[F4Thought] Intimacy

This wasn’t a prompt I thought I could write about, then I saw the posts that have already been linked and they set me thinking.

One of the things to surprise me was the number of people who separated sex and intimacy.  Some going so far as to actively consider them as separate activities that they would not combine.

I grew up in an isolated world devoid of intimacy.  I don’t recall a single kiss or hug from either parent.  The only moment of parental intimacy I do recall was at the age of 13.  On the day of the funeral of my father’s stepmother who had lived with us for 8 years, her real son turned up with fake grief and demanded all her jewellery.  To avoid fratricide my father grabbed me and we went for a walk together in an intimate companionship.

And that was it.

In the school environment I’d learned the hard way that exposing emotions was a vector from which to be viciously attacked.  The ability to express social intimacy was walled off.

Although I now know that asexuality was a factor, the antipathy towards sex wasn’t helped by those deeply ingrained walls.  As a young adult making my way in the world romantic intimacy felt to be an impossibility.  The social expectations with which we’re bombarded tell/told us that romantic intimacy and sex were one and the same thing.  With an already fairly low curiosity about sex, the idea of being intimate, socially, romantically, physically as part of the process was actually quite terrifying.

For many, including myself at that point, fantasy BDSM looks like it solves those emotional and intimacy issues in that it allows you to objectify yourself and your other practitioner.  All those stories rarely mention intimacy or real emotions, they get straight to the mechanics.  They hold out the allure that you can partake of exciting activities without those frightening emotional or intimate thoughts intruding for either party – no emotional dependencies.

There’s an upcoming prompt on #TellMeAbout about objectification, I’ll save my thoughts for that prompt.

My path to D/s started online, as it does for so many, and in this environment it’s highly likely that if you pluck up the courage to get to know someone you will at first treat each other to some extent as an object, isolating your emotions to avoid being vulnerable.  Messaging and email allow for being very self-centred – ‘this is what I want.  this is about ME’.  Don’t get your way ?  Cut your losses and walk away with nary a moment’s thought because you avoided the investment in emotional intimacy.

It’s even rarer for such exchanges to lead to actually meeting where it’s very possible in the early stages to continue to objectify, to avoid the terror of breaking down the intimacy taboos.

I remember the first person I met in such circumstances.  Even after several years of online interaction breaking down some of those walls we were both terrified of being exposed in person to intimacy.  The result – it didn’t work and scarred both of us for some time.  Now I look back through the mists of time, I know she had it much worse than me.  As the saying goes; you can lead a horse to water … Every time she picked up courage to approach the water trough, her internal horse bolted in fright.  For me, I just about had enough courage in me to know I had to face this one way or another.

Imagine the Team America sequence of “We need a montage” to weave past the intervening years before I found a real D/s relationship with the one who would be my mistress for many years.

The slow realisation that not only was intimacy unavoidable, it was inevitable because the emotional protection of objectification doesn’t survive in the face of real, up close human interaction.  She was safe and protective of my vulnerabilities.  From a slow start we ended up with a full chastity lifestyle relationship and I defy anyone engaged in that to maintain cold detachment when it comes to intimacy and emotions.

I learned about being intimate with her.  The mental and social intimacy that two people have in being totally comfortable with each other.  Neither of us particularly tactile, not often holding hands or cuddled up on the sofa (too many dogs in the house wanting their own attention 🐩 😂)  Yet in the dungeon she was sensuously tactile, projecting both hard and soft intimacy.  As for intimacy of sex ?  Neither of us needed it.  Perhaps I might have wanted it at the beginning, but chastity was the name of that relationship.

And that’s where I really learned that all the messages pumped at me for so many years equating intimacy with sex were so much guff.  They were two completely different things.  It was possible to find intimacy compatible with who I am and even more amazing, possible to find someone with similar outlook.  Even today, when the D/s is long past, we have a social and semi-romantic intimacy that’s stronger than it’s ever been.

When it comes to intimacy today, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised with what developed with my domme.  Yes, it is a pro/client relationship and at the outset I never expected anything more than it being of a transactional nature.  It would have been easy to revert to the objectification mindset, instead I just carefully guarded the emotional pathways to avoid inappropriate complications.

But I’ve been seeing her for four years now, we’ve engaged in hypnosis all that time and she’s slowly dismantled those inner walls.  It’s incredibly intimate for both of us.  She’s been the enabler of the confidence that makes melody possible.  There’s a social intimacy I would not have thought possible and the deep emotional intimacy extends to the dungeon in a way that really mocks the original notion of it being transactional.

Undoubtedly I am able to be far more intimate now than I ever imagined possible.  It’s perhaps somewhat untraditional and yet I read other posts and find yet again that other people have been on similar paths.  That can feel like coming home.