talking

I know I'm not unique in this at all - but telling my husband my most intimate feelings and desires is very, very difficult.  I was able to bring my initial curiosity about (overwhelming hunger for) D/s to him via IM because it is fast, blunt, and keeps him at a mental distance.  He was in fact also physically 1000 miles away at the time, a fact that helped my courage, I'm sure.  Since then, we have worked to find a system of communication that works.  We have not been entirely successful.

I wouldn't have thought it could be so difficult - although the fact that i instinctively wanted to find a way to put my thoughts and feelings on paper or in a blog should have been a clue that some part of me knew that saying hard things face to face is just much harder. Clearly - he did realize that.


I gave him access to my emails, facebook, and chats (i can talk about why another day), and he does read this blog; he says he likes to keep tabs on my general frame of mind.  We have a private blog for more intimate, difficult or new things that come up.  It is one-way: I write to him, he may comment - or respond by email or in person, or not. I was/am inconsistant about using it. Many times, the effort of trying to put things into words was more than i would do, so i just didn't.  Sometimes i would feel  that I was writing into a void, that he didn't really care whether i wrote or not. As often as not, i let things go unsaid that probably should have been said. 

I want my husband to know me, i want to tell him the thoughts I have, and how I feel, and what has occured to me.  What i am learning is that i also want to be able to control that message very tightly.  I want to craft it and spin it and shape the way it is presented.  I can do all of that in writing, not as well as people who actually write well- but moreso certainly than face to face or under cross examination. 

My husbands's strong preference is and has always been for face to face, real, old-fashioned, talking.  Second choice would be by phone - if we are apart. Fairly early in ttwd, he started to expect me to talk to him when he asked questions, he wouldn't allow me to blow him off, as i often had.  He also expected me to really talk to him on the phone, instead of multi-tasking or grunting one word answers.   Most recently, in response to my kinda wild meltdown, he started something new.  Each night, as we go to bed, I have to tell him one thing about my thinking about my submission, several things if he has been out of town.  It has to be truthful, significant, and something he didn't already know.   And this is hard, so much harder than I would have ever imagined. 

I am finding that, as I write, I think about  the composition, the syntax, the appearance of the thing, how I want the point to come out.  When I tell him something face to face, the internal dialog is also about how it will sound, how it might be interpreted.  But, being there in front of him creates another backtalk in my head that my intention may not have been exactly what I had thought.  That voice questions my motivation for the initial message as well as whatever spin i am trying to put on it, and then I have to expain that also. 

Above and beyond all those convolutions, the fact he is demanding this of me, that it is such a personal subject, and the fact that I don't already know how he feels about the topic, make me feel small, silly, vulnerable, at risk of rejection or ridicule, and very, very submissive.  It is working: I tell him things I should, rather than let them sink back down into the murky depths somewhere; I examine my feelings and motivations more honestly; it reassures me that he cares very much about what i think; and it reinforces or re-establishes our dynamic in a small way at the end of each day.