The healing embrace of a good relationship

We like to cuddle. He wraps his arms and his leg around me and I'm wrapped in his body, his warmth, his love. I can feel it, that love, as it responds to mine.  It's a sort of pulsing power source, and it's amazing. It takes my love, amplifies it, sends it back to me in waves. We're connected by it as surely and irrevocably as any physical tie. More so.

"Can you feel it too? Is it just me?" I ask him, sometimes. I'm convinced that I could be crazy, or just tuned to a different emotional wavelength than everyone else.

"I think I can feel it too, love," he assures me. We make happy noises, wrapped up together like that, and I feel like the luckiest, most loved woman in the world. I talk a lot about how amazing he feels to me, to the point I worry that I talk about it too much.

"I like to hear your love," he says, allaying my fears for the umpteenth time.

I could feel that power source a month into our relationship, when he was thousands of miles away from me, an ocean between us, and we'd never met in person, 12 years ago. I could feel it. I wrote him an email about it.

Amidst a sea of rambling, trying to feel my way to my point by writing there, I got to this:

I'm frightened at the depth of the feelings I have for you. I mean. . . Gah. I usually feel things deeply, but. . . This. . . this is. . . gah. Suffusing my entire being. . . not that I didn't feel sort of that way before, with him. I did, else he couldn't have hurt me so badly - and twice! - but it was. . . different. This is..... gah. I keep saying gah like you know what I'm trying to say. Sometimes. . . Sometimes, I just want to devour you. 

Okay. . . I don't really want to sound corny, but. . . the thing is, I can feel your feelings coming back at me. . . I mean, as opposed to having these feelings and dumping them into this giant black hole, and losing all this energy due to it, it's like a whole other power source. That frightens me a bit too, because I'm not really sure of the whys of it. . . Not that I'm not glad of it, I am, but.... I.. mmf. I don't think I deserve it. 

We'd known each other for some time, but the relationship was new. It terrified me, seeing as how in my previous relationship, all the love had come from me, into the other guy, and sort of died there. New relationship energy, you'll say, but it wasn't. It's only grown stronger, so that now when we are together, it just pulses there, a bright thread of love and life and contentment and true, honest-to-goodness happiness.

It healed me, that love. I was seriously heartbroken, not that long before we got together, and pretty damaged from the treatment I'd received in that previous relationship.

He was so incredibly sweet, patient, and good, that when I began to reveal my true needs - my submissive nature, my need to be dominated - he didn't balk. He has accepted every single kink I've revealed to him as if it's just a thing people do. He's amazing, and even when I was struggling with him being a nice guy, with wanting him to have more demands of me, he handled me beautifully.

How can two people who've never met be so connected? How could those threads pulling us together, connecting us across all those miles and all that water, even exist?

I'm convinced we were made for each other. Over the years, we'd been friendly acquaintances, always too distracted by other things going on and, of course, for me anyway, by the extreme distance. I once asked a friend: "Why couldn't I have fallen in love with someone like him?", due to his extreme sweetness and niceness and general all around great person-ness. Another time, another friend suggested I get together with him, and I laughed. "Hahaha, right, me and him, sure." I felt confident in making that into a joke, because I had spent a lot of time with him. We'd spoken on the phone. We kept winding up alone together in various instances. The universe was trying to tell us something, but we weren't listening. We weren't ready to listen.

But... it wasn't such a joke, after all. We even talked about it later, something trying to get us together. He put it well.

"It's like something was saying look, you'll be good together, and that's that."

Something kept telling us that. It's kind of amazing, considering the many hour time difference between us, that we were ever around at the same time at all, to be honest. For it to keep happening, over and over?

Surely there's some design in that. Or our souls just pulled to each other, furiously, irresistibly, despite our conscious selves ignoring it. He was pulled to me so fiercely that he crawled out of the womb early to be born just after I was.

We're meant for each other. Yes, I really, really believe that. I'm not sure everyone has a missing part of themselves out there in the world, but we did.

Submitting to this man is not always easy, but it does tend to be, because he adores me. What he wants is our mutual happiness and the health of our relationship, and for us to be together for a long, long time. Ideally forever, though the both of us realize that's not terribly likely to happen. The choices he makes, the things he asks from me, make both of us better, because - here's the awesome part for me - he's a better person than I am.

I've become a much better person in the time I've been married to him, so that that may not even be true anymore, but if it's not? It's all thanks to him.

I once struggled with wanting him to want more, in these endless cycles, infinite loops where I would resolve to be okay with it, but then the need to be overpowered kept coming back. I'd spend whole months perfectly fine and then I'd rebel, and after years of that, in large part thanks to spewing out my inner turmoil on this blog, I had a realization: Just submit. Just do it. Show him what it can be like. So I began to look for little ways to please him, making "I'll do whatever you want," a reality, not just inside the bedroom. If he asks me for something, whether it's a cup of water or a particular dinner or to go for a walk with him, I try my darnedest to give it to him.

Then the magical thing started to happen: he responded. He responded beautifully. I gave more without him forcing so hard, and then he became more comfortable taking. The thing I was missing all those years was the way he works, while I'd been so focused on how I work. I should have noticed it. It's been there all along. He's quiet, but he dominates the way a gentle stream can cut channels into rock if given enough time. It's even the way our relationship started: he was just there, until I couldn't imagine him not being there anymore. He's slow, but especially now, pretty damned sure of himself, and I am softer, more yielding to him.

I once told Kitty that submission feels like softness - and that's what it feels like for me. I just stopped struggling so bloody hard and let it happen, let him dominate the way he can dominate, because a submissive who's always trying to shape her dominant is not being submissive. My periodic internal struggles arose from the fact that I was trying to submit to an idea of dominance rather than the very real kind he was giving me, from the fact that I was an oxymoron in myself and my submissive nature balked at it.

The power that I give him in this power exchange we're in becomes a part of that power source that binds us together, is fed with our love, and feeds it back to both of us, restoring us from the ravages of living in the world. I give him the power, but it feeds both of us with positive energy. It's beautiful.

He is my jasmine. He's gently intoxicating, unassuming yet overpowering. He surrounds me and I breathe him in and my life is infinitely better, happier, for having done so.

I can't imagine being happier in a relationship. Being wrapped in him makes everything better, even if it's just for the time we spend cuddled together, though often enough it lasts well beyond those moments. It's literally a healing embrace, and I'm delighted and feel like the best-cared-for woman alive to be able to experience it so often.