Can I Be Mad At You As Your Slave?

I didn't know I still had it in me to be angry, like enthusiasm and excitement I thought I had left that emotion balled up in the corner of a room, like a beloved shirt-turned-rag at the end of its life, as I moved out of my apartment, but it would appear that I can still be mad.

It came at me at a weird moment.

He punched me in the face. Just your usual Tuesday-night punch. I grit my teeth and thrashed around until he had to force me onto the bed and climb on top of me. He asked me to move my hands up over my head. I did it, well, I started to do it, but I screamed as well. He pulled my hair and attempted to hold me still. I looked at him with fiery rage and threatened to kill his entire family.

"You will behave," he said to me.

"I am," I responded, "I said I would obey you, I didn't say I had to be happy about it."

"You're unhappy, is it?" He asked, tightening his grip but softening his gaze.

"You will get the slave you deserve," I said, shocked that the sentence even existed inside me.

"I deserve an angry slave?" He asked.

"Yes," I said, leaning into the anger so as to hold back the tears, "If you want me to be better, you have to deserve it."

"I agree," he said, not letting go of my hair, "Now put your hands over your head, do it angrily, if you must, but do it now."

"I know I hurt you," he said, repeatedly going back in to hit me in the face, "I am sorry. I should have done better and I will do everything to fix it. There is nothing worse for me than to know I hurt you."

He did hurt me. He really did. It was the kind of hurt that can only be caused by choosing silence when you should have spoken; the kind of hurt that turns into neglect if you don't force in onto the table. However, let me back up, explain and address the obvious concerns. I am not going to kill his family. I also know that this conversation I have just repeated may make some people uncomfortable and others will accuse me (and him) of being toxic or problematic or violating some covenant of BDSM that we must hold more sacred than our hearts but I found myself immersed in a strange conundrum. I am not mad at my partner, I am mad at my master. A day prior to this interaction we had a long, calm conversation in which I expressed my hurt and my subsequent inability to be freely present with him in my role because I found myself leaning on pride and resistance instead of surrender in our sexual interactions. I found myself refusing to break for him. I found myself holding my silence not because he expects that, but because I didn't want him to have my suffering. We made the decision to work through it within the dynamic because I needed that. I didn't need him to show me he'll be a great partner because, well, he's been great in every way, the indiscretion that hurt me so took place within his role as my master, and I needed to address it within that role, I needed him to show me he would do that better.

There is an inevitable question one must ask here. How seriously do you want to take this dynamic? It would be easier, way easier, to practise it within a purely sexual space and resolve any conflict outside of these roles. It would be wiser as well and until now, any time we have had conflict, it was calmly discussed as equals and resolved before we resumed any power-based dynamic.  That has always felt like the safer, smarter choice. It has always felt more intelligent to rely on levity to ensure we don't immerse ourselves so deeply within a construct meant for pleasure that it becomes fraught with ritual to the point that we lose our humanity to one another. I wasn't anticipating having the most confrontational conversation we have ever had while he held me down and beat me.

But I am glad we did.

There is a contradiction in the union of the way we are supposed to practise power exchange and the way human beings emote. The protocols we have laid out are perfect and any deviation from perfection is equal to complete destruction, but what we do is laden with emotion, intensity, madness and blinding intimacy. I cannot do perfect power exchange because even within my terribly advanced ability to compartmentalise, I cannot keep love, life and these roles completely separate. Maybe it's possible for some people, but the way I love is inextricably linked to who I am as a romantic and all of my romance, all of the ways in which I express my love, takes place on my knees. I cannot keep denying this forever. A part of me even wishes that it just wasn't true so I could have easier relationships, ones that didn't need to be accompanied by bucket loads of communication to function well enough to remain healthy. If I could be a different person, maybe I would, lord knows I have spent a decade trying to resist the idea that I really am who I am and it's not just a proclivity to whips and bloodletting, but it's just a pain in my own ass to not accept it now. You don't have to take these constructs seriously, but in the same way that you don't have to take any relationship-based constructs seriously. You don't have to take dating, marriage, commitment, any of it, seriously, but we tend to, the ones we take seriously, I think, depend on who we are as romantic beings and for, better or worse, this is who I am. This is who I choose to be.

While the nature of our relationship is protean, at the heart of it is this dynamic, these roles of master and slave, and sometimes the discord takes place within those roles. Outside of them I was able to explain to him exactly why I was feeling what I was feeling and what I thought we should do about it, but it was only inside the role that I could show him. I could discuss it to death, but the sentiment isn't fully understood until it is seen. I needed him to see my hurt. I needed to be able to express my anger. I couldn't do it over a healthy discussion at the dining table. I couldn't because there was no way for me to access my anger in that space but when he was hurting me and demanding my obedience, it came rushing out of me. The truth came rushing out of me. He could have stopped, I know that many would argue that is the right time to stop, but stopping would have abated my pain in the moment, he would have demonstrated that he cares but I know that already. I didn't need him to demonstrate that he cares, I need him to show me that just like I will continue to begrudgingly do as he asks even when I am angry, he will continue to do what he must and adhere to the role he chose, even when he is shaken and pained by my pain.

That is what I needed. For one moment in time, I needed both of us to commit to the construct even though it was hurting us both. It would have been much easier to hug and cry it out, but it would have remained inside me. The resistance and the pride that has been keeping me from approaching vulnerability would have remained.

Instead he kept on beating me.

For hours.

There was something different about it. For once, he was hurting as much as I did. I could see it but he wasn't channeling his hurt into helpless pummelling of my flesh. He was more controlled than ever, as if he were beating me for the first time. As beside myself as I was with emotion, that's how resolved he was to retain his composure and calm. As aggravating as I was determined to remain, that's how sanguine he was determined to be. I don't know why that is what I needed. Maybe I just needed to know that I had the right to be the unreasonable, unpredictable, flaming mess I was and he would still take me as that. Maybe I needed him to sit in the discomfort of my pain long enough to really realise it. Maybe I needed him to truly feel reminded that he doesn't get to play with my heart and soul and then leave those toys on the floor until he was ready to play with them again. I fought him for hours, not with words or overt displays of anger, but with a petulant silence and constant tears. I cried for hours. On a side-note, sometimes I think bdsm is just an excuse for me to cry. You know those middle-aged men who were unfortunately raised in the "men don't cry" era so they have to wait for an event where it's socially acceptable for them to cry and then let out decades of pain? I think I am those men but instead of a funeral, I do it during sex.

After crying for hours, he told me he didn't want to see my tears anymore and flipped me over to my stomach. He started to beat my back with his belt and told me to stop crying. I did. I don't know how. It just happened. Each time he hit me, the tears started to form in my throat but they wouldn't come out of my eyes because he kept reminding me that I didn't have his permission to cry. Something softened, the resistance I have been carrying for a couple of weeks gave way to the realisation that in a relationship you give each other the kind of trust where if one person fucks up, you both have to work through it, it cannot be fixed on one end alone, and as much as he needed to show me he would fix it, I needed to let go and move on. My parents used to fight all the time and once they determined whose fault it was, it would be proclaimed that that person was entirely responsible fixing everything because they had made the mistake but they never fixed anything. They just spent their years trying to prove the other was more wrong, not realising that it wasn't him against her but them against the issue. When he wouldn't let me cry, and that alone was enough to keep the tears inside me, I realised the thing that hurt the most was that I thought that I had to take no role in fixing this and let him take care of it. I thought he would do something that would get rid of my resistance for me, but I had to do it, I had to choose to let it go. It's not fair to be responsible for fixing the mistake of another, but that view is simplistic, because on other days, he supports my mistakes like they are ours. If there are moments when I need him to truly forgive me, there are moments when I need to truly forgive me. Power exchange doesn't give you that ability, but love does.

By the time he finally let me cry he wasn't even hurting me anymore. I was just lying on the floor, aching to tell him that I loved him more than anything in the world. As soon as he said I could cry, a thousand tears emerged at once. I lay down on the floor because I couldn't carry the weight of the tears and my own body at the same time. He lay down on the floor with me and held me for a long time. We didn't speak at all. There are moments when communication means shutting the fuck up.

"I need water," I said, finally, what felt like hours later.

"I'm going to get you some water, my love," he said, as if resolving to bring me the moon and the stars.

It was funny so I laughed. I laughed so he laughed. I drank some water. I could pretend to be perfect. I could pretend this relationship is perfect and I have cracked the formula for perfect control-based dynamics, but this is the other side of intensity. You cannot wrench someone's heart and never end up in a difficult place. What you do in a difficult place may not always look right, it may not even be right, but it is more right than denial and pretending everything is perfect all the time.  It would be so easy. The entirety of social media exists to enable this eyewash but I am compelled by the desire to be real. There is nothing more damaging than truths brushed under the rug.

Sometimes "real kink" is heartbreaking.  

Sometimes heartbreak is good.