BDSM, Open Relationships, and NRE: From Way Up Here

I’ve read a lot — everything I can get my hands on, really — about polyamory and open relationships.  Polyamorists love to coin new words and phrases, and have an unhealthy love of the acronym, and the big one, in open-relationship land is “NRE,” which stands for “New Relationship Energy.”  That’s the on-top-of-the-world, I must have you now, the rest of the world does not exist feeling that accompanies new love.

The other big poly word is “compersion” — that is, feeling genuinely happy for your partner when they have a new partner (or are simply enjoying their relationship with that other partner).

I have that in spades.

Hey, don’t look at me like that, I do.

That doesn’t stop me from having All The Feelingz, though.

Like:  I am Old Hat.  Worse!  I am ancient millinery!  Prehistoric headgear!

I AM NOT THE NEW SHINY!  HOW CAN I POSSIBLY COMPETE WITH THE NEW SHIIIINY?!

Waaaaaaiiiiiiiitttt a minute.  I am not competing.  BREATHE!  Breathe.  Sit with the feelings.  ZEN GODDAMNIT!

So there’s a lot to read about poly and NRE and how to deal with it — but I really haven’t found a lot about Poly/open relationships, NRE, and BDSM.

I mean, it’s tough to deal with that first difficult part, when your partner has someone new.  But there’s chocolate and red wine and the gym and Judgy Bear (more about him later, pervs) for that.  There’s also the comfort of knowing that it’s temporary.  Drag out the DVD box sets and by the time you’re done with Season 4 of The Wire it’s over, right?

But what about when NRE does a number on your BDSM dynamic with your partner?

I’m not sure I (or anyone else) can make any grand statements about what happens to a BDSM dynamic when a new partner is added; it’s just too variable from person to person and from relationship to relationship.

I can tell you that for me, my BDSM dynamic with Bryce has gotten very thin — has dried up — when he gets a new partner.

I can also say this: That is NOT his fault.

It’s me who’s pulling back.

For me, bottoming — submitting — is an intensely vulnerable, personal experience.  The sheer emotional intensity of that experience is one of the things I want out of BDSM; it’s one of the reasons I pursue a kinky dynamic with my partners.

But I find that I back way up — way, way up — from that kind of emotional intensity when Bryce has someone new.

I miss it.  I miss our dynamic.  And now that things have settled down a bit, I have been creeping (oh, who am I kidding, when have I ever in my life creeped? Stalked.  Rowwrrred in the general direction of) back to it.

It’s bumpy.

I miss bottoming.  I miss submitting.  It fills a huge emotional space in me, and without it everything feels a bit arid.

It reminds me of what my life felt like B.K.E., frankly.  What?  Oh: Before Kinky Era.  I spent over a decade married to Bryce thinking, “Hey, that’s just a FANTASY.  I don’t REALLY want to do that.”  (I’d roll my eyes but if I roll them that hard I could get a sprain.  Nobody wants to sprain their eyeballs).   I wasn’t miserable:  I was busy.  Hell, I was successful.

Same thing here: I used the extra time to write a book.

I could be as successful as hell, though, and it ain’t the same thing.

It ain’t the same thing at all.

It ain’t the same thing as everything.

///

Deep breath.

It’s temporary.

Hell, it’s almost over.  I can feel that it’s almost over.  That feeling of distance.

From way up here.

 

 

 

“I can see yo bokey house up here,” Pic Fix,  Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.