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Moonlight wrote:
When I fail him, it is devastating. I can take emotional pain and physical pain until the cows come home to prove a point that I'm committed to proving. I can't take the pain of failing someone I love.
Sockermom wrote:
Has this ever actually happened? If so, I'm sure it was an intensely personal time, but I'm really curious to hear more about it. ;-)
Hrm. Y'know, I'm not sure it has. I have to think about this one for a moment.
I suppose that everyone fails at some point. I'm not sure that my failures have all that much to do with kink as they do with normal things that happen within relationships.
One or two do spring to mind, however.
The first was part of the demise of my marriage. There were lots of things leading up to it, I suppose, on both sides. I don't presume that I was the only one at fault, nor was I completely innocent in the matter.
It boiled down to a mismatch in needs. We spent our first 3 or 4 years together learning about BDSM. Figuring out what we needed. I, in my usual fashion, leapt into the relationship and changed myself in order to help it along and make it work. Now, most of these changes were what was inside me, anyway, but they were difficult ones to make or admit too. Being poly...being bi... I was just coming out of being a good little christian hetgirl. Vanilla, no less.
Along the way, he and I started growing in different directions...but we still wanted to be together. I tried to be what he needed and do what I needed to do at the same time. In the end, though, his sadism needed to also humiliate his partners...and to objectify them. And both of those are damaging to me for several reasons.
I started closing down and not playing with him...he turned his attentions to his other partners. Until I finally stopped wanting to be intimate with him because I felt like a pair of tits and an ass to be used because someone more convenient wasn't around.
So, I spent the last year of our marriage sleeping alone. Why? Because he wanted sex and I did not...at least, not with him. I failed to end the relationship and recognize long before we got married that we were not meant for each other. I was stubborn about trying to *make* something work...when I could not be what the other person needed and be what I needed to be.
The second is not kink related...instead, it's pagan in nature. I had, for a long time, a working partnership with someone. This, for us, was *very* like a marriage...call it a "magickal marriage" since we organized and ran several circles and we were priest and priestess for them.
He had also been the person I was apprenticed too. And he had...difficulty at times in not thinking of me as his student, even after I had stopped officially being his student and became his partner. Eventually, this caused us some problems since he tried to exert that control and I would not allow it.
For my own growth, it became necessary for me to dissolve the partnership and strike out on my own path. We did so...but he still felt like he was being abandoned. Again, I could not stay in the situation without harming myself, but leaving failed the other person.
Now, you might argue that such things are not true "failures" like are being discussed. And, you may very well be right. Each decision was made by both parties. And, you could say that both men failed me, as well. Again, you may be very correct.
But, more important to me is the fact that I failed those people, somehow. I was not able to live up to what I had promised them, for whatever reason. (Justified or not.) I started going to great lengths not to get put into the position where I *might* fail someone. Anyone.
And believe me...trying to live up to everyone's need of you is hard work. And it lets you neglect yourself...because *you* aren't the most important one in the equation. It's your partner that is.
This is a very dangerous line to walk. I can promise the world to Tiger... and not be able to deliver it. That is a failure. And, I have a tendency to want to try to do so. And, when push comes to shove, that small instinct for self-preservation and autonomy raises its ugly head and strikes out like it did in "One Weekend..."
If I know, deep in my heart, that Tiger wants something, I promise... even if its only to *myself* (so I don't promise something to him and not deliver it) ...to do my best to deliver it. To *will* myself to deliver it. Even when I know I can't.
Tiger has, to some extent, mitigated this by his Rule #1. Even if he didn't do it intentionally at the time. Rule #1 requires me to try to prevent falling into that trap in the first place. Which, obviously, I don't do very well.
How, then, does one not allow harm to come to oneself and yet give as much as possible to someone?
How do you go about being who you are and still submitting to another person?
How, in god's name do I ramble on so much? :)
