CaringandReal
Posts: 1397
Joined: 2/15/2008
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Phanual
From reading a few profiles, I notice quite often that both Dominants and slaves ( I rarely read submissive or switches' profiles ) complain about trying again or giving up after many disappointments.
I'm trying to figure out what are the usual reasons for these disappointments, excluding fake profiles, that is. I mean why two ( or more ) people who were truly interested in each other lose that interest and deem that relationship a failure, then move on to try and find another Dom / slave more often than it should?
The only time that I remember someone giving an explanation was a slave complaining how so many Doms are not sadistic enough, so turning the coin around, I guess that Doms don't find their slaves submissive enough. In the case of not finding the right slave, I believe that it's a Dom's job to turn that slave into the object he / she desires, and not expect the slave to be perfect from the start.
But I'm just guessing.
I think the medium in which people are trying to connect imposes a great deal of problems. Meeting people online or in a text environment is a strange experience: at one and the same time you can feel so intensely intimate with another mind and also, due to anonymity and the lack of sensual cues, so very distant and protected/walled off from them. So relationships (not just bdsm ones) get very hot, very enthusiastic, very fast, and, instead of a slow and gradual building up of impressions, like the way they dress, the way their car smells, the sound of their voice, all you have are intense ideas that seem, at least initially, very much in accord with eacyour own. But these ideas are impoverished because they are not backed up with shared sensory experiences between the two individuals. So people move fast, far faster than they would in "the walking world" (as a dear friend of mine likes to call real life). You think you know this person so very well, and then BooM! They say something casually that causes a vast ringing dissonance, that makes you do a double-take and start looking at them a lot more closely and clearly then you were in the glazed-eyes soulmate stage of a few moments ago. And all of a sudden you find yourself not really wanting to be around them that much, as they aren't even close to what you projected upon them.
So the relationship ends as quickly as it started and, because most people need to have rational reasons to explain their actions to themselves, they say things like, "she wasn't submissive enough" or "he wasn't sadistic enough" (it amuses me to no end that many of the people speaking the latter phrase are individuals who have never been seriously beaten in their lives). What they actually mean is, "He wasn't sadistic enough for my fantasies."
It is rare for most of us to make close, lasting connections via text alone although I think the odds of success--of making an online connection that leads to reality--are increased if both individuals are good written communicators. But the pitfalls and landmines in the way are tremendous. "Tis many a slip twixt the cup and the lip" is very descriptive of meeting others online, I believe.
It isn't so much that people are habitually insincere or constantly running into fakes or flakes or scammers. That happens, but not nearly as often as peoples' journal bitches would lead one to believe. It's that this extremely starved and withered medium we deal in is so hard to navigate (and becoming so much harder, it seems, as fewer and fewer poeple have even the minimal amount of literateness required to engage someone in an interesting text-only discussion) that most encounters end up as total wastes of time--for both individuals. Yes, we all get greatly disappointed, but only because we expect way too much from a medium that most of us can barely function in. If I meet just one person I can connect deeply and lastingly to every two or three years via text (and the majority of these people have not ended up as my master), I feel like my batting average is pretty good. A lot of people, I suspect, come to online dating sites expecting it to be like on-demand TV--just order what you want and it's delivered to you on a silver platter with no effort expended on your part. And they have these wild expectations of success in this awful medium which is actually tremendously difficult to succeed in, even for sincere people of like minds who are willing to put forth the strong efforts needed to connect. It's no wonder there are so very many great disappointments everywhere you look.
_____________________________
"A friend who bleeds is better" --placebo
"How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home." --thomas harris
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