[TellMeAbout] Resets

As a sub the reset is a hard and salutary experience.  I went through one such experience early in my D/s path, it was a very painful lesson.

This was a long distance relationship (LDR) and was, therefore, around 90% online.  At the time of the reset it had been 100% online or remote.  As has been written about in other recent meme prompts, the advent of online interactions without all the additional communication cues we get from being face to face has great potential for misunderstandings.

Another thing about conducting a relationship online is that it can be conducted at our own convenience and have a tendency towards complacency.  Remove the online component and relationships have to be conducted in the same way as they have been for thousands of years.  That is, regular physical proximity.  I believe this generates a major difference in how a reset can work in an online relationship and a relationship where the participating partners live in close proximity.  When you live together, kink is rarely the priority in daily life.  Simply managing that daily life requires maintaining interactions and communication.  Kink maybe shut down, but the rest of that mutual life can’t be.

Online kink relationships have new characteristics that the human psyche is not well equipped to deal with.  Give us a dozen or more generations and perhaps we will evolve accordingly.

What’s different ?

• The relationship probably started because of a mutual interest in specific kink.  There’s no nervous courting before tentatively raising the subject months or years down the line, it’s already there before you start talking
• Given this mutual interest, the relationship starts almost exclusively around kink and sex.
• The emotional investment and dependency can become extreme almost from the start.

This started as a chastity relationship and she took me in deep.  She introduced D/s through the back door before I really knew what it was.  Which meant that by accident or design she created a submissive training regime.

You can expend a lot of time behind a keyboard playing submissive fantasies and think you know what they mean.  Being introduced to reality, even online, highlights you understand nothing, though you almost certainly don’t realise it at the time.

I was almost entirely male oriented back then.  Male subs, especially the online variety, can be exceedingly competitive when it comes to expressing kink and submission.  You could summarise by saying that they haven’t learned that it’s not all about them.

If you’ve ever had to participate in corporate online training modules provided by your HR dept, you might understand how you race through the modules and get enough of the module multiple choice questions right so that you can speed on to the next module.  Taking the shortest time possible to be an ‘accredited expert’.

Yup, I viewed it and approached it like that 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️  The end goal being to earn a collar in the shortest time possible to demonstrate what really good submissive I was.

Of course I earned that collar and was high as a kite at the accomplishment.

Two weeks later she took it away and declared a reset.

It wasn’t as if there had been a major infraction.  Rather it was the incursion of a cocky confidence and taking the gobby brat routine the wrong side of a line I didn’t know existed.

That kind of online relationship reset has really only one major sanction, the removal of all contact.  Right at the point you’re on an extreme high of emotional dependency it’s whipped away.  The despair of this new emotional low is an appalling shock.

The kind of despair that leaves you barely able to function and wondering if you even want to continue functioning.  All this over someone you haven’t physically met yet !!

This cutting off of all contact lasted a month.  One of the worst periods of my life.  The amount of introspection, soul searching and self analysis being enormous.  And probably the biggest question being, do I want to continue this ?  A month is a long time to decide you still want to be there at the end of it.  So tempting to walk away and find someone else less demanding – many do.  But to walk away is to acknowledge you’re not cut out to be a submissive, that you are unable to let go of your ego and that your dreams are unachievable.

I learned so many valuable lessons from that reset.  Not least that online or not, kink or not, D/s or not, that every relationship has ups and downs and that with the right person every effort should be made to negotiate the rough with the smooth.  I was a very different person by the time that reset ended.

And it was worth it.  We had many good years as Mistress and sub and I evolved beyond all recognition.  She never did restore that collar.  By the time she might have done it was irrelevant in our dynamic.  Of course I kept it without ever wearing it again.  A couple of years ago I took her to dinner and brought it out of my pocket to show her.  The tears in her eyes said volumes about the value of that long ago reset.

Written for #TellMeAbout.  Click on the image to read informative posts from across the D/s spectrum.