Choosing to struggle

I think I have earned my stripes (little joke there!) as a submissive woman by now. After all of these thousands of words of my thought processes, wants, needs and desires, I think that is a given. Yet, after all this time and all those words I can also say with authority that ceding control is rarely easy for me.

Is this a contradiction in terms? I say it is not. I know that some women take to their submission like a duck to water and all power to them. I am not one of those ducks. I feel internal struggle in about the same quantities as I feel a sense of coming home in being submissive. In other words, I am regularly in internal struggle with the giving up of control. Relinquish it I do, but not without a struggle.

I really do not wish for control, necessarily. I don’t care to be controlling or to boss or to have great responsibilities on my shoulders. I’m not the sort of mother that wants to have her chickens live in the same location as her all their lives, for example. If one chooses Paris, the other London and another New York, so be it. I only want their happiness and satisfaction and I can adapt to their needs. I know how to buy a plane ticket.

Nor am I a fool. I married a man who demands to be in control; not just in terms of our path through life but of the most minor of details. No woman who demanded control of him would last three hours let alone 30 years. Yet, when he instructs me how to do something that I have done thousands of times before perfectly satisfactorily, I can feel my ire rise. Almost always, I bite down on the irritation and allow it to pass without expressing it. I’ve learnt over time that it is not worthwhile to express my frustration. It is a far better outcome for me in the long run to bite down on the irritation and let it pass away. There is nothing I hate more than getting a telling off for being rude at such moments. It only exacerbates the whole getting irritated thing by a country mile.

My husband has learned that when I am agitated or out of sorts it doesn’t do to leave me to fester. These are moments when I need to feel his control to get back my equilibrium and he’ll demand of me something that I don’t want to do. Inch by inch he brings me back to that little space of mine where I find the most comfort – my place, on the bottom. But, I don’t go there, quite often, without a bit of a struggle. I don’t necessarily go there willingly at all. I’ve wondered at times, if there was a photographer there at those moments, could he or she manage to capture that internal struggle?

Of course, I know that I might never get to that happy place of mine without a committed man in my life. Any man who thought, “Oh well, I guess she just doesn’t feel like submitting today...” would not work for me. I need to feel that resolve. There is little that I cannot do now in the hands of a committed and caring dominant.

But, I do have a sticking point and I rather hope that all submissive women do, too. A submissive woman deserves respect and she needs to feel that respect at all moments; no matter what it is she is being asked to do; no matter what is happening to her; and no matter how debased she has become for him in any given moment. I think there is a real risk in this dynamic that a man might forget how essential respect is to a submissive woman. She gives of herself to him, for him and for the betterment of the power exchange they share. If she smells the slightest sniff of disrespect in the air; if she needs to wonder for half a second if he is exhibiting a lack of respect for her, then she will back away for fear that the trust she has put in his hands has been corrupted.

She needs to know with certainty that whilst he will do things that hurt her, he would never want to hurt her feelings. She needs to know with certainty that whilst he will do things that suggest he does not care about her, he will always care for her and want the best for her. She needs to know with certainty that whilst he has sadistic leanings, he would hate to think he has damaged her sense of him as her protector.

I think a submissive woman has a most healthy dose of self-respect. She may crave to submit to a man but when she does so it is with the sure knowledge that she is a confident woman who has given of herself because it is her choice. Should he take her for granted, she may choose again.