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brokenhallelujah -> RE: preventing vanilla! (8/7/2005 11:30:16 AM)
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Having had some personal experience in "when kinky love affairs go vanilla," I have to say that it can happen pretty easily. Not for all people, not for all relationships. But I have definately seen it happen. And had it happen to me, to some degree.
I was in a monogamous ft relationship with a collared submissive for over three years. It was wonderful for the time that it was, and it ended, rather spectacularly in fact. There were things that influenced that deterioration which had nothing to do with the M/s portion of our relationship. But overall, I would have to say that the deterioration of the PE aspects of our relationship also contributed to its eventual demise.
It's like a marriage; you have to work at it. Yes, you may be fundamentally dominant. You may be fundamentally submissive. There are needs that are met, negotiations made, compromises struck -- it's a lot of work. More so perhaps than most vanilla partnerships or marriages, I think. It's a more complicated world in which we (as a community and a lifestyle) operate; there are more variables at play than most people acknowledge in their vanilla relationships. I think one of the reasons that relationships involving BDSM are more fulfilling is that they are also more precise about the needs that are being met, the services performed, the trust established and used.
And if you don't put in the work to keep it healthy and functional for both parties, things start to degenerate. One of the ways that this manifested itself with my submissive is that we both began to get lazy, complacent, tired, worn down by the dailies -- we stopped working with each other to maintain the roles we had defined for each other. We stopped expressing our love for each other in this particular way, and something began to atrophy long before it ended.
It started to look and feel pretty vanilla. And the relationship had never been vanilla. Yeah, it was a harbinger or warning of sorts, I suppose. That is clearer in retrospect, but at the time we both made a lot of excuses for each other not being able or willing to put in the good, sweaty, kinky work that had always been the beating heart of our love for each other.
If you aren't putting in the time, you can lose the relationship: we all know this. Sometimes the first thing to go is the kink.
And that was the canary in my coal mine.
So that's how I feel about that.
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