Love is a many faceted thing.

There are so many different kinds of love.

For now I’m pretty much focusing on romantic love and the difference between loving someone and being “in love” with someone.

I can honestly say that I think the whole “in love” thing definitely interferes with D/s.

Being in love is a very vanilla concept. The feelings of being in love spark reactions that are very vanilla. And very vanilla doesn’t have much place in a long term, 24/7 M/s or D/s relationship.

Being in love is a very selfish sort of feeling. It’s focusing on yourself and your own feelings – wonderful as they may be. Those feelings burn out pretty quickly. Not that they necessarily completely go away but they aren’t sustainable in the long term. Not that euphoric, “in love” feeling that is so predominant in the first months or years of a relationship.

Eventually you love more than you’re “in love”.
And that, I feel, is where productive D/s comes from.
Loving someone enough to focus more upon them than your own buzz from being “in love”. Loving someone enough to do things just because they want and need them.

Loving someone in a way that is unselfish and giving, a way that is not jealous or possessive, a way that is focused less upon being madly in love and more upon truly and deeply CARING about someone. Caring for someone.

I dunno. I can’t quite make my thoughts come together tonight.

I just feel, very strongly, that the vanilla perceptions of love and being in love are a huge part of the problem in most failed D/s relationships.
That you have to find a place where your perception of love sort of changes and you stop using vanilla standards and societal training to determine how you love someone.

Argh!
I’m not really making sense.

For me…
I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship of any kind with someone I didn’t love. But even realizing that the love in a power exchange relationship is a little different than vanilla love… those vanilla feelings, expectations and whatnot still creep up and bite me in the ass sometimes. I have to work at not judging my relationship by vanilla emotional standards.
Because I AM so damned in love with Taylor… even after almost six years… that it is still sometimes hard to keep it straight in my head… to remember that I have to set aside the selfishness of being in love sometimes and just… love.

Lol.

Now that I’ve confused everyone…
I’ll stop trying.
Perhaps it’s something I’ll come back to when my mind is more clear.

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