Control

It was only our second night of playing when I began to feel the anxiety. It was discomfiting, this idea that my needs and desires are valid and that I have a right to have them met, that I have a right to relax my rigid control and unrelenting standards and fall into the moment and allow myself to trust another to care for my needs.

I wanted to call and talk to him about these things. I wanted to sit in the tension on my own and sort through them. On the one hand, talking to him had the potential to build further intimacy and trust; but if he wasn’t interested it had the potential to drive him away. On the other hand, the desire to talk to him about tit might just have been a desire to seek comfort and reassurance and numb the discomfort of being cared for.

Ultimately, I decided it was largely both. I wanted to avoid my own uncomfortable truths about how deserving or undeserving I felt in regards to being taken care of in any capacity and I wanted to build more intimacy by sharing how I was feeling with him. Because the connection was there. I blame the geese.

Still, I felt like our engagements were lopsided. I wished he could be physically present with me to hear me sigh his name when I climaxed. I wished to be able to give him anything. Though I knew that giving him control of my orgasms met his needs, it almost felt too easy, as though I was giving so little and gaining so much.

Eventually, I broke down and sent him a text asking if his needs were being met. He didn’t respond and after ten minutes, I decided to begin writing to try and sort out my own weird feelings about the lopsidedness. I wanted to distract myself, as well, from the anxiety of wanting a response. I wanted to call him. I really wanted to call him and talk through it. In some ways, I wanted to call him just to hear his voice.

In the end, I was glad I didn’t. He had told me earlier in the evening that if I awoke in the middle of the night he expected me to have a third orgasm. When I sent the text inquiring whether his needs were being met, he didn’t respond for nearly four hours. His text, finally arriving at three in the morning, woke me from a sound sleep, effectively ensuring that I would have a third orgasm.

It felt like it took forever to reach that orgasm. The next morning I was quite sore. I didn’t know if I was over stimulated or if I had abrasions on my clitoris. It did, however, serve for the rest of the day as a reminder of the ecstasy I had experienced the night before.

Once my partner did text, I realized that if I had called or asked for a timeout to sort through my own uncomfortable feelings, I would have been doing so, at least in part, as an effort to take back control of this part of our play. Counterproductive to my goals - giving up some level of control in some area of my life, to just be less controlled and controlling because I knew that my rigidly structured engagement with the world wasn’t good for me.

At the same time, I didn’t know if total surrender to another in any are of life is good or healthy. I knew it felt good as an idea and had unexpected consequences as a lived act. I knew that I could easily take back control and us it to control my feelings of discomfort by removing the stimulus for those feelings. Feelings of discomfort and confusion, though, aren’t all bad. And I knew that that in taking back control of the situation in order to control my feelings would deny me the opportunity to learn about myself as I struggle to understand the root causes of my emotional response. Letting go and learning more….trusting that my partner will respond in his time…trusting that my need will be met or they won’t….knowing that I’ll be okay either way.