Kai Under Pressure

I’m not entirely certain what the point of this entry is going to be. I’ve been thinking about it and trying to figure out if there’s something overarching that I can say with it, but even now I’m just not sure. Maybe it’s just a little bit of a story, something that happened in the course of my relationship with DW and which therefore has a place here. It’s probably not even an interesting story… but here we go, all the same.

At some point last week, I ended up spontaneously getting very upset over the prospect (read: fear) that we were going to lose our D/s dynamic and I was going to end up in a relationship that, for whatever reason, just didn’t incorporate it. It started, I suppose, over dinner, with him telling me that sometimes he felt like he didn’t have a lot to work from with me. DW has always based his scenes (and out-of scene play) on things that he knows about his partner, be it things that he has personally observed, things that his partner has directly told him, or things that he has inferred from conversation or action. One specific thing that troubled him with me was that I don’t have specific fantasies about scene-ing or playing, which gives him less material to work from. I got frustrated, in part because the last time that we had a long talk about where we were at with the dynamic, he had reassured me that he was still working on figuring me out and that I didn’t have anything to worry about. Things like this are a process, and he had things that he wanted to be sure of before pushing forward. And then, in the course of talking over dinner, I started feeling like things had just stalled out in that process…. And I felt like the reason for it was something that was my fault.

I didn’t cry in public, which I suppose counts for something, but I ended up breaking down in the car in the apartment parking lot. Maybe it was stupid and maybe it wasn’t, but I just felt like something was going to happen and we were going to discover that we’re too different to make this aspect work. I told him that I was upset because I was giving him everything I knew how to, but because there were still certain things that I just couldn’t provide—like fantasies about potential scenes or progressions that I liked—it was my fault that we couldn’t move forward. He told me that that wasn’t true… The problem was that I work differently from the other submissives he’s had in the past, and the things that worked for them just don’t work as well for me. He said that the fact that he hasn’t found the right patterns and triggers for me is hardly my fault, so I shouldn’t be upset about it. For my part, though, I still don’t like that there are things that I can’t quite give. I can tell him all about things that I like and what I like about them, but I can’t tell him much about my preferences for scene progressions because, let’s face it, I rarely subbed for the same person twice back in college. The scenes were all quite casual, and none of them much resembled each other. So, in the end, anything like a preferred pattern or sequence that I could tell him about would, in essence, be a guess.

It is an unavoidable fact that I am not the same as the women he’s been with before. I am reminded of this whenever I decide to ask him where we stand in the D/s aspect of things. I want to play more, I want to keep this part of us alive, but somehow there’s always something I feel I’m not doing or elsewise not living up to. The day after, I wrote him an email while he was at work, with some speculation about combinations of things that I thought would work for me in scenes. It wasn’t very thorough, and some of it was fairly obvious, but I really felt like I needed to offer something, to do what I could to hold up my end of things.

The biggest thing that I took from our conversation is that his not having me completely figured out is not my fault. I don’t know that I completely believe this, but I’m trying to. And even if it isn’t my fault, I’m sure that there’s some way in which I could be helping. I’ve made a fair amount of progress on the issue of offering versus expecting him to take, which I’m fairly pleased with, so I suppose the next thing to work on is to come up with more definitive information that I can give him to assist in scene-building. I’ve always been wary about helping with scene-building because I don’t want to necessarily know what a scene contains, nor do I want to be in control of it, but his view on it is that I can give a framework that he can then mould and change and build on. So… I have to learn to make things that can be built on.

It’s hard to not feel a little bad about being difficult to figure out, though.