Emotionally Unequipped Part II

I talked to the wife today about my blog after she read it. She was…I don’t want to say upset, but seemed off-balance by it. The first words out of her mouth were:

Her: “Baby, I will hurt you as hard as I can, I promise. We will have a ball on Friday night…I just…”

Me: “No, no, I don’t want to…”

Her: “It’s just that I’m worried about hurting you…”

Me: “I know, and I don’t want to push you past your comfort level. I just…don’t have the words to frame what I want. I don’t want to scare you off, I don’t want to make you do anything you’re afraid of doing. That post was about my lack of communication skills…”

Her: “That post was a plea. You were pleading with me to hurt you. I’ve never heard you plead like that.”

Me: “But I’m not trying to control you or force you to do something you don’t want…”

Her: “Oh, sweetie, I understand. It’s good. I want to hurt you. Hurting you…hurting you and causing you pain makes me very, very hot. It brings me enormous pleasure. But I have a natural instinct, we’re raised…not to hurt people. It’s hard for me to overcome that conditioning.”

Me: “I know.”

Her: “It must be so easy being a sub, because you don’t have to violate any Sunday School ethics to really get into it. I mean, all our lives, it’s ‘keep your hands to yourself,’ ‘don’t hit others,’ and yet hitting others is what I get off on, so I have to overcome it.”

Me: “You’ve done a great job so far. You hurt the hell out of me every time.”

Her: “Thank you. I should just trust you to use the safeword.”

Me: “I promise to shout ‘broccoli’ if you hurt the hell out of me.”

Her: “I know.”

Me: “Broccoli…!”

Her: “More like, ‘BROCCOLI!!!”

Me: “Yeah, or, “OW OW OW OW!”

Her: “I’m not a professional dominatrix who doesn’t know you, who you just met or something. I’m your wife. I’e been married to you for twelve years. I know you, even if you forget the safeword or are just looking ‘not right,’ I’ll ask if everything’s okay. You can trust me to know when we’re getting close to a line, even if you forget.”

Me: “Yeah. I do trust you to stop. I just worry that when we’re getting close to my threshold, and I ask you to not go further, you’ll pull back.”

Her: “I promise not to pull back.”

Me: “I don’t want to control the scene.”

Her: “You keeping me from killing you is not you controlling the scene. I’ll just ask if you want me to stop, go back, move forward slowly…”

And so on. That was the conversation. It’s nice. It makes me happy to know that we can just…talk about things, reasonably. Because I really want to be hurt, but I don’t want to top from the bottom. I just want to…let her know it’s okay. And I don’t think I have the vocabulary yet to do that. I didn’t come into BDSM by way of S&M, and both my wife and I are amateurs doing this at home, away from public clubs or public scenes.

And the thing is, I know she wants to hurt me. I know she loves it. So many times during our play together, she’s said something like, “I could come right now, no physical stimulation, just from hitting you.” Or, “I have never been so wet in my life. I just ruined these sheets, all from beating your beautiful ass.” Pain gets her right the heck off. But we just need to figure out some way to do it so that we’re both comfortable. I mean, what we’ve done so far is great — we’re certainly not blushing virgins at pain-play. But I think we both think we could go further, if we can just negotiate the pitfalls…