I’m afraid to ask you for this because I’m afraid you’ll think I’m weird. I’m afraid, so afraid.

It opened a dialogue, and the floodgates opened. I want to try this, this, this, this. Let’s try this, this, this. I think this, this would be fun.

He asked me if I would consider letting him play with my ass during sex, confessing that anal turned him on a lot. In fact, it was the anal category that had caused his panic in the first place.

I was so, so hurt that he’d not want to discuss something sexual with me. I felt hurt and rejected and like maybe the reason he didn’t ask me about it was because he didn’t want to do sexual things with me in that way. In reality, it was nothing like that at all… and in reality, I was doing the same thing to him.

We went to the sex-toy trade show the week after, and walked hand-in-hand, in public, browsing for buttplugs. It’s one of the happiest memories of my life, the memory of starting to get over one of the things that made me hate myself — my large sexual appetite, my deviant tendencies… that which sets me apart. Apart became, suddenly, a desirable trait — a trait that brought my soon-to-be-Master and I together.

a coming-out, of sorts

Perhaps I should explain.

I am a slut.

I’ve always been this way — since I could remember. I don’t know how child’s play devolved into playing ‘doctor’. I don’t know how the neighbor girl and I ended up playing with each other with our clothes off. I don’t know why my friends at the time were interested in roleplaying a married couples’ struggles with sexual desire. I don’t know where I got the idea to see and touch other peoples’ nakedness.

I do distinctly remember the first time I found pornography.

I was mesmerized. Fascinated by all this new content, pretty ladies in pretty clothes, their nethers being photographed in extreme close-up. I remember my favourite section being the letters section, where I would read story after story of some fabulous sexual tryst. I locked myself in the bathroom, delicately pulling the magazines out from their hiding place, turning the pages slowly, carefully, drinking in every detail. I felt feelings in places I’d never felt feelings before — tightenings in my sides and tinglings down under. I knew I enjoyed all of this talk and the sight of all of these naked ladies, but I was terrified of what it all meant.

All of my first sexual experiences had been with women. Women, and their nakedness, their warmth, their curves and softness. Pictures of these women aroused me. I had never had a boyfriend. My train of thought, as a young woman just beginning teenagehood, was one of constant anxiety — the petrifying circular fear that I was a lesbian, a pervert, abnormal, different, set apart in some way.

I was precocious. In a house where my mother talked openly about how little girls who wore makeup looked like whores. (I wanted to wear makeup.) They talked about homosexuality as if it were sick. When my mother found out my father had pornographic magazines in the house, it was a Big Freaking Deal.

I grew up with a twisted sense of what sexuality was, or what sexual identity was. This was further exacerbated by the fact that I was lucky to go to a school that discussed puberty as a topic — let alone sex.

I believed when growing up that since I’d had sexual contact with a woman, that made me a lesbian. It was like a disease that I had caught, that I couldn’t get rid of. I tried to rationalize it — maybe as I got older and more womanly I could “shed” it like a skin, love boys, get married, have an easy life and that would be it.

Eventually I started reading about what being homosexual actually meant. I felt relieved to be attracted to men, to not be this big “L” word, to not have to tell my family I was going to cut my hair like k.d. lang and the whole works. But to be attracted to women at the same time was strange. I ignored it, wholly, though I maintained sexual relationships with women. The tension was huge and I had crushes and loves. I said to myself I was just ‘curious’ but it wasn’t curiosity that caused my head to lean a little closer to hers, to make my heart stall a beat at the thought of kissing her.

I dated men. I grew up. I met bisexuals, who told me it was okay to be the way I was — how unfortunate that this message came at the same time as a large number of other ones. The signal-to-noise ratio was not a good one. I was coming out of a long-term relationship with a man I’d thought (naively) I was going to marry. My mother called me a slut for having sex with him, at the tender age of 16. I was crushed. She grilled me as to why I would do such a horrible thing to her. I was encouraged to ask the man to apologize to her. I didn’t understand then, what I understand now. I didn’t understand the old-school idea of my virginity as the property of my parents. I just knew that while it was he who’d pushed me to have sex with him, it was me who was being called the slut.

That stuck with me, that word. My one [real] male sexual partner had made me into a slut — whereas the four or five girls I’d had relationships with before didn’t. True, my mother didn’t know about the four or five girls — or not that she let on, anyway.

Thinking back, perhaps I was a bit sluttish. I say [real] because I’d had sexual contact with men before — wondering what all this fuss was about, about this singular act. More learning when I discovered that what I’d thought was a singular act — sex — was actually a series of acts, acts which a woman was expected to be proficient in, without ever having practiced.

The inequality did not strike me at the time; at the time what I was most struck by was how little I’d been told. Even though I’d been exposed to such topics as oral sex and multiple partners, I’d never thought about the implications of such things. Suddenly things that weren’t sex were sex and things that were sex weren’t sex and it all depended on who you spoke to. Some girls weren’t sluts because all they did was suck cock — the ‘technical virgins’ that are commonplace in today’s media, which, as usual, is about a decade behind the times.

I resolved to raise my children differently with regards to sex, and walked into my relationship with my now-Master feeling very much like damaged goods. I’d lost my (value) virginity to someone else, I’d fooled around much since then, what was to make my sexual relationship with my sweetheart anything more meaningful than a pair of drunken tourists fucking in a hotel room?

My society taught me not to expect sex better than the sex joked about on TV. My society taught me that to want more or to expect more or to, Lord forbid, demand more, was anathema. I would take the cock I got, and damn it all, I was going to like it whether I liked it or not.

I’d like to lodge a complaint.