You know what the biggest killer of power-exchange relationships is?
It’s not lies, doms acting like a-holes or emotionally unstable subs.
It’s complacency.
I had a moment this morning when I thought I’d well and truly crossed the never-to-be-crossed-again line that separates the comfortable from the complacent.
Master was ravishing me and I let rip the biggest, most carefree fart of my life. It felt great and I didn’t care.
Master said to me,
‘You wouldn’t have done that three years ago would you? Now you know I accept you warts and all and you’re so comfortable that you don’t give a second thought to stunning me senseless with your gas.’
So I lay there after that – as I am wont to do- frantically churning what he’d said over and over in my mind. Had I really become so comfortable that expelling violently smelling things from my body in front of him was completely acceptable and even natural? Or was I just a hop, skip and a jump from that slippery slide into friend-like cohabitation?
If the truth be known, four years ago when I first moved here to be with Master, things were very different. I didn’t crap for two weeks. I slept with one eye open in case I drooled or did something else as equally as embarrassing while I slept so that I’d have a few seconds to compose myself if I saw him coming.
In short, I lived in fear and it was the perfect power-exchange relationship.
It took me months before I got into a normal sleeping pattern and almost as long to have regular bowel movements. During those months he still had me regularly on the verge of tears by yelling at me or by telling me I’d done something wrong and it took me a while longer to get used to his louder-than-normal voice and brusque comments. But I did and now I don’t even give them a second thought.
In short, I lost my fear and now keeping up that power-exchange thing is really hard.
As a result of that discovery, I have a bit of a theory about why being obedient and staying in the slave mind-set is so hard when it should get easier over time:
Fear=power. If you’ve got nothing to fear, you’ve got nothing to exchange.
In those first few months, for the first year even, Master was virtually a stranger to me. Sure we’d talked for hours on msn and discussed this, that and the other, but I didn’t really know him. We’d never met face to face until I came to live with him and people tend to be a bit different in real life to how they are in chat anyway. Being a stranger, I had a lot to fear. I didn’t know how he would react to things, I didn’t know his thoughts, his feelings. It was all new ground and more than anything I feared rejection.
It was easy to stay in the head-space back then. I felt like I was constantly walking on egg-shells and expected any moment to get bundled up on a plane and sent back to where I came from because I was lacking in some way. Every day that I made through remaining as his slave, was a victory for me.
As the days rolled into months and the months rolled into years, I started opening up more to him. I told him all my embarrassing stuff – my secrets I’d told no-one else. I told him about all the bad things I’d done and thought. We talked about anything and everything and somewhere amongst all that he told me he’d never let me go.
So I’d laid all my nastiness on the table and he’d looked it over, picked up a few things here and there and after a few seconds of scrutinizing, laid them back down. There wasn’t anything about me he didn’t know and he took it all in his stride, almost as if to say, “That’s all???” Nothing fazed him, he judged nothing.
And more importantly he still wanted me.
So now I have unconditional love. I know regardless of what I do or how bad I am, he will still love me. He will still want me as his slave and he won’t let me go.
The fear has gone, but the love remains.
Maybe we don’t have TPE, but we have TLC instead.
a subtle time 
Ok now seriously, I spewed an entire mouthful of hot coffee all over my keyboard, down my chest and half of it was flying from my nose! The mental image of that little “rip” was just over the top.
And don’t ya know now I keep checking your Master’s journal to see his take on the incident.
OMG I sooo needed that laugh!!
What’s even funnier is that I had absolutely no qualms about writing about my embarrassing moment on the internet.
Sorry about the keyboard though 😉
I like your theory and it works for me.
But I think maybe the “real” doms actually want us to lose that fear, even if it means a little complacency sets in. Obedience that stems from love rather than from fear seems to me to be harder but more meaningful.
But thank you, p, for pointing out that we might get Master’s side of the story.
I shall haunt his journal, as well. ;-D
I don’t know. I find that I’m more ‘willing’ to do things I don’t want to do if I’m in fear of the person making me do them. I think love makes the obedience harder.
But that’s kind of what I’m wondering. It’s harder to do but do they appreciate it more? Do Masters prefer the more mindless total obedience that stems from fear, or obedience that we struggle with but arrive at anyhow, because of love?
I don’t know. It’s a thought I’ve pondered on and off. And never been able to decide. I have a good idea how mine feels, but I haven’t been able to get other Doms to answer the question.
I think my problem is that without the fear I’m not obedient because I know I can wheedle myself out of things I don’t want to do. I don’t ‘arrive at anyhow’…yeah, I’m bad. 🙂
I almost wet my pants laughing. Maybe you need to bring in gas mask play just so M is safe from you. PMSL
I went out with a fellow for a couple of years and he never once saw me eat. For reasons unknown I couldn’t not just have a crap if he was anywhere in the house but I couldn’t eat either.
Am I going to have to send you a shipment of clean undies or something?? Lol.
I have a question though, did you never go out to a restaurant with that guy? Two years and no eating? Wow….and I thought I was anal 😉
Like many things in D/s relationships, I think each person’s motivation is different. For you, fear seems to be what trips your submissive button. For someone else, it might be love. For me, it’s respect. A sense of being awed by the person I’m with, of them being better than me, more competent than me, being able to look up to them. Love doesn’t really need to enter into it, (although I’m glad I have it) and while I might like to have a fear that if I don’t do something he’s going to make me do it, in an unpleasant way…overall, I don’t fear him. I never have.
That being said however, having those particular motivators as the things that trigger my submissive button causes us some seriously dicey ground to walk on in our relationship when…he makes a big mistake, he’s not feeling his best emotionally (he goes through depressions sometimes), or I start to get on my high horse and begin looking down my nose at him because he’s going at his own pace in learning this thing called life, or doing it his own way and I think my way is better.
We’ve been going through a difficult period that’s involved all of those things. I’m trying to get over it and find my motivation again.
And…in terms of familiarity, I’ve always thought that there were just certain things that two people should never do in front of one another if they want to continue to find each other sexy, no matter how comfortable they are with one another.