Balance

I don’t think that sounds dour at all. Contemplative would be a better word.

A lot of people mistake going against the norm for open-mindedness, but if you really consider all of the angles in the choices you make, you’re bound to end up siding with the majority at least some of the time. Or at least you’ll consider it. That doesn’t make you any less of a libertine.

It seems like you’ve been out on the cutting edge of sexuality for a while and are still blazing new trails with your choices. There does seem to be a lack of understanding, support and information about this lifestyle. My sense and hope is that the more people open the lines of communication and the less we demonize sexuality in all its varieties and flavors, the better off we are going to be as a society. Thanks for taking the path less travelled and sharing your experiences with us. Also thanks for the note last week; it was very helpful. You weren’t direly wrong; quite the contrary, I think you were spot on.

Let me see if I understand what you are saying. You have a lifestyle, a preofessional interest, and an academic interest that you are and have been pursuing. You’d like to consider a personal relationship with another person, but you worry that misconceptions, bad information, and lousy communications could screw up that relationship, and pssibly has in the past. This might also be affecting your current thinking.

Now, knowing all of this, the issue is, what should both the person and the relationship look like to best satisfy your needs in this relationship, which would make it somewhat easier in identifying a potential partner for ths relationship. Is this correct?

Perhaps, motivated by sinboy from the last post, if you really like to relate to your partner by spanking them, and directing the sex in your lives, perhaps you would need to find someone into spanking, sort of as a prerequisite. Perhaps a knowledge of art and/or photography would be usefull, maybe not, this may be pushing it too hard. But someone into spanking might still be desireable. If this is way off the mark as far as thinking goes, what would be closer to your thinking, please.

Yep, that would be balance. I like what you were alluding to, saying that there is another person on the other end. Learning to care about the other person is a sure sign of sexual and intimate maturity.

I think what people don’t realize is that most of these problems/confusion are not sexual in nature - it just happens that sex is involved. But it could be anything. It could be church for godsake. The bigger issues are personal, social, and relational. (Or at least that’s what I’m finding in my own explorations.) Wonder why that’s so hard for some people to understand.

One thing- there are no compromises when seaching for attributes in a relationship. Once you compromise, you give up something you were originally searching for anyway. It may be something big or something small, but eventually it will be an issue. Try to find a partner that is has the same compromises in mind that you do. Are you searching for yourself? In a strange way yes, but no two individuals are the same. The problem with your situation Dacia is that you are on the “cutting edge” of society. I completely support people like you who have the courage to follow what they feel. Following intuition is hard because it is those individuals that face the harshed criticism. Being on the edge of something has its values. One is that there is few people there with you. The flip side is they are scattered in a line, not pooled together in a group. You basically have to walk a lot of miles to find what you want. Its out there though, keep looking. Like HDT said “We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.” A partner/relationship should always have some shroud of mystery involved with it, thats what makes it exciting. Keep thinking about your decisions, thats where the truth lies and thats where you will find indicators as to what you seek…true balance.

i think ever since you got the injury, you have been trying to work out where you are going with your life. i hope that anyone like me,who has benefitted from your experiences of life,would let you have a bit of”me time”until you figure out what you want to do next. hoping you will decide what is best for you.

OK, I’ll be the contrary Mary and say I think these problems ARE about the sex because sex is not just putting genitals and mouths together. Sex is about interacting with other people, otherwise we’d be perfectly happy masturbating, and that’s not what most of us choose.

I’m not advocating or judging any lifestyle or choice, but I don’t believe it’s possible to wall off the emotional from the sexual. Desire is about more than nakedness, the whole BDSM movement proves that it’s about control, the hot wife movement shows how it’s about the aphrodysiac of jealousy, the swinger movement shows how we try to integrate our lusts and our need to be close to someone.

So I am not surprised that you’re having these issues, because I think they’re completely normal and natural. Not wishing to sound like a one-note band, but it’s why I wrote my book: to highlight how sex, desire, love and trust are all intimately tied up inside our psyches.