Worries, Wishes, and Resolutions, Post-Heartbreak

Sweetie says it’s not always the same story, but the last year is really looking like a pattern to me—girl meets dom, dom breaks limits, girl panics and feels unplaywithable. It takes so much to rebuild myself after each breach of trust, and it’s very hard to live with the fact that these kinds of things are happening all the time, that he’s out there ready to dehumanize the next girl.

I don’t want to be using words like “dehumanizing.” I want to have fun. I want to be the brave naked girl with a well-spanked behind and ropes in various shades of Hello Kitty, but that girl seems really far away. So I’ll start with the worries:

--I am worried that there isn’t a dominant guy in the world who doesn’t secretly want me to just shut the fuck up. No matter how clear I’ve made it that messing with my voice is a hard limit, I always seem to end up with a hand across my throat, literally or metaphorically.

--I’m worried that I’ll never be able to tell the difference between red flags and just fears. Since I’m a fairly anxious person anyway, I tend to dismiss intuitions and deal-breakers until it’s too late. In the case of the last guy, so much of my psyche was like a horror movie audience hollering DON’T GO IN THERE but somehow I always end up in there. It would save me a lot of trouble if, as Sweetie suggests, my intuition could please speak in complete sentences.

--I’m worried that I’m just someone who can’t gain respect for some reason. I worry about this a lot in my classroom, as well, on the days when the first graders won’t simmer down long enough for me to finish a sentence.

--I worry that submission is just something that I try to exchange for love, but I don’t think so. After a good, connected scene, I feel clearheaded and centered, closer to my better self. It’s only when I play without connection that things go off the rails.

Now for the wishes:

--I wish for a man who’ll be happy to belong to me, no matter who else he belongs to, no matter who else is at the table. I would love to sit there and know that he loves me, even as he gazes lovingly at his wife. I want to feel cared for and secure enough to enjoy the love between him and his other partner(s). I don’t mean belonging to each other in a M/s sense, only in the Breakfast at Tiffany’s buy-some-furniture-and-give-the-cat-a-name sense. This is the hardest thing to believe in.

--I’m trying to figure out a non-hurtful way to say I wish for a guy with a regular-sized penis that works most of the time. But it’s not really about the size or hardness; it’s more about having the depth of character to handle mishaps and insecurity with aplomb. In my somewhat limited experience, there seems to be a connection between frustrations in that department and misogynist tendencies.

--Speaking of depth of character, I wish for a man who is as good and careful with knots as my wife is. Learning ropes takes discipline, practice, and patience, all things that I need to be looking for in a partner.

--I wish to be able to make mistakes, talk things through, ask for compromise. It keeps getting to a point where I’m afraid to ask questions, and by then it is certainly too late.

--I am not a unicorn, and I do not want to date or bottom to his wife, girlfriend, friend, other sub, or anybody else, unless I expressly say so. I wish for a man who can have healthy boundaries between relationships and who can even (Do I dare wish for this in modern times?) PUT THE FUCKING PHONE AWAY on date nights. (Except for check-ins and emergencies, of course.) It’s not that I don’t want to know his people; I just would like a chance to know him first.

--I wish for a man who can see me broken and sobbing, who can see me at my ugliest and still think I’m beautiful. I know this is a possible thing because my wife has been doing it since 2001.

And the resolutions:

--I will not ignore red flags. If something in me says “RUN!” I will run as if Matt Smith himself were telling me to.

--I will not do things I don’t like. Even if other people seem to like them. This seems obvious but I need to tell it to myself.

--I will not date men whose other partners have “Veto power.” I will gladly meet folks but I won’t be vetted. I want to be treated like a potential friend, not a potential employee.

--I will not date anyone who makes me feel secondary or tertiary. I have room in my heart for a real second partner, and I want a man who does as well. This doesn’t mean I would need equal time, but if I see him once a week, I want the time to mean something.

--I have friends with whom I will happily play casually, but when I am on a date and someone asks me what I am looking for, I will not give some wishy-washy answer about “Oh, well, I’m open to however things turn out…” I will say “I’m looking for someone at whose house I could eventually leave a toothbrush.” and if he seems toothbrush-averse, I’ll move on.

Scene Failure and the Scary Party, Part Three: A Long Night and a Sweet Morning

This was the first time I saw the inside of their apartment, a cute homey place except for the racks and racks of horror movies everywhere. (Seriously, who wants to sleep next to more than one installment of Human Centipede?) I loved his cats instantly—he rivals the Mayor of Kittentown in terms of breakup pet-regret.

We tried to talk but we were both exhausted and not really getting anywhere. I said I was embarrassed about arguing loudly with Sadist Girl and he was all “Yeah, well, you’ll just have to mend some fences.”

“What? Mend some fences? After what she did?” I just couldn’t believe it. There was less hope of renewing trust with him with every word out of his mouth. I couldn’t believe that that’s what he was gleaning from the situation—a need for me to preserve some imagined friendship with someone who’d helped him completely screw me over. I just didn’t get why he was so desperate for me to connect completely and immediately with the women in his life, but, spoiler alert, that’s what he ended up calling the deal breaker.

Mending fences? Really? I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t mad at her when I was clearly so hurt. The more I type this story, the more I think maybe they planned it without me, that it was his idea all along.

Talking wasn’t working, so we went to bed. He and his wife have an agreement that others can sleep in their bed, they just can’t have sexytimes there. Even though I couldn’t feel safe with him, I still felt something like affection lying there in his arms, with the cats hovering around us, nuzzling and sweet. I really, really wanted this to be real, not just a hollow shell of a snuggle.

He fell asleep immediately, the blissful sleep of the not-panicking, and I lay there feeling trapped and sad and horny and broken. I woke him up a few times to try and get him to help me calm down. His face trying to stay awake was really sweet, but the conclusion was always the same. She was his friend, and of course he loved his venue, and there was nothing that could be done about it. I felt like he was choosing brutality over everything I’d had to offer, over the very, very much I’d already given. It didn’t make sense to me then, and it doesn’t make sense to me now.

Around 6 A.M, something piped up in my brain that told me I had to get myself home. I told him I was leaving and he offered little protest. He just said goodbye. I don’t think I could stand to know that he valued me so little, I felt like I had to stay and change his mind. I went back to bed and finally drifted off.

When he woke up (He kept mentioning a thousand times that he had to go and pick up his wife at a horror convention. He had, in fact, asked ME to go and pick her up, because he is man-with-no-boundaries. I’d declined.) Anyway, when we woke up, I told him to hold down my heart to keep it from breaking—he has these big, beautiful meaty hands, just like I always go for. I can’t believe I never got to write about those hands having happier times. Maybe I’ll come back to it. He held my heart down so hard that it pressed my neck and felt like choking-as I pushed his hand down, he felt exactly like Bill.

And yet the warmth from him still felt like love or like some kind of connection. I forget sometimes, I forget over and over that some things are just about sex, just animal attraction that I tend to give more meaning than it deserves. I just forget.

“Let’s go to the couch and make out,” I said. “It might be our last chance.”

I climbed on top of him and ground myself against him, that teenage dry-humping thing I always miss when there are no guys around. (Although, teenagers probably don't really do that anymore, now that I think about it.) No way in this world was I going to let him inside me, but I loved feeling his (admittedly insubstantial) stuff against mine. We kissed and kissed and he played with my nipples just as much as he possibly could.

He said “Tell me the things you want to tell me. Get the anger out.”

“Well, you are just gonna have to get it together. I have 23 first graders and I don’t need one more. In fact, I don’t need a whole venue full of first graders who can’t keep their hands to themselves. Be my hero and clean up your fucking mess. Rise to the fucking occasion.”

“What else?”

“No matter who else you belong to, no matter who else you LOVE, when we are together, you are MINE. These lips are mine, these ears are mine, this dick is mine. MINE.”

“Okay.”

After I said that I felt a lot of the tension drain away. The feeling of wanting to claim him was deep and scary—I’m still very scared of it, but I am also glad I acknowledged it.

“Unless (the wife) is there.”

Ugh. Goddammit that wasn’t what I was talking about. But also, I totally can belong to somebody else if my wife is there. I think we’ve reached the actual problem, or one of them.

We kept kissing for as long as we could, and I made myself come with him on top of me.

Then we talked, and in a way it felt like the first real talking we’d done. He told me all about his family and his background, and how he’d joined the military because they called the day his mom died. I was uncomfortable with the whole ex-military aspect of him, but that was such a sad and broken fact, it endeared him to me, and when he asked me if I wanted to see photo albums, I was so touched and said maybe next time. This is what made it seem worthwhile, what made me want to give him every possible chance.

We agreed that we would talk a whole lot, do lots of vanilla things for a long while before we ever set foot back in a dungeon again. We made plans for a long walk the following weekend, assuming I decided to continue things. We were gonna give things a few days to simmer down and then talk.

Then he told me to bring a toothbrush next time, but to make sure not to leave it at their place. I need someone who wants me to leave a toothbrush. Yet another time when I should have just broken it off right then.

But all morning he’d told me that he was going to get better for me, stronger and more courageous, that he was going to be the man I deserved, and that, as an added bonus, he’d work out until he could lift me over his head. He said that I deserved everything I’d been asking for.

“And you tell that girl what my REAL NAME IS.”

I was supposed to meet Sweetie downtown for the flower show—it was our big date. I parked pretty far away and walked toward where she got off the bus, feeling disoriented and young, the way I’d felt when I first lived here in 1994—lost, unformed. We never made it to the flower show because I couldn’t stop crying, and that is what I regret the very most.