Changes in circumstances

This month has seen a few changes in my life and lifestyle, and whilst I have been the instigator of most of them, they aren't exactly making me happy.

I started a new job which is exciting but involves very long hours resulting in little time during the week to go on dates, attend munches and by the time the weekend arrives I am rather tired. I'm hoping that this will settle down once I get to grips with everything, but for the moment, I am very much work rather than play - this has it's own attendant problems. I feel disconnected from the scene, especially given my prior levels of involvement and I miss people who I used to see more often. I'm in a more "formal" environment which means that the day-to-day perversity levels are lower and I am certainly in the deeper waters of the vanilla subculture - though that itself might give some useful and interesting insights.

Following on from my reduced social time, in some respects, is the change in my relationships. My partners colour a lot of what I do kinkwise, so I imagine it will come as no surprise that the lack of content on the blog has been driven by, well, a lack of content. I am, it appears, single, once more.

Mannequin, Fenrir and I had a good (though sad and somewhat wistful from my point of view) conversation a few weeks ago in which she was going to be exclusively his. I know that this is something she really wanted, and from what I hear on the kinky grapevine, she's well cared for and enjoying herself. I miss her, although at the same time there is a certain sense of relief - throughout our relationship there was a strain caused by the disconnect between what she wanted and what I was capable of delivering. Ultimately, she wanted a cis-male partner and all the strap-ons in the world will not change this fact. Writing that sentence felt strange, as if there was something to blame for one person's particular preference, which of course, there is not. And honestly, I like male bodies too, and enjoy having them around.

The strangeness is all in myself. It's not a fault of either of us, just the simple fact that having started down the road of D/s with her it has come to an end. All the feelings of ownership, control and self-worth deriving from that power exchange have stopped because of being unable to be the right kind of dominant person, and I wouldn't want to be that person, because that would mean not being me. It is a curious feeling. Wanting something is never reason or justification enough for it to be able to happen. Some things just don't work out. And that's life.

Which brings me on to Mr Smith. There have been various points in our relationship where it felt that the D/s was creating a difficult push/pull for him with respect to how we worked compared to his marriage and other lovers. D/s is a very different place to either of these things. We were not casual Friday night affairs, and neither was I ever going to be the most important woman in the world to him (that would be his wife). Those two poles were markers of where our relationship sits - somewhere in the middle, slightly uneasily.

On the one hand, he craves submissive satisfaction, the control and order that comes with a set of protocol, the firm guiding hand and the patient caring tones of one who owns. He would come to me and be placed outside of the world for an evening, be allowed to let go and bottom out and be put through his paces.

All of those things I was able to make time to deliver, but he was struggling in fulfilling his side of the deal. The things that I needed - the level of service I required from him once he was away from me. Now, these are important to me for a number of reasons - first they make it into a genuine relationship. We have contact outside of our play-dates, talk about our lives, share notes and thoughts, meet for coffee, lunches and similar. They are the surrounding elements that make me feel like a partner, rather than a pro domme. As I reminded him in the heat of an angry exchange - I have no problem with delivering a session in an allotted time and having no call upon him outside of that. But I require paying.

I want D/s relationships. This means that, as a dominant, there are things that the submissive must do for me. Not just kneeling and giving head, or doing all the kinky sex stuff that they want to do anyway. Things that are just for me. Day to day things that are embedded in their life and make me part of their world, just as they become part of mine. Now, this will; never be done "right" straight away - there's always going to be give and take. The training process involves an element of "getting better" and I had no expectations of instant perfection and enjoyed the correcting procedure. It was when things started to be forgotten, or half done, or rules were only part remembered that I began to get worried. Rather than supporting him, the training process became an additional stress - a thing that "didn't get done" and then was an extra weight in his busy and stressful life. And in my busy and stressful life. It was made worse, in many respects, by the fact that we are friends, so in tandem with this I was meeting him to try and help him resolve issues in his marriage - the stress of which, and the sexual absences within it I felt was contributing to his overall unhappiness and reliance on me.

This had the difficult effect of making me feel like part prostitute, part marriage counsellor. Again, all roles I can fulfill, but I'd like to be paid for them, really. What I wasn't getting were the things I needed, and constantly demanding them was making me feel angry towards him. In the end, we have decided to remove the D/s element from our relationship. I place no requirements or protocol on him, we see each other if and when we can and we do what we feel like when we do see each other. We fuck a lot, and it's good sex - but it's not particularly kinky and therefore for me, it is not deeply connected. And I miss that. I miss the intensity and the desire for intensity. I no longer look at him and think "mine" - though I do think "my friend" or "the boy I'm fucking"

I'm pleased with how amicable and straight-forward most of these parting conversations were - admittedly the situation with Mannequin and Fenrir was easier because it felt much more like a D/s handover, whereas with Mr Smith the lack of communication between his wife and myself means I have concerns over whether he is being adequately cared for outwith my patronage. I am also very conscious of theses absences in my life and the loneliness that this has created in me.

I'm working through it. Certainly the world is a calmer place, I'm not upset per se, and I've removed a lot of anxieties by having these conversations and changing these relationships. But I've also removed a lot of good stuff (admittedly, potential good stuff that wasn't working). And that makes my life much emptier. I'm trying to work out what I need to fill it.