D/s and love - for me

I've been reluctant to write this post - but the feelings and the conclusions have become increasingly important for me...

I know that other people have needed to make different choices, are in different situations than I am.  There are appropriate places in the world for judging and disapproving of other's decisions - this realm isn't one of them for me.  Nuff said.

I love my husband and i know deeply that he loves me.  The issues we had in our marriage had more to do with me than him.  They had to do with me and my lack of wanting sex, and all the ramifications to the rest of our lives from my rejections and lack of intimacy between us. You know what?  D/s fixed that.  I'm sure there's more too it - if i wanted to dig.  But let's call it a style issue - vanilla was not my style.  It just didn't work.

The intimacy and the connection and, let's be honest - the giving over of power - is lovely: it's heady, and arousing, and centering, and thrilling, and insanely addictive.  And the lines that separated sex from the rest of our relationship have been obliterated.  Maybe they never really existed.   It's all part of the same thing.

I think love - we have figured out.  We don't always have our mutual expressions of it perfected, and God know's we misunderstand each other often enough.  But we know, we KNOW that the love is there underneath everything else.  That's huge when it comes to facing the inevitable (or even the selfish but avoidable) issues.  We can let go and feel the hurt and the despair and the anger and whatever other ugly feelings because we know that our foundation is safe and solid.

We didn't fall in love at first sight, lust maybe and infatuation, but not love.  Certainly it took time for the love to solidify and grow.  And we had to and are still learning the mechanics of having our relationship; what adds to the love, what challenges it, how to build each other up, how not to sabotage each other....

I'm not sure how to say d/s fits into all this.  Is it like love?  Is it really something that can grow to be so assumed and ingrained that i could let go and rebel and doubt and kick at it, precisely because i know it is solid enough to withstand my attack?  I don't trust it that much right now - which is really to say - I don't trust him that much.  And that's a problem.

I flip flop.  Sometimes I think that D/s is something we overlaid onto our marriage, something substantial, but still not innate to our relationship.  Something almost pretend - like first moving in together feels a little like "playing house," like life with the first baby feels unreal and alien, like if it doesn't work, we could just take it off and go on without it.

Other times i see that the essence was always part of us - just not expressed because we didn't understand.
We had to learn how to live together - we weren't just playing house.  We had to learn to be parents because the baby was real, was ours, and was staying.  We haven't perfected the realities of D/s either.

I imagine this whole post has not much meaning for anyone else.  But for me - i need to stop flip flopping.  I need to stop seeing it as something i can step out of.  We are long past thinking we are playing house and the kids are closer to moving out than just arrived.   If i can't take it off or quit playing - then i need to figure out how to really make it work.