I'm writing with a few questions about a relationship that has already ended, namely whether or not I dodged a bullet. We were together just over a year and a half. I'm 27, he is 30. We met over Fet, and our (monogamous) relationship encompassed D/s as well as S&M wherein I was the submissive masochist. It was both of our first D/s relationship, though I'd had a lot of experience with a longterm play partner before we met and he'd had a serious long term relationship with a vanilla girl some years prior. I worked full time throughout the duration of our relationship, and he was a full time law student who worked in the summers but not the school year. I paid for all of our dates and much of almost all of our mutual travel expenses. I saw it as an investment in our mutual future because he will come out of law school with such an obscene amount of student debt (more than double mine), and I didn't want him to have to take on any more of it to pay for fun stuff we did when I just had money in my checking account and could take care of it.
He brought up the idea of threesomes early in the relationship when we were first getting to know each other ("is this something you're interested in?"), and I initially agreed. After a while, when he wouldn't stop talking about how much he wanted to fuck other women, I told him I was no longer comfortable with the subject and did not want to put it on the table, at least not anytime soon, but he never really stopped talking about it. I tried to grin and bear it in the name of letting him express what he seemed to feel was part of his sexuality (though he'd never had one in the past, whereas I had and didn't care for it), but it really worked my nerves and made me feel inadequate. I'd bring this up with him and he'd tell me some nice things to comfort me, then go right back to talking about it the following week.
In the course of our relationship, he broke up with me three times. Once I had coming, as I drunkenly blew up at him after he worked every single one of my nerves by taking a summer job in a town about three hours from us, refusing to not hang out with a coworker who was very clearly on to him, etc. We wanted to move in together at the end of the summer (it'd been a year and a few months at that point), and he was pushing for us to move to the suburbs so he could take the bus to school in a neighboring city while I took public transit to the large city in which I currently live and work. He owns a car, I do not, and I offered to buy him a parking pass and put gas in his car for his final year of law school if it meant we could stay in the city. He wouldn't consider it. Long story short, I had too much booze in me when I was hanging out with one of my cousins from out of town, and I blew up from all the mounting tension. He dumped me and took me back after a month, but we did not move in together as planned. A few days later he told me he was very certain about wanting to pursue threesomes with other women, even though that was a subject I had made amply clear I was not interested in, at least not yet. I asked if he would stay with me if I said I was not interested, and he said he wouldn't know until I took it off the table, so I took it off the table. He dumped me again and said he didn't want to be with a partner who gave him ultimatums, then apologized a couple of hours later and said it was stress from school, being broke, the job hunt, etc. I forgave, but he broke up with me for the third time the day after Thanksgiving when we were discussing my discomfort with him spending the night with his female friends (who I have not met) when he went back to the west coast to visit his parents for the holidays (and did not invite me). I had been pretty clear about my boundaries, those being that I was not comfortable with him spending the night with other women, not telling me if/when he finds one attractive and we're out together (I realize this happens and I do it too, but I don't need my nose rubbed in it), etc. I considered all of these reasonable, as did my friends when I asked them about it, but he told me they were unreasonable and that I just needed to work more on my jealousy issues and just trust him. He changed his mind about breaking up after maybe half an hour and told me he would commit to not breaking up with me on a whim anymore (thanks, asshole?), as it was now the third time and I did not feel at all stable with him. In retrospect, this is when I should have departed for good, but you know, hindsight, 20/20, etc.
To that end, my major flaw here was my sometimes crippling but always present jealousy, which came mostly as a result of a guy I dated a few summers ago. (We'd spent every waking second together, he took a two week trip to South America, came back, dumped me, and a year later told me he hired two Peruvian sex workers to have a threesome with him. It made me feel that once I was out of sight, I was also out of mind, which produced some pretty severe separation anxiety and some jealousy issues that weren't really there before that point.) As it manifested with my ex, I was intensely jealous of his female friends after a while (though not initially), both the ones I did meet (to whom I was very nice and tried to be welcome and relaxed) and the ones I did not meet because he never invited me back to his hometown to meet them. Initially I liked the idea of him having purely platonic female friends who he'd never slept with or dated, but over time he gave me small reasons to believe he'd done one or both those things with a few of them (namely the ones I never met). (I don't think it's appropriate to keep exes around, as all of mine are long gone and did not contact me throughout the course of this relationship.) It was also around the time that I asked him to stop talking about threesomes because it was making me uncomfortable that I noticed the jealousy began to intensify. Also keep in mind that I never once told him he could not or should not hang out with these women, just that I was not comfortable with him spending the night with them or doing things that most people probably wouldn't consider okay if their partner was doing/would do. I never interfered with his friendships, as he never interfered with mine; I just got anxious when I knew he would see them. This past Fall, he called off moving in together a second time when I had a jealous outburst about his female friends in his home state.
I was also really jealous of his other long term ex girlfriend, who appears to be very different from me in every imaginable way but is very similar to the other girls he had dated before that. It seemed like I was not at all his type if he could go for someone who was so radically different than he is (vanilla, not as smart as he is, not politically engaged, watched and listened to whatever film and music was popular, etc.) when he and I had so much in common, even aside from kink. The fact that he did not stop harping on fucking other women for good until only a few months before we broke up for good (so maybe October 2015, as we broke up in January of this year) did not help the jealousy or the feeling that I was inadequate even though I (figuratively) broke my back trying to keep him sexually satisfied, was routinely told I was the best lover he'd ever had, that he'd never emotionally, physically, or intellectually connected with a partner so deeply and was never more himself, etc. All of which were things he told me somewhat regularly.
However, I absolutely agree that jealousy is an unhealthy emotion, so I did what we both agreed was best for me and I put myself in talk therapy in June 2015. It helped a lot with some of the communication deficiencies I inherited from my mother, and I felt that I was making slow but steady progress on the jealousy front. Now that the relationship is over, I'm still in therapy twice a month with no plans to discontinue my regimen.
He often told me I was the love of his life and that he absolutely wanted to spend the rest of his with me, that he had never been more himself with a partner, that I was the first girl he'd ever dated who was as smart as he is, etc. The kicker here was the kid situation. I was on the fence about wanting kids and he was sure he wanted kids when we met; we both disclosed these things to each other and pressed on, figuring we would have a more serious talk once some more time had passed in the relationship. A major reason I was on the fence about kids is because I have a medical condition that for the first 25 years of my life I was led to believe made me sterile. I never really wanted kids but softened to the idea maybe six months before I met my ex (I was being genuine with him about my indecision), but I had not had enough time to really make up my mind about it. We saw my endocrinologist here in January 2015 and asked point blank if I was able to reproduce, and she said I could, that it would require a medical intervention and would be a high risk pregnancy but that women with my condition gave birth regularly. Within maybe a month of receiving that information, he told me that if I was not willing to commit to having a biological child, he would leave me. (He said he would stay if I'd commit to trying but ultimately could not.) In light of my terrible genes and his similarly terrible genes (mental illness and substance abuse issues on both sides of his family, alcoholism on my father's side, we both have bad joints, and my endocrine disorder is heritable), he also would not consider adoption, which was always the way I assumed I'd become a parent, if I ever did. He was initially good with it, which I felt good about, but then read some articles talking about higher incidence rates of behavioral problems in adopted kids, how sometimes they're nothing like their parents, how sometime parents don't bond with their adopted kids, etc., and changed his mind. (Now that everything's said and done, I consider the unwillingness to adopt/insistence on reproducing to be a moral failing, and I won't put up with it again with any future partner.) I waffled a lot about reproduction, but at this point I just don't think it jibes with my politics and doesn't seem like a reasonable expectation given my debt, the fact that everyone has debt, and that the political climate the world over is so dire. I also asked him if he was single at 34/35 and had no kid by then if he would adopt and just be a single dad, and he said no.
I consider myself to be very assertive and strong willed outside the bedroom and outside this relationship I'm very much an Alpha. As is the case for archtypical Alpha submissives, I enjoyed being able to give him that power for a change; I find it relaxing to take instructions in my personal life instead of having to call all the shots myself, which I find very stressful due to my generally neurotic disposition. However, I always felt like he pushed for more control than I willfully ceded until we found ourselves fighting about who had control over what. Every time I told him I was not comfortable with him being in control of a thing I never told him I wanted to give up control over, he'd tell me I was probably vanilla and that I should go date someone vanilla. This always struck me as ludicrous because I had considerably more experience than he did when he and I met; he dated a submissive for a month two years prior to us meeting, and I'd had a six/seven month play partner relationship with someone that only fizzled out a couple months before we met. I emphasized the fact that D/s was what we wanted it to be and that we did not need to follow a prescribed pattern or regimen to do this effectively, that we needed to figure out and negotiate what worked for us, etc., but it felt like it always fell on deaf ears. He accused me of trying to turn it into a vanilla relationship when I insisted that I did not need or want to be micromanaged or ordered around with no niceties. I'm very service oriented and love, love, love being helpful, but you still need to treat me like a person you claim to love, you know?
I've told you nothing but bad so far, so in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that this is the first person in my adult life I've been in love with. He is brilliant and creative, he's hilarious, he's the single most beautiful man I've ever laid eyes on, he is amazing in bed, he is very talented in the kitchen, and he is the most politically congruent person I've ever dated (I lean hard left/Green, so I disagree with a lot of people about a lot of things). He is thoughtful and well-spoken, and he was my number one cheerleader throughout a career change I made last year as well as different academic paths I pursued while we were together. He's at least as misanthropic as I am, and he sees the world mostly in ways very similar to the ways I see it. When our D/s was working and I felt that my boundaries were respected, being his submissive and girlfriend was the happiest and most cared for I've ever felt in my life. I've never felt more cellularly attracted and connected to someone than I did when things were good, so it was worth something to me to try and stick it out to see if things could get back there.
The questions I am writing to ask are as follows:
1. Is this emotional abuse on his and/or my part? Several of my friends have used that phrase completely independently of each other, and I confess that I am not adept at spotting it being that this was my first real, adult relationship. I've done some Googling, but I thought it'd be worthwhile to ask your opinion as well.
2. Did I dodge a bullet, or do we just want different things in life? Most of my friends (again, independently) said I dodged a bullet; no one said we just wanted different things. They all said he was nuts for making those kinds of demands of me, not respecting my clearly communicated boundaries, and being willfully delusional about the atrocious law market, his debt, our genes, etc.
3. What can I do to continue to work on my jealousy issues so that they do not impact a potential future relationship? Stay in therapy obviously, but anything specific? If you don't have suggestions, that's totally cool.
4. I know you've said in the past that a person doesn't have to be in 100% working psychological order to have a successful relationship, just that they should be in mostly good working order. What might that look like based on what I've told you? How un-jealous should I work on trying to become before "putting myself out there" again? Is there even an answer to that? I do not want to repeat my mistakes with someone else, though I'd like to think that in the future I won't pick someone who gaslights me left and right and knowingly or unknowingly feeds that jealousy.
5. Is it necessary/advisable to apologize to him for my jealousy further down the line? I feel occasionally overwhelming guilt about it even after having been broken up for a couple of months, even in the face of the fact that I believe he manufactured it (consciously or not).
6. Was the feeling of being loved and cared for I mentioned I felt when our relationship and its D/s was working Stockholm Syndrome? Do you see a lot of that illustrated in your letters from kinky writers?
I'm a long time reader/listener. This is my first time writing so I wanted to be thorough, as I'm trying to work through some shit before I declare myself clean of this relationship and its fallout. Thus, I apologize for the length of my letter.
Bondage Undulates Love/Lividity Every Time
1. Um... I usually read a letter through a few times before I respond, BULLET, but I'm not going to be able to do that in your case because I have a plane to catch.
On Sunday night.
I don't know if this rises to the level of "emotionally abusive," but it certainly qualifies as "emotionally unpleasant/manipulative." You don't have to see yourself as the victim of emotional abuse, which is a specific kind of psychological abuse, just to to indict your ex or exonerate yourself or rationalize the collapse of this relationship. He was kinda shitty (except in those ways he was completely awesome), you were kinda insecure (except in those ways you were completely secure), you two weren't right for each other ultimately, and it's a good thing it's over.
2. The two choices aren't mutually exclusive—you could want different things and have dodged a bullet. And the bullet you dodged could be "wanting different things." Or that could be one of the bullets you dodged. Other potential bullets: mountains of debt, a useless law degree, wonky genes, his desire to procreate, his willingness to mooch, his inability to take "no, never" for an answer on the threesome question, etc., etc., etc.
3. Maybe don't invest a whole bunch of time and emotional energy in guys whose ultimate fantasies revolve around D/s threesome scenarios or other forms of group sex? Since you're clearly not down? As those fantasies sandpaper your insecurities? And you have a jealous streak? A jealous streak you're both cognizant of and in control of? But why inflame it needlessly?
4. You seem fine. A bit up your own ass, and a bit longwinded, but those aren't disqualifying dysfunctions.
5. Don't pick at scabs.
6. It wasn't Stockholm Syndrome. The sex worked, the rest didn't. You hung in there a little longer than you should have, perhaps, because the sex worked—and that's understandable. I get a lot of mail from people who are fucking miserable because the sex doesn't work at all. Finding someone you click with sexually is major. That's not something you toss aside lightly, BULLET, as the potential benefits of making it work, if you can make it work, are huge. So you gave it a go. Stop beating yourself up about it, stop reviewing the tapes with your friends, and stop writing letters to advice columnists about it.
