Trust and submission

I've mentioned a few times that I had a previous relationship. I was deeply in love with him. He was smart, a year or so older than I was. He was also a bad, bad person who broke my heart not once, but twice. I was 18 when I met him in the very same online community where I met my now-husband. He was a "bad boy" in geek circles, a "hacker" in the sense that he was good at finding exploits, security holes in software that needed patching.

The first time he broke my heart was when his old girlfriend contacted him out of the blue and he dumped me for her. We maintained contact, I was devastated but still very much in love with him. We resumed netsex while he was still with her. I did not really like this, but she interrupted my relationship with him, so I justified it like that. As their relationship began to crumble we grew closer, until they were no more and our relationship was established again.

He didn't care enough for me - he would stay out all night, tell me "I don't know if I'll be online later or not," and leave me sitting there waiting for him to show up until sometimes four in the morning... at which point, if he did show, he would be drunk, say hi, I'm drunk, g'night now! And off he'd go. Yes, we were in the same time zone. I knew he didn't care enough, my friends who knew us both would point out to me that that's not how a man in love behaves - that he should have my interests in mind as well, but he didn't.

At this point (two years!) we still had not met each other, we spoke on the phone a lot, he had seen my photograph but I had not seen his. Digital cameras were just barely a thing, and while you could get scanners or you could get a photo scanned as a service, he didn't have a scanner and he never made it a priority to show me his photo. He could have sent it to me in the mail, at that. I was young, stupid, besotted, and every excuse he gave me didn't deter me. I eventually organized a meetup of some of the people from the community and we got together in a city near his home town. My plane was delayed by a day, and even so I got there before he did. He overslept.

I wasn't a complete idiot. I knew that no matter what he said, he did not feel for me what I did for him and that he never would. I just didn't care, because I wanted to be with him even for just this one time, even though I didn't completely trust in him not to hurt me emotionally.

We all sat around waiting for him from all over the world, an hour's drive from where he lived. He didn't show up until midday... a fun time was had waiting for him not knowing what he looked like. Every new guy who walked in we laughed and said "maybe that's him!" And finally it was.

I already knew I was kinky, but it never came up between us, through all of those 24 months and then the two weeks we were physically together.

Now for an insightful comment from one of my readers:

You have to be secure knowing this person loves, respects and cherishes you, that they want it to be a mutual experience regardless if the "Scene" is for them to use you for their pleasure especially if there are elements of nonconsensual play.

We had ultra-vanilla sex in a few different positions, over a period of two weeks. It was..okay. Kind of dull in comparison to even things I did with my husband that weren't "sex," as such. I didn't have any orgasms, not that that's the point - but not a single one. I didn't mind, but neither did he. In retrospect, it's stunning how different (in a bad way) real sex with him was from the text-based kind.

He treated me badly while we were together; he didn't want random acquaintances of his to see us together. His mother thought I was some random girl he'd picked up in the city. Seriously. I was not part of his life at all, after two years. The thing is, as much as I loved this man/boy, I knew he didn't love me and so I did not trust him with my whole self. It was a good thing I didn't, because he stopped talking to me once I went home. Nothing, no goodbye, no "This isn't going to work for me anymore.." just, nothing.

I say now that this was for the best, because had we maintained contact I would have held out hope. I wouldn't have bonded so much with my husband, who was already a friend of mine even then, but then it hurt. It hurt like crazy and it didn't stop hurting. On some level it still hurts, but him getting his toxic self away from me was the best thing he could have done for me at that point.

What I had with my husband was better from the beginning than anything I had with this other man. I couldn't do things the same way again though, and so we avoided sex-type chatting until we had met. He would call me, but not terribly often because phone calls were awfully expensive. We had seen lots of photos of each other even before we became involved.

When we did meet,  fireworks. He turned me on more by stroking my arm from wrist to inner elbow than I'd ever been turned on by the other guy at all. Everything my husband did he did out of love for me. He was in a very different time zone from me, but he made sure we had hours and hours of time online together. He made sure I got enough sleep, even if I did set my alarm for four in the morning to talk to him. I made sure he got enough sleep by sending him away at midnight his time, though that was hard for both of us. I was actually able to have a real life because we knew when we would talk, there was no guessing, no him expecting me to wait around for hours for him.

When we were physically apart, we were miserable, longing, pining for each other. We organized trips to spend as much time as possible together. These were horribly expensive and we were quite young, but we did what we could.

Knowing how much he loved and valued me made it easy to come out kinky to him, to let him know that I wanted to be dominated, to be used for his pleasure, and yes, pleasured myself. He has never once given me reason to doubt his devotion. Not once. Marrying him was the best thing I ever did.

I trust him not to break my heart, so he can say horrible things to me in-scene and it's erotic.

I trust him to have my best interests in mind, so he can order me to do anything at all and I will.

I trust him to love me absolutely and unconditionally, so I just fall deeper in love with him every day.

I trust him to want to please both of us, so I submit.

Love and trust - you'd think that where there is love, there is trust, but it's not true. Trust is earned continuously by displaying trustworthy traits. Love is a strange animal, and trust definitely feeds it, but love can  pop its head up without the trust, unfortunately.

A good, strong long-term relationship of any kind needs both, but with D/s it's even more the case. Without the safety net of trust, submitting is beyond scary.

When I asked him recently what his favorite thing is, he replied "Giving you orgasms."

I suppose that just says it all right there.