Guilt

Why do we feel guilt? For me, it's usually self-imposed, rarely do others make me feel guilty. Lately, however I've been feeling more and more guilt about being poly. My (for lack of a better word) primary partner, Marie, lives in a different city and although we see each other quite regularly it's not everyday and due to her new work schedule we're not communicating as much as we used to. As a result there's now a sense of guilt whenever I spend time with peach, not because I'm spending time with her, but because I feel like Marie needs me to be available to communicate with her seeing as we don't communicate as much as we used to.

Marie does not do anything to make me feel guilty, it's that I know she wishes I were available to communicate when she's available and I'm with peach it makes me feel guilty for being with her, like I said self-imposed guilt. I'm undecided on how to handle it. All it's doing is making me less inclined to spend time with peach when I know Marie is available to communicate and that's not fair to peach.

My relationship with each is very different. I'm very much in love with Marie and she is someone who I see myself living with sometime in the next year and we have similar relationship goals. Me and peach have a defined D/s relationship, she is submissive to me, but we don't have the same relationship goals. She very much wants to be someone's slave and enjoys the potential of a 24/7 D/s relationship with a Dominant, something I've never wanted. Marie and I are both very secure in our relationship and we have an amazingly strong connection, but yet I still feel guilty.

Marie is new to the poly lifestyle (I'm her first poly partner) and recently she's been struggling due to her feelings surrounding recently having casual sex with a friend; leading her to take 3 months to determine how she feels about poly. Another source of guilt may be the road I'm taking with peach; if Marie doesn't feel like she can be in a poly relationship, what then? Will I have just dragged peach along for the last few months? I also know that I'm not what peach wants, we don't have the same goals and while we both know this I have a feeling she lies to herself about it. I'm trying to mitigate this by pushing her into the BDSM community more, as I am also her first poly relationship and Dominant, so exposure is important for her.

The ironic thing about my guilt is that if I were to end it with peach and move at a slower pace with Marie from a poly perspective, instead of 'forcing' her into it, she'd feel guilty about me not being poly. It's a no-win situation; I feel that no matter what I do I'm fucked.

A friend of mine once said that poly relationships are like the Phd of relationships, not because we're better or smarter than monogamously inclined individuals but because it takes that much more work to have successful poly relationships and when they do work they are incredibly rewarding. Being able to be a part of someone you care about's growth is my favourite thing about poly. It's not about the sex, it's not about the play, it's about being a part of someone's life and potentially having a material impact on that life; that's what poly means to me.

Drunk and Unsubmissive

Last week my submissive partner, peach, showed up an hour late to a date with me highly intoxicated. I knew as soon as I spoke to her on the phone I should've told her to go home. I had to verbally direct her to my condo, a place she's been on numerous occasions over the past 6 months, even though she was only 5 blocks away. It took 25 minutes to coax her in the right direction, something that should not be necessary given our D/s relationship. I should've gone with my gut feeling and not concerned myself with how she would react, she wasn't being disobedient per se rather she was not in any place to do a scene, let alone hold a conversation. My feeling towards her was/is utter disappointment, not in that she was late but that she had let herself get to that point with the knowledge she was to see me that evening.

Upon finally arriving, her usual submissiveness was non-existent. The food she had brought me was inedible after being tossed upside down in her bag, she split water all over my floor failing to clean it up, forgot to use 'Sir' the name she is supposed to call me...these were only a few of her indiscretions. It was obvious that she was in no place to be spending time with me, so I got her together and drove her home, much to her chagrin and indignation, as she tried to storm out, something she would typically never consider doing, no matter what the scenario. She said she wasn't THAT drunk and that I didn't need to drive her home, however I had no confidence in her ability to find her own way.

What really got to me during this ordeal and really the purpose of my writing is the numerous items that she discussed or babbled on about when I got her to her place and tried to get her out of my car, which took over 45 minutes. I feel that when people are drunk things that are usually thought about are vocalized, as the level of restraint usually shown is eliminated; I'm sure that many of you have witnessed the same thing in similar situations. These formerly hidden thoughts and feelings can sometimes be ignored, but I'm not sure if that's true in this case.

Through tears she said: her friends didn't understand our relationship and didn't like the way I treated her; I didn't care about her or didn't show it in a way that she wanted; that she didn't feel like herself around me and felt uncomfortable in her own skin; that her feeling of being uncomfortable was compounded because of how comfortable I was with everything; that she was afraid of having her submissiveness rejected because she wanted to be more submissive than what I was looking for; she wanted to potentially be a slave in the future, but knows that's not what I want; on two occasions that she thought the conversation in my car would be the last one we had and would be the end of our relationship as she knew it.....And then the next day she remembered none of it....

She doesn't want to talk about it, doesn't want to know what she said, and she's beside herself with grief over being that intoxicated in front of me. I don't know how I'm supposed to handle our relationship now. I know I can't go on as if nothing she said wasn't said, I'm a talker and I need to talk about things like this. But the flip side is I know that I can't handle the fallout from that discussion; I can't handle another 4 hour crying session from her, that we've gone through on more than one occasion; it won't resolve anything. Those thoughts and feelings of hers will continue to be there, continue to reside in her head and continue to affect our relationship. She's looking to me to help fix her through D/s and only she can fix herself, I can only help give her a little nudge along the way and I wonder if in this case that nudge is an end to her first D/s relationship......