Warning to anyone who knows me personally. This is going to be, perhaps, a TMI post.

This is about my sexual history. Because I am trying to date now and I’m both insecure and apprehensive about this. Because my views and experience seem to indicate that I should be better, more practiced than is reality.

So, my first. I was youngish. Older than most men like to claim. I was 20, she was 18. I came, she didn’t. The relationship that spawned this coupling did not last much beyond this. I wish I had some great or interesting story but alas…

So not a learning experience and little to show for it. I’m sure it was a bland nothing for her as well. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, that’s why we didn’t hang out further. “You’re boring” I believe she said. It’s odd what you remember.

Moving on, nothing for awhile. Until I met “Sarah. She was the emotional center of my life. She introduced me to kink. I wasn’t a stranger to it. Even from a young age the idea of whips in a sexual context fascinated. But she was both experienced at it and needed it.

Her kink was pain. There was some branching into other areas but it all circled back to that. Many people like a little pain with their pleasure, in the heat of the moment. This was not that.

She wanted, needed pain. I desire to give my partners what they need. That satisfies me. The orgasm is pleasurable, but that is what I need. So I learned to inflict pain. She orgasmed from pain. She was wired that way. I loved her. Her pleasure is my pleasure equals feedback loop.

So bottom line here, we had a lot of sex but pain was the focus. I didn’t learn the ways of pleasure as it were. I have a lot of skin to skin experience but that practiced love making was not in it.

While I was with “Sarah” we attended a few baccanals. Orgies. I just like the term baccanal better, its got style. Indiscriminate fucking there, which drives my number of sexual partners up. Again giving the illusion of experience without the substance.

After “Sarah” I was with Eric. I met him through our (Sarah and I’s) extended friends. He mixed pain and pleasure. He was my Top. This is the first time I have ever given his real name. Before I came out, I always referred to him as Erica. I usually use aliases for people on this blog but I know he would not care.

Probably get a kick out of it. I learned submission from him. I also learned I prefer pain to humiliation. No, stronger. I have no desire to be humiliated; It does nothing for me and can turn me off very quickly.

Eric and I were on again off again partners for awhile(4 years span,  but only together for about 6 months altogether) but nothing major.

I’ve dated here and there but no real sexual relationships beyond those.

So I have had sex many times. But unless pain is your need, I’m unlikely to be good. Not that I can’t learn. Just that my experience belies my skill.

That makes dating awkward.  In every area but this I am confident.  But when it comes down to brass tacks, this one place I am uncertain. 

It is when you stop looking that you find what you’re looking for.

What they don’t say is how often the person you were looking for is so often in a bad place or sees you as just a friend.

Or you found them and can’t hold on to them. Hold too tight like a drowning victim to a life preserver; It pops out beyond your reach ejected like a missile, an opposing force to your need. Hold too lightly and they slip past you like trying to grasp mist.

Then where are you left? Back at the beginning, how do you stop looking when you were that close. You don’t. You renew your efforts and end up adrift. A vessel without safe harbor.

You find people who are almost but not quite. Not because they are not seemingly great, but because they can’t accept something about you. You’ve fought your way through the competition and distinguished yourself as a champion but nah, your nose is crooked, you’re not what I thought you were, you aren’t enough in some way.

Denied entry from the outset due to some, to you, superficial slight. What are you left with? What do you do?

Is there some grand gesture I could make that would convince her that I’m worth a second chance? Or are we talking restraining order territory? Who do I ask about this stuff?

I could ask one of my sexual companions, but I’m their comfort not vice versa. I’ve tried going down that road and lost what we Did have.

Should I ask Erica, the last person I had a relationship with? But no, wouldn’t work. I love her and she loves me but we’re not friends. Not any more.

So who do I ask? I suppose I ask you. Sad but you’re my confessor and councilor. .

When I wake from an incredibly detailed dream, wherin I kissed a man with a trimmed beard, it looked good on him. But what woke me was the taste of the Marlboro red double fine that he mixes with menthol and rerolls and the sensation that I got a beard hair stuck in between my teeth.

So I wake up, alone in my bed. I want someone to hold me as I hold them. I think what can I do to chance another chance? Anything, something? But no, my councilor is silence and I’m alone.

I find it hard to write right now
I feel weighed down
Like I’m walking under water
Though it may be that a karmic debt is paid
I once ended a relationship by cutting off communication
I was selfish and capricious
And about a year later I realized how horrible I had been.
I Have thought about and regretted it multiple times a week since then
So to have that happen to me feels a bit like karma.
But it doesn’t change anything, I still regret my inaction.
And the emptiness I feel is like a Phantom limb. You know it’s not there, but you can still feel it.
I guess thats where the metaphor breaks down. Because I still want to hear from you. Still want there to be something there when you clearly feel it’s not.
Still want to contact you.
I’m trying to be mature and let go
But I just want to make some grand gesture like show up at your work with a bouquet of flowers dyed teal and try and sweep you off your feet.
But I won’t because if you truly don’t want me then, I don’t want to make your work awkward. I don’t want you to be unhappy.
….
Well at least the emptiness is gone.

 

Note: the emotions in this were real but based on a fallacy.  I made a fledgling mistake. Given how long it’s been since I’ve had a standard date, I guess I should have anticipated this. This was no fault of the woman I was courting, for want of a better term, this all happened inside my own skull.

To truly appreciate pain, specifically pain given or received as a form of or an addition to pleasure, one must first fully explore and thoroughly examine pleasure.

Pleasure and pain are simple responses to stimuli. But as thinking beings we have the ability to move between the two states fluidly and, With practice, substitute one with the other.

Most often this is done to transfer pain to pleasure but once you’ve gone far enough in that direction there is the desire to take pleasure and form it into pain. For the novelty, if nothing else.

I’ve yet to successfully do that. Though the results of the attempts is a delightful crippling of my ability to distinguish sensation itself as something other than a heightened mingling of pain as pleasure.

I hate the feeling of anyone having power over me. Its why, for years, I’ve chosen relationships that were doomed.

Ones which were shallow, which were physical only, or were based on the premise of having one foot out the door. But I’m there now, because I responded to a friend request on facebook.

I accepted the request and responded with snark. I didn’t expect a response. It’s Facebook, I mostly play games on it. I just accept requests if they seem to come from actual people.
But she did respond, and we talked a bit, and I asked her out. It went well. It continues to go well. I think we’re doing good.

And now I’m happy and a bit scared. I don’t know if she reads this blog. I did point her to it. It’s not a secret. My rule has been from the start if it scares me, it plays. And by the gods, this scares me.

Dating vanilla is harder than I thought it would be.  Different, not bad.  It is akin to Dancing to music you half remember with steps you were never good at.

When you start a relationship as a Top/Master,  you sit down and talk about what is and is not allowable, what both want, what both need.  there is little ambiguity. Which is not to say there are not surprises. Delightful surprises.

But the framework is there to talk about it.  If you want an emotional escalation or something else you can talk about it.  Of course, that is the ideal.  The reality is often not as clear.  But there is a feeling that it is possible, needful even.

In a vanilla relationship I am adrift.  I’d normally have cut ties, it being so confusing, but I feel a genuine connection.  And I’ve learned to trust my Intuition, having ignored it to my peril.