Written and dedicated with love and gratitude to my future husband Bondage Jerry for all he has given me throughout our two years together … his love and dedication, his time and attention, his consistent belief in me and in us.
Also written and dedicated with love and gratitude to our dear friend Barry T., who willingly helped us grow together during our down times through his interventions of common sense and wisdom along with his consistent belief in us. Barry, during our times of trouble, you helped us find our way. We cannot thank you enough.
Though in the following piece of writing I refer to “we” throughout, this is written by me and is a reflection of our first two years together of sharing, learning, discovery and growth as individuals and a couple.
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I met my mate two years ago and we formed an instantaneous relationship of friendship. Three months after this date we, without expectation or intention, found ourselves falling in love with each other. Living together shortly thereafter, we time BDSM relationship we both needed could begin, yet all of our many attempts at "having" such a relationship failed miserably. It was only recently we realized why.
The "falling in love" messed the both of us up, especially my mate. Neither of us seemed to be able to assume the roles we both needed to assume, with any form of consistency. We both became frustrated and disillusioned over time and because this BDSM relationship was so elusive, we resigned ourselves to focusing more on our development as a vanilla couple and put BDSM away until some later time in the future. This BDSM stuff was creating too much chaos and confusion in our lives.
We can now see that though we have been together for two years and we consider ourselves to be intelligent adults, there was so much we didn't know. We believed that by living together the creation of a 24/7 BDSM relationship should be relatively easy. After all, we were already living 24/7. We thought that a solid vanilla relationship was instantly developed through love alone. We asked ourselves and each other why we couldn't incorporate into our lives the BDSM relationship we both needed and always dreamed of. We blamed each other, we blamed ourselves, yet love kept us together though we both often wondered if this would be enough. It was only the last week or so that the answers fell into our laps in the most unexpected of ways.
We were going about this the wrong way and knowledge of BDSM combined with a burning desire to become a BDSM couple is not enough to create a BDSM relationship. Living together 24/7 does not make creation of a 24/7 BDSM relationship any easier or quicker to achieve. Past experience does not give us the perfect template which we can follow in forming our own BDSM relationship. The most relevant answer we found was that "falling in love" and desire to be together promised no guarantee that we would remain together "in love" for the balance of our lives, let alone as a vanilla/ BDSM couple.
What we realized was that falling in love was the glue that kept us together through our troubled times, to evolve into the loving couple we are today. It was the realization of what we created through falling in love that changed us into a loving couple. It was remaining together through our down times which reinforced the wants and desire to become a loving couple. It was the shared excitement over each new day along with our plans for the future, the interests we enjoy together in the present, our overall compatibility, the knowledge that together there is nothing we cannot do, there are no dreams we cannot reach. It was the many long, lengthy yet honest discussions we had and it was taking the time to learn about, to accept and to understand each other. It was the efforts given to develop deeper self honesty and honesty to each other which led to an unfailing trust in each other, open communication and integrity as individuals and a couple. In our two years together and from our successes and failures we took “falling in love” and evolved into a “loving couple”.
We realized that the reason our attempts to live as a BDSM couple failed were because our unspoken but shared priority was the development and growth into a loving couple in the vanilla realm, the environment that we live the main part of our lives in, the environment we cannot escape from, the environment we need to keep us balanced.
Everything makes more sense now. My mate has recently become my fiancée and will become my husband on May 4th of 2013. We were unable to develop the type of BDSM relationship with the strong D/s elements we both need into our lives because the vanilla aspects of love, growth, stability and future were and will always remain our priority. This has become the necessary foundation on which we can build our BDSM life within and upon. Becoming a loving couple has aided us in identifying our respective strengths and weaknesses and this knowledge is imperative for us to develop and help us grow into a D/s couple. Along with the desire, we now have the trust, faith and respect that a BDSM element in our lives would require to be fully incorporated into our vanilla life that will last forever. We now have the full understanding of our individual and joint needs and our own template to follow. We have given each other permission to live as our natural personalities and tendencies exist with my future husband assuming the Dominant role allowing me to assume the submissive role in our life together.
We have thrown away the “how to”, “must do” and the “follow me” books and have made a commitment to ourselves and each other to build a D/s/BDSM dynamic in our lives, our way, learning as we go and strengthening the D/s element until our interactions become “just the way we live and love” with no excuses or explanations necessary. We will always endeavor to learn from our mistakes and grow with our successes and we have allowed room for mistakes because without mistakes there can be nothing to learn from and grow upon.
What we learned was that it was not realistic to attempt to build a vanilla and BDSM life simultaneously because one required elements of the other to succeed and be lasting. It may have taken us two years that at times felt like an excessively long period of time but every moment of our struggles were worth what we now have, what we will continue to build upon and the direction we will take our lives with love, and as a loving and committed couple.
Bondage Jerry and I found something very valuable and rare and we will treasure it always and keep it safe. The following sentiments have more personal meaning for us today than when I wrote them many months ago. I am therefore going to retain them below in this writing. We are on a journey of a lifetime together and our destinations may change, but our journey will go on forever.
Writing of some months ago …
“I would like to share a few of my sentiments and you can take this or toss it. If you are fortunate enough to find "your" special partner, if you are compatible in most areas with the same expectations for the future, if you understand that perfection is unrealistic and mutual need to give, receive and share is the main motivator, if you know that open and honest communication is imperative to develop any relationships and are prepared to be an active participant in this regard, if you are both willing to work your asses off to build a foundation that can be strengthened in time and depended on, if you know the meaning of commitment and necessity of following through, if you believe in honesty to others and self honesty, if you give as much as you receive in a different but complimentary form, then accept you have found something very valuable and rare. Treasure it and keep it safe.
You are on a journey of a lifetime together. Destinations may change at times but the journey never ends.”
Amandarites