I'm Just Playing the Game

We have some extremely tedious (youthful) house guests lingering from the holidays - long irrelevant story, but it's the right thing to do.

But as a result, everybody's been a little stressed and there certainly hasn't been any time for intimacy on our part, either in the bedroom or out.

A long time ago, as what I've come now to realize that I was regarding as "starter rituals", I suggested that when I arrive home and she's working, I just sit beside her until she's ready to interrupt what she's doing and say hello. It was a hot day in the summer, and she suggested a glass of water too.

So yesterday I arrived and went over to her and she said, "Where's my glass of water?" - it was a moment of moderate pandemonium in the house. I said, "Sorry", and she smiled sweetly and said, "I'm just trying to play the game, here."

Cut me to the quick.

What can I say? I don't appreciate your "playing the game"? It doesn't count if you don't really feel it? Clearly not - she's a saint for "playing along" with me in the desire for me to feel better. I can't make her feel any particular way, I can only hope that she does.

Certainly, recently I haven't been under any illusion that I'm going to start doing things and she's going to wake up one day and say, "Oh, this is kind of fun. I wonder if I can make him do more?" (No thanks to Her Knight's Princess, who seems to have decided just that.)

I think I was hoping that my beloved would find that my service was sort of useful, and that she'd come to expect it, and come to see it as part of our relationship, rather than something she's doing for me.

As it is, the whole thing right now seems kind of akin to a "mercy fuck," only a fuck with my head rather than my body.

It would explain why our little going to bed ritual seems pretty hollow to me - I do it now out of self discipline, rather than because there's any joy in it. I'm not as dumb as I look - I think I pretty well picked up on the fact that it touched the merest surface of her mind and emotions. I think she was genuinely happy early on when I told her how much I appreciated doing it - how good it felt to "be me".

But of course what I've finally realized is that all that "submission" was to myself, not to her. Interesting and profound philosophical questions aside (like to whom can one ever submit, etc), this isn't very satisfying. I can have fantasies lying in bed by myself; does it matter if my beloved is complicit with them? It is certainly better in terms of relationship if she knows about them and if the secret and shame elements are gone.

But fundamentally, if she's just an actor or a walking prop in my fantasy, that's not very satisfying.

It reminds me of when I was a teenager. My parents would go out for the night leaving me by myself, and I would hurry to enact all sorts of submissive fantasies, chiefly motivated by whatever TV show I happened to be watching. I went so far as to get and pin and the rubbing alcohol out, convinced that I was going to pierce my nose that evening. Never did though. But the point is, those were me acting out fantasies that were entirely in my head. Better than nothing? Maybe, especially since, at that age, they always ended in orgasm, which was big news when I was a teenager.

But this exercise seems only a slight advancement from that, with all the good-will that my beloved is putting in to accommodating me.

Sorry to start with such a downer post for the new year. Perhaps things will improve. I sense another conversation in the offing, though I can't exactly figure out how it will evolve... "You're being really nice and doing this thing for me, but it feels like dust in my mouth?" Not very promising...