Cold and Abrasive??

I read another slave’s blog today, mostly because we are basically engaged in a silent debate on the differences between showing realities of 24/7 live-in m/s and the flowery romanticized ideals used as expectations for a live in relationship. I say silent because that debate is occurring without much real input to each other, just in denied posts to a list and blog entries like the one I read.

The first thing she asked was is the fruit of slavery bitter or sweet. The realistic answer is that it is both. There will be many sweet things as a result of one’s slavery, and there will be some bitter things, some anger inducing things, some hurtful things…in short, there will be things that can be described by any emotional state that a person can name. There is joy, happiness, satisfaction, fear, anger, resentment, relief, love, caring, romance, hurt, depression, disappointment etc. Why? Because we are at base human beings. We are not, by virtue of our personalities as a dominant or submissive/slave somehow lifted above and better than other human beings. We are still prone to the same fallacies of every other human being, and our relationships are still prone to the same pitfalls, joys, and everything else a non-TPE relationship is prone to endure. So the answer, in my opinion, is slavery has a bit of both bitterness and sweetness and we will not always be able to choose which one occurs on any given day.
This blog went on to say that experienced slaves often speak "harshly", "abrasively" and with "rough edges", that we come across as cold, bitter and cruel. I think this can be accurate for some people, but in my experience this has never been the majority of experienced people. In my experience, the ones who make this accusation the most are the ones who are dead set on believing the ideals to be the reality and they will fight tooth and nail to keep anyone from injecting a bit of reality into their fantasy. Often these same people are the ones who have extremely high expectations of an m/s relationship because they have yet to actually live in one on a daily basis and in the same house as their owner. Instead they follow a set of guidelines/rules that govern their daily behavior, but still make most of their own decisions and their experience with live-in m/s occurs on an occasional basis. In my experience it has been very easy to maintain that wonderfully romantic "shining slave light" for a weekend, yet much more difficult to remain always joyful, at peace, content and enraptured of service on a daily basis.
This also made me wonder, how much of that harsh abrasiveness is being read into the words being read by the reader and not actually intended by the author? Mailing lists are text only formats and unless you are reading the words of someone you have spoken with many times in real life and know very well, what you read is heavily influenced by your current mood, your defenses, biases and what have you. If the topic at hand is one that somehow makes you feel vulnerable or threatened, then you will very easily infer an attack of some sort, sarcasm, or outright cruelty in the words even when the words do not support that view in any way. If you are one who prefers to focus solely on the perfect things in life, then anything that is not in keeping with that flowery way of writing or thinking will be seen as cold and abrasive, no matter how politely it is worded. In a text only environment, one has a great deal of leeway with how one interprets what they are reading. The best way I have found in my 10 years on mailing lists is to always infer a monotone to what I am reading, by doing so I reduce any knee jerk reactions on my part that may not be based on truth, but instead based on my own interpretation that is heavily influenced by my mood and biases. This is very hard to do, and I freely admit that I do not always succeed at it, but I try hard anyway.
The argument was made that being a slave has caused this person to grow in gentleness, yielding, understanding and other such commendable attributes. This growth has been attributed to the owner and the basic relationship of m/s; to being a slave. This personally I can agree with; that such growth is not only possible, but that many slaves can and will say similar things, with the ones who have done this the longest having the longest list of positive changes within their personalities, attitudes and behaviors. Part of the whole goal of any power exchange relationship (or any vanilla relationship for that matter) is the growth of the participants, both as individuals and as a couple. So such growth should and does occur.
The statement was made that the longer one is a slave the softer they become, that they desire to speak solely in gracious words that are nurturing to the soul, rather than combative and cold. This is a commendable goal. However, it all depends on what one defines as combative and cold. Stating "I do not agree with this ideal because…" is not combative, it is an attempt at explaining one’s opinion and the reasons for it. Interestingly enough, everytime someone uses that phrase they are accused of being combative or attacking another, of being cold. So what should really have been said is that this person prefers solely to focus on only the good and positive things and not the bad; to be an optimist and anyone who does not do this will be summarily dismissed as cold and embittered. That is fine by me, but it does not work for everyone and when one has placed onself in the position of teaching others about slavery, stating positive things as the truth for every minute of every day, sets the novice up to fail.
Honestly, I think that deciding that those who speak of realities are nothing more than embittered, resentful cold people is no more than an attempt to deny the harsher aspects of this lifestyle and relationship choice, in order to keep ones dreams alive. This is something I have seen time and time again in my years of talking with and spending time with others in the lifestyle. It is most common in those who have had rough times in the vanilla world and begin to see bdsm as a solution to all vanilla relationship issues. Time and time again I have watched, counseled, supported, comforted and all of that these same people when their relationship failed because of these very same unrealistic expectations and focus on romanticized ideals. It is my experiences doing this myself, and assisting others in dealing with the aftermath that has cemented my belief that one needs to talk about both sides of the coin when in a position of teaching a novice; meaning, speak of both the good and the bad. That one has to discuss the realities with any potential partner, not just the bdsm stuff, but in all aspects of life. This is not being cold, this is being realistic and time and time again I have seen that relationships based on realistic expectations last longer and are more satisfying to those involved than those based solely on fantasy.
The following questions were asked: "Do slaves who have been slaves and lived as slaves for many years begin to resent it?" the answer to this one, in my experience is that yes this does occur for some people. In my experiences, the vast majority of the ones who end up resenting it are the ones who went into it with rose colored glasses and found out the hard way that all is not romance, flowers and joy on a daily basis. The ones who do not resent their slavery, are most often the ones who learned their lesson about being too romanticized the hard way so went into their next relationship with more realistic expectations, thus they are better equipped to deal with the day to day realities and find true satisfaction for themselves. In such cases, resentment is not an end result, instead the end results are much more positive and uplifting.
The comment was made that maybe us embittered, cold, resentful long time slaves could learn to rekindle the joy in our slavery from witnessing the joy of another slave. I can buy this because everyone can learn from someone else, and everyone can have old feelings rekindled in unexpected ways and from unexpected sources or have something wake them to something they are taking for granted. However, I find it very difficult to swallow that I should have my poor cold embittered soul rekindled by the subbie fever joy of someone who has yet to truly live this lifestyle in the same house as their owner for more than an occasional weekend or evening event here and there.
Sure, I had the same wonderful ideals, stars in my eyes when my owner and I were long distance and only saw each other once in a while. Submitting joyfully was easy on those occasional weekends together, and this only made me believe that it would be that easy all the time when we finally lived together. I too did not want to listen to others who tried to warn me that this is not how the reality is. It was this very overly romanticized rose colored glasses view that assisted in getting myself into an extremely abusive relationship under the guise of master/slave with someone else.
I truly believed there would never be disagreements because all that was settled easily by the power structure. False. I truly believed that I would never feel any resentment, anger, lonliness or hurt..that I would feel nothing but joy in every service I did every single day. False. Reality slapped me and slapped me hard. I spent a long time believing that I was a complete failure as a slave because I could not maintain that wonderful "shining light of slavery" every single day, no matter what was thrown at me. It took me years to realize that I had not failed because I had done everything asked of me, no matter how impossible it was and in the process completely destroyed myself to try and make someone else happy. Why? To attain that ideal of the perfect, never conflicting, joyful shining slavery of the "real slaves" who constantly spouted all those wonderful tidbits of advice.." a real slave never" " a true slave always" and all that crap. I bought it, and I paid a high price for it and I am not alone. A lot of people fell for that stuff and paid a high price for it. It is the entire reason that people started writing about the phenomenon termed subbie fever and other similar terms. It is the desire to try and prevent a novice from making that same mistake, and possibly paying a huge price for that mistake, that prompts many of us long time slaves to speak on the realities over and over. This is far from cold and combative. In fact it seems to me that this stems solely from a compassion for others and a true desire to teach and help others. Cold and combative? Nope.
I will say that despite the many negative and hurtful outcomes of that one relationship, I learned my lesson. It made me more careful before submitting as a slave again. It made me keep one eye on the reality, and make sure that my expectations were attainable. I eventually regained my dreams and my ideals, my joy and all that, but it was finally tempered with experience and rooted in reality not fantasy. I believe that this very ability on both mine and my owner’s part to accept the realities of life and relationships that has made it possible for us to have the strong, loving, committed relationship we still have 7 years later.
Lastly a comment was made, paraphrased, which basically said that slavery is both good and bad, has its good points and bad points etc. This I can agree with wholeheartedly. My whole problem with this particular topic was not speaking of the ideals themselves, it was completely dismissing the realities as being of no value, combative, cold or embittered in order to focus only on the sweet, lovey dovey stuff instead. Both should be presented in order to provide a truly balanced view of slavery within a TPE relationship. To focus solely on one part or the other is to be unfair and unbalanced. One leads to unrealistic expectations, the other to indifference and despair. However, by focusing solely on the good stuff and negating or outright denying any of the bad, mundane, boring or whatever stuff, you force the experienced into a corner where all they can add to the conversation is the stuff that was left out. This basically manipulates them into looking cold and embittered, and thus easily dismissed in one’s rose-colored view. I wonder, is that why people do that? To set the experienced up to look bad and thus easier to ignore so one can continue to focus on the "slavery makes life perfect!!" ideal? Hmm..interesting and rather disturbing idea. I would not be surprised if that is exactly why some people insist on focusing solely on ideals that can not be attained, and romanticized versions of daily m/s life. That’s sad, but a fairly intelligent use of manipulation in order to maintain one’s denial mechanisms.

I did post a comment to the original blog that inspired this entry in my blog, in case it is deleted, I am including it in its’ entirety here.
---my comment----
Speaking about the realities of living an m/s relationship on a daily basis does not mean one is full of resentment or bitterness, it means one realizes that going into such a relationship with an unrealistic expectation that slavery is easy, that a slave must be joyful and happy at all times and other ideals, sets the slave up for some serious hurt and we try to prevent that from occuring by giving our experiences for review.
Bitterness would be saying "being a slave is the worst thing I ever did!" not saying "being a slave on a live-in basis is very hard day to day".
Is there joy in serving for many years? yes there is. Do many slaves find themselves becoming gentler as time goes on? yes they do. But that does not negate the truth of speaking from experience and reality vs. speaking solely in romantic ideals.
Though I suppose deciding that anyone who does not speak in such romantic ideals as being the one true way is a bitter resentful person, is a good way of not having to face the idea that maybe live in 24/7 m/s TPE is not as easy as it is for a weekend once in a while.
As for learning from each other, I know many people who are very open to learning from each other. I for one have no problem being reminded of the joy, pleasure and love in my relationship from someone else, or an unexpected source. However, being able to express that joy and love, does not negate the realities. It is my opinion that on mailing lists and such where the stated goal is to teach others and grow, ignoring the basic reality facts does not meet with that goal.
My Owner and I have a very close, loving relationship in which we are very aware of the joys of being together. However, we are also very aware of the realities of human interaction and it is that very reality base that has allowed our relationship to last the 7 years that it has, while many relationships of people we know that were based solely on those romantic ideals, failed miserably with great pain, self confusion, self-recrimination for the slave involved because they believed the ideal to be true every minute of every day, and when it wasn’t, they believed that by being human they failed and were not a "real slave" because they did have days where they were annoyed, they did occasionally question a rule or order, they did have thoughts of hesitation etc. I do not believe that hiding the fact of our very basic humanity under jargon does anyone a service or teaches them anything but good denial techniques.