Thursday, April 3, 2008

Have I thrown my values out the window?

It's extremely flattering to be pursued.

When I signed up to The Cage (BDSM community in Israel), I began getting dozens, if not hundreds of requests/introductions.

But at the start, when the numbers were still sort of sane, I was a bit less selective. I described in my last post how I basically gave myself to one of the first people who even spoke to me. But it isn't just that he was one of the first. I might not have all the tools yet to determine who is a good match for me D/s-wise, but as a human being I know what I like: Communication, sophistication, cleverness... When someone writes to me "I liked your profile. Can we meet?", the chances are I won't meet them. I'm just a bit bored with the fact they didn't say anything about themselves (and many of the profiles are empty), and they didn't think they need to "market" themselves at all.

But then I got this:

"I've already invested in our relationship (in Hebrew there is a lovely word for "couplehood" that just doesn't exist in English). I looked up the meaning of your username. Is it possible you are really into the room where priests change their clothes?"

Okay, so maybe some of the humor is lost in translation. But he looked up the meaning of vestry, not vestri, and came up with a Catholic church reference. Which actually does it for some people, hehe, but wasn't my intent.

But I loved that he was thinking about my nick, that he made an effort, and the intelligence and humor that oozed from every word he wrote. I wrote back, then he wrote back, and we were so engaged in this light, surprising, delightful dialog, that before I knew it I had pretty much committed to him, inasmuch as you can through PMs in The Cage.

I couldn't wait to meet him. And I did, and it was great. I'll tell about that too. But what is more important for me to share right now is my mental state, my thoughts, my emotions, at this stage of my self-discovery as a submissive.

I was "with" Domino. I shouldn't have been. It wasn't fair of him to claim me just because I met him for a session. And there is no real reason I have to give his claim any legitimacy. But I wasn't clear on the rules, or even what I wanted or expected. And here I am meeting with someone else. There is a fundamental dishonesty here that I would never have allowed myself in any vanilla relationship.

Also, my new Dom (Cafe) is married. That is also a bright-line limitation I do not cross in my "real" life. So why in my BDSM persona am I allowing things I never would before? Have my ethics and values changed? Are the rules really that different? Am I making allowances for myself just because I'm that horny?

This was the next big question I had to deal with: What are the rules of engagement, and how do I reach synchronicity between my true values and the world I am exploring?

1 comment:

David said...

My opinion, I gather you are soliciting opinions?, is that your morals, value and ethics should not change. If you have principles that guide you in relationships, they should apply in any realm. BDSM - D/s are just things you do when you are relating to someone. The person at the core should be true to themselves.

David