Sara said something that made me think in this post…

I have to wonder. If he thought something he wanted was hurtful to you, would he do it? I don’t mean it just hurt, but YOU were hurt, in your heart or mind? I am talking about hard personal limits. I know slaves often go back to the idea that he “would never want to hurt his property”…but is that just another way of saying he respects you, your limits? There is a huge difference between what you don’t want, and what harms. If he cares for you, as I hope he does, you are precious to him as YOU are. He recognizes you for yourself, engages with you with a posture of awareness and care that would indeed be respectful to you and your hard personal limits…I think?

At first, I was trying to think it all through. This is how that looked:

Would he do something that hurt me? The answer is yes, he would. He has hurt me before. Deeply. Deeply, but not permanently.

Sometimes, I think he hurts me to heal me. I think I’ve had a lot of (metaphorical) broken bones in my life and many of them healed wrong. Because of that, in some aspects of my life, I am bent almost double – I am hobbled and slow… And yes, it feels cruel of him to grab a hold of me and re-break the bones. And in my moments of pain and agony, I can’t see the benevolence in his acts. I sure can’t feel it. I often did not consent to the resetting of my bones, either, and I may have violently struggled to get away. But he does it anyway, he doesn’t go breaking more than one at a time, I heal eventually, and I can walk a little straighter when I’ve recovered.

He’s never once done anything to do me permanent damage, physically or emotionally. And that’s why I gave myself to him. I trust him. I have to trust him, because, yes, sometimes he’s going to have to hurt me in ways I will not want at the time, and I won’t be able to see the benefits – for him or for me. I’m going to beg and cry and plead and say I can’t and I won’t and God damn him for trying to make me.

I came to a point once where I had to imagine my life without him. I even spent a solid 30 seconds attempting to convince myself I’d be better off. Total and utter failure in that attempt, even in the face of incredible emotional pain and turmoil. I was meant to be his, and nothing can shake that belief from me.

Sometimes, I think he is simply weighing the pros and cons. He wants something from me. And he is smart enough to be able to estimate the outcome of getting what he wants. So, if he feels I would recover and remain useful and loving? Yes, I think he’d hurt me, if his need was great enough. He’d balance it out. He’s not child-like in impulse control, he’s a VERY in-control-kinda-guy. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, he had a real choking fetish. He doesn’t, but, shhhhh, we’re pretending. Maybe he WANTS to choke me for twenty minutes. By God, he’d just love to. Nothing would make him happier. Nothing, EXCEPT the prospect of me being alive the next day. So because MORE than he’d love to choke me for twenty minutes, he’d love for me to be alive in the morning, he doesn’t do it. He’s not respecting a personal hard limit of mine, he’s making his own choice based on his own desires. Sure, it works out for me in the end that he likes me better alive than dead, but is it really about me?

And that is where I got stuck…

Because it’d be insane to claim it’s NOT about my personal limits at all, right? I mean, he doesn’t stop himself from murdering me ONLY because he’d rather I be alive, right? I mean, he loves me… So, it’s clearly not NOT about me, right?

Or would it be insane to claim it IS about me? Maybe, the fact that he loves me is still HIS emotion, HIS drive, HIS meter for gauging activities and it STILL isn’t about me? I don’t know.

Maybe it’s ridiculous to try for an “either/or” situation here. I mean, can I really break it down into does he hurt-me-to-heal-me for my benefit, or for his? Does he simply want me walking straighter and faster for his sake, or mine? Does he stop himself from doing me incredible physical harm because he likes me alive, or because he is concerned for me? Is all that an oversimplification that ultimately makes no sense? Is it really more correct to say that our goals are lined up, so it’s NOT either/or, it’s a form of mutualism?

Or maybe what I’m really stuck on is the concept of limits. Because, surely, there are things I don’t WANT to do. But… If he made me do them? I’d survive. It might be a long road, but I’d survive. To say he doesn’t do something terrible because he “respects my limits” would imply he wants to cause me deep, irreversible damage and only resists because he respects my limits… And that’s just not the case for me. I didn’t get involved with a man who wants to do me deep, irreversible damage. By design, he and I agree on the core limits – things like bestiality, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, infidelity… And he loves me. He might hurt me, or stretch me, or break me down – but I firmly believe his ultimate goal with me is not destruction, so his ultimate goal in any act would never be something horrific. I’d kind of question the sanity of someone involved in a relationship where they weren’t 100% sure their partner didn’t want to destroy them…

Maybe it all comes to the same thing. Perhaps the situation is the same, whether you are saying “He recognizes you for yourself, engages with you with a posture of awareness and care that would indeed be respectful to you and your hard personal limits” or I am saying “He weighs the pros and cons, and acts upon whichever desire is stronger for him, which, because he loves me, usually comes out in my favor in terms of being severely hurt,” or I’m going with my option of mutualism…

Maybe it doesn’t matter how we describe it, we’re just stuck looking at the moon from opposite sides and one of us is saying “It’s so DARK!” and the other is saying “What are you looking at – this thing is really BRIGHT!”

This is one of those moments I’d love Antonio to weigh in because I’m fairly sure I’ve just confused myself.

(Incidentally, when I handed this over to Antonio so he could look at it, d’you know what he thought about everything?  No?  Well, neither do I.  ‘Cause all he did was point out typos.  Bah.)