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Prospecting for Pleasures along the
Canadian Border
The Perils of Transparency
By Sensuous Sadie
SensuousSadie@aol.com
www.sensuoussadie.com
This series is the story of my relationship with Vladimir, who lives
just over the Canadian border, not far north of my home in Burlington,
Vermont. In addition to being my Dominant, Vladimir is a writer and editor
himself and had full editorial control of this essay.
July 2006
This Series
My Promise to Vladimir
That Old Monogamy Commitment Fandangle
Caging my Submissive Spirit
The Perils of Transparency
A Very Short Love Affair
They say you should never sleep with your
friends
An Ode to Master Xavier (and tell him
not to get a swelled head over it either)
When Do Broken
Hearts Heal? Not Soon Enough, If You Ask Me
Photos of
Vladimir
Here in New England there's a personality type that's as common as the
maple sap running down our trees every spring. It's a kind of closed
sensibility about life, a way of keeping our feelings close to the vest
and not sharing loosely and sprightly as we imagine those on the West
coast do. I can say this because I spent a decade in San Diego and have
vestiges of a California Girl in me. Even so, my father's grandparents
were Pennsylvania Dutch and I think he passed down to me this way of
being: to choose carefully what you share and with whom, a kind of a
"choose your battles" approach to what you talk about. I wasn't so careful
in my earlier years and I discovered that not having good boundaries made
for negative consequences. For example, several times I shared personal
things with co-workers which came back later to bite me in the butt. Now
you might wonder about this because my columns are chock full of intimate
details, but writing is a different thing. You, my reader, may feel very
close to me – and in a way you are – but you are not in person this
minute. You are several degrees away from me, and that makes the
experience of writing a wholly different experience.
As you can imagine, my natural reticence is somewhat at odds with the idea
of Transparency that Vladimir and I agreed as a foundation of our BDSM
relationship, an idea which I wrote about in the first column of this
series. Just for a little refresher on that concept, here's an excerpt
from Guy Baldwin's book Slavecraft: "i believe that He cannot
master me if i am hiding from Him in any way. In fact, to the extent that
i can hide myself from my Master, i am not surrendering to Him. By hiding
something, anything, i undermine His power and my respect for him-
essentially, i castrate Him (figuratively, of course) without His even
knowing it and, simultaneously, sabotage my surrender. Ball cutting slaves
are the undoing of Master. i believe this because i have asked Them about
it."
Despite my inclination to keep things close, I have opened up my heart, my
mind, and my body to Vladimir in this, our first month together. I have
shared my most heartfelt emotional wants and needs, my weaknesses and
fears, and yes, my body – in some ways the most intimate part of me of
all. I have shared with him things that I share with no one else, not my
friends or family, not you my readers, no one. Things about my sexuality
that I want no one but my Dominant to know. To have those things be out
there, no longer a secret, but also not acted upon either leaves me aching
and raw.
The most difficult part of all is that through this process, I have come
to realize that while Vladimir loves me very much, I am probably not the
right life partner for him (although I could be wrong, I hope I'm wrong).
He is struggling to come to terms with what he wants and it seems that
most of what he wants is − quite simply − not me. How painful to hear this
now, when all of me is open and vulnerable. And oh, how I wish he had
figured these things out before he had asked me to commit to him, before I
opened myself up as I have. Because of this, I believe that the decision
to be totally transparent may have been a mistake. For one thing,
transparency is such an intense and vulnerable act that it needs to be in
the context of a relationship that has a stable foundation. While our
relationship may have seemed established because we were best friends for
many months before our commitment, I realize now that that was naïve.
Perhaps this would be easier to do when a relationship has been solid for
a longer time, which means that perhaps we can return to this if we are
together in six months or a year. It may also be that transparency may be
something best kept for a strictly Master/Slave relationship, not ones of
the Dominant/Submissive genre where the Submissive has so much more
control over their own life on a day-to-day basis.
Being transparent has made me powerless in some ways, open and vulnerable
with my guts hanging out on the table. And when I am deeply hurt as I am
now, there is no one to help me tuck them back in and sew me up. Certainly
Vladimir can't do it because he's the one who has hurt me. Vladimir truly
wants me to be transparent and feels that he has a right to know how I
feel about him in every way. Perhaps he does; I'm not so sure now where my
rights to my private thoughts and emotions start and end. For example, I
realized some months into our friendship that I was in love with him. I
never told him this because I didn't want to make either of us
uncomfortable, after all he had been very clear that we were just friends
and that was that. Because I wear my heart on my sleeve, he knew how I
felt anyway so in my mind so saying it didn't really matter much. When we
became partners, words like "I love you" became so loaded that I also
chose not to use them, knowing that there would be pressure for him to
respond in kind. I wanted him to have the space and freedom to come to his
feelings when he was ready. But he wants to hear my feelings, all my
feelings anyway; in fact demands to hear them. There are so many other
feelings that I have that I still do not want to share with him, now
simply because I am still flayed and exposed, and cannot reveal anything
that will invite any more hurt into my life. I'm maxed out on pain.
Vladimir also believes in the idea of transparency and he has shared all
his feelings with me as well. You might think that this was just great,
but to be honest. I'm not so sure about that. Sometimes I don't think I
need to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about
what he thinks about every aspect of my personality. Sometimes I think I'd
like for him to just love the whole, and not analyze the parts quite so
much. I'd like to not have to explain so many of my actions to him, and
just know that he knew me well enough to find joy in my way of being. I
think there might be a place for kindness in not sharing everything we
might think about another person, especially if it can only hurt them and
it's pretty much just who they are. Just a different perspective I guess.
This morning I realized that I have to pick myself up, tuck my guts back
in, sew myself up, and get on with it. Sadly, that means that I have to
close the door – gently close the door – to sharing everything with
Vladimir. Maybe it's a moot point as the BDSM part of our relationship,
the one that includes transparency, has not yet been realized anyhow. So
perhaps the transparency idea dissipated along with the unspoken agreement
to make love. Of all the things I regret at the moment, that is the one I
am saddest about. I thought that Vladimir and I could go together into the
deepest mysteries of Domspace and Subspace. I so looked forward to making
love to him, to serving him, to turning over my loving self. Maybe we
still can, and maybe I still can; I don’t know. Anything is possible with
God's help.
I imagine when Vladimir reads this it might further push him away, so I'm
not quite sure how or when I'll share it with him. He doesn't like it when
I put up defenses and close down, but as one author I like puts it:
"Defenses are good things. If we didn't have defenses, we'd be a bunch of
jellyfish." Of course he'll read it before it is published, but
publication is always many months after I write anything of this personal
nature. Closing the door, even gently, tends to limit intimacy which is
not all that good for a relationship; I understand that. On the other
hand, I did promise myself that Sadie the Warrior Goddess would
guide me out of the wilderness if I started getting lost, so thank
goodness she has arrived with her compass. I don't know how a Warrior
Goddess gets on in the bleak midwinters of the Northeast, but I'm thinking
that she too can put on a warm wool cap and hunker down until the sap
comes again in spring.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
REFERENCES
[1]
a grateful slave, with Guy Baldwin, M.S., Slavecraft. 1st. Los
Angeles, CA: Daedalus Publishing Company, 2002.
[2]
Robinson, Betsy. "True or False? "This is a Safe Place"." Spirituality
& Health July/August 2006: 62-65.
Sensuous Sadie is the author of It's Not About the Whip: Love, Sex, and
Spirituality in the BDSM Scene. Read an excerpt at
http://www.trafford.com/robots/03-0551.html. She is the founder and
leader (1999 - 2001) of Rose & Thorn, Vermont's first BDSM group.
Comments, compliments and complaints, as well as requests for reprinting
can be addressed to her at
SensuousSadie@aol.com or visit her website at
www.sensuoussadie.com. Sadie
believes the universe is abundant, and that sharing information freely is
part of this abundance, so she allows reprints of her writing in most
venues.
Copyright 2006 Sadie Sez Publications
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