House Tearmainn

I’ve been wanting to post again—not least because Sir wants me to—but I’m fighting a semi-nasty cold that seems to have rendered my higher faculties mushy.  If memory serves, before the cold got bad, I had in mind to write about distance. I’ll try to channel some of those ideas.

This is a tricky subject to delve into for me because I feel defensive about it in all kinds of ways. For one, I made myself a promise over a year ago not to enter into an LDR again. I’ve tried it several times with different people and different situations, and to put it mildly things seem never to turn out well. It is hard to know someone well over geographic distance; it’s hard to evaluate how they behave in different kinds of situations. It’s hard to be sure one’s trust is well placed. Then too there are the lonelies, which as a rather needy person I experience in depth.

It seems too personal to explain in this setting why I decided to break that promise to myself. Suffice it to say that certain sorts of people are incredibly rare, and when the heart recognizes one, promises made in the interest of self-protection can quickly come to seem counterproductive. Then too, it finally sunk it for me that all of my relationships have seemed not to turn out well, distance or proximity notwithstanding. The reasons are many and varied. I have plenty of work to do in this area no matter how or with whom I go about it.

Another reason I feel defensive about the LDR thing is that many lifestyle participants and thinkers whom I respect have evinced an attitude of condescension toward such relationships in a D/s context. I understand why, and ultimately, I need to not care about what anyone outside the household thinks about the nature of my dynamic with Sir. This is good for my ego, frankly, which places far too much importance on matters such as “belonging” to a category of people whom I consider “legitimate” practitioners of D/s.

Excellent, the defensive preliminaries have been dealt with in only 350 words! Now I may begin to actually write. Ahem.

The challenges that distance creates for any intimate relationship are obvious (communication, lack of physical touch, lack of immediate companionship, etc) and needn’t be enumerated here at length. In a D/s dynamic, those challenges are multiplied to include issues pertaining to power exchange. Because we are at the beginning, it’s hard to do more than identify some issues we’ve discussed and describe how we’re attempting to address them thus far.

The most obvious is control. An in-person D/s dynamic allows for direct control of various kinds, both psychological and physical. I will be the first to state that distance does not eliminate the possibility of using psychological control tools, yet I’m equally sure that the type and efficacy of such tools is limited by the lack of direct proximity. And obviously he cannot, as he put it recently with tongue only somewhat in cheek (eep!), bitch-slap me if I disobey him.

Sir’s opinion at this time is that his primary method of punishment will be to reduce my opportunities to please him. I don’t look forward to that. Already I have felt rather deeply the effects of a simple expression of disappointment with my behavior. How these tools will work over time in terms of control remains to be seen. But for these reasons we both perceive our dynamic to inhabit the category of ongoing voluntary submission, though I’m not sure either of us finds this ideal. It’s simply what is available to us at this time.

Have just decided that this post is to be part one of a series. It is time to listen to my cold and put myself to bed.