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We are three adults living in a polyamorous triad family. The content here is intended for an adult audience. If you are not an adult, please leave now.

3/25/2011

Relationship DYNAMIC

Morningstar recently pointed to the phenomenon of major breaks that sometime occur in the context of our BDSM relationships, and asked the pretty direct and essential question (the one we tend, generally, to avoid):

I have to wonder IF this BDSM lifestyle is something that most of the population can maintain for any length of time. 


Certainly, our family has gone through a really difficult stretch during which we've questioned just about everything about our lives and our beliefs and our interactions with each other.  We've been rocked to our foundations (and there have been those ubiquitous although, thankfully, few nay-sayers among our readership who have cheered our ever wobble).  We are still here, still standing, and still together. 

Our overtly power-driven BDSM M/s DYNAMIC has, in fact, been largely dormant as we've directed our attentions and energies to the demands of surviving, and healing.  The classically, play-based, fun, fantasy oriented, and yes, sexy parts of BDSM have just not been part of our lives for these last months.

We've had a lot of heavy and intense work to do, and serious matters to attend to.  We've been engaged with professionals regarding mental health, physical health, relational issues, legal issues, financial issues.  We've all had to confront the various bits and pieces of our lives and habits that contributed to and supported our family's addictive breakdown.  It has been a challenging time.

I tossed a tablecloth over the toy rack a few weeks back.  It was a way to protect myself from having to see them all hanging there on the wall each morning when I first opened my eyes.  I covered them up and hid them-- but I could not bring myself to put them away.  I have simply not been able to convince myself that we will never be into "that kind" of BDSM play again.  Things have, surely, changed.  We are not the same as we were.  We'll never be the same again.  We are and will be different for having traveled this particular path together.  That is the fact of having lived this long and experienced what we have.

On the other hand, we remain in some very basic parts of our day to day lives, exactly as we have always been.  I still do a whole variety of things for Him, and He still expects them to be done -- not so much in the sense of "requirement" or "demand," but more as a matter of course.  It is the way it is.  Too, we have, in the last bit of time, begun to flirt with one another and tease a bit about the SM side of our relatedness.  That is feeling fragile, tentative, delicate, and exploratory... but it is, nevertheless, there, and I am glad for it.

In the end, I think that the question is really not about BDSM relationships at all.  I think it is simply about relationships in general:  Is it possible for one fallible and frail human to enter into and maintain any sort of long term viable relationship with another human -- or are we just too volatile and unpredictable to make it work?

I think that we can make life-long relationships that work.  Call me naive.  Label me a dreamer -- a Pollyanna.  I think that we can hang on and hang in and grow and learn and start again -- over and over and over.  I believe in the power of love and the strength of a promise, and I will forever assert that we can make it work if we just refuse to quit. 

What is the future?  I do not know.  Cannot know.  None of us can.  We can only choose to love with our best selves in this moment, for this day.  Our BDSM relationships are no better and no worse than any other.  All those scary looking whips and paddles do nothing at all to keep life's vagaries away from our doors.  We make our relationships last, for the long haul, by being the people we have promised to be -- on the days when love lifts us up soaring AND on the days when we slog through the muck unable to see the sun.

swan.  

8 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:53 PM

    ok egos maybe just maybe someones post wasnt about you. just saying. oops anonymoes

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  2. Personally, I am sure we have many lives and each life is going to be affected by others and will in turn affect yet others. The feelings we sometimes have of belonging to someone else for no reason are rooted in previous incarnations and close relationships formed then - sometimes of the type we try to reproduce here and now. Sometimes pictures form spontaneously in the mind which hint at the circumstances or even describe them clearly. That has been my experience. These are always my thoughts when I read your blog posts Sue.

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  3. Anonymous2:27 AM

    I would reiterate that yours is like any other relationship out there. Regardless of what works for you sexually, there is an ebb and flow to every relationship, and over time each relationship has high and low water marks, sexually, romantically and intellectually. I am guessing that if you polled the couples at your meetings that even the purely vanilla relationships would be in similar straits with their romantic pairings.

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  4. Impish17:15 PM

    Yes, we can. It requires that we be honorable, know the power of a promise, the power of understanding, the power of forgiveness, and the power of our own worth, but it also requires something more. We must fully understand that no one lives an entire life stagnant. We grow and change, and any relationship that is going to continue must stretch, twist, turn, at times stand on it's head until it finds it's new form. If they are fexible enough, it settles into a new thing that in time fits and becomes comfortable.

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  5. I didn't comment when you first posted this.. it kinda caught me by surprise....

    I think we are coming to a place where BDSM is alive and well...... just different.

    I am not up to - or even close to - the point of playing as hard as we did.. or as often as we did. I wonder some days if those days will ever return.

    But I am finding a more gracious submissive inside of me... one who doesn't fight and strain against the bonds.

    But then I think he is finding a more gracious Dom inside of him as well.. one that doesn't feel the need to "prove" things to others ..

    And both of those changes are a good thing

    ReplyDelete

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