I was answering this in the comment section, but it was getting awfully wordy, and I’m always glad to get one of my entries for the week out of the way.

I don’t think that love is the major player here. Most people are in love, but few enjoy your lifestyle and ever fewer push it to the extremes as you and Phrank do. Like you say, you sought out a Sadist, and it sure appears that you got what you want. Could you stay with Phrank in your relationship if you stopped loving him? If he stopped loving you? Is love necessary for your lifestyle? Can you be loved if you are a belonging and not a person?

Oh, come on. Did you ever read Different Loving? Hell, we are interviewed in it. Of course we love each other. We have been giddy in love for almost two decades. Everyone who knows us in person tells us that we still look at each other like newlyweds, and it’s not that we are getting all sexual out in public, because we don’t even come close to doing that, ever. (Well, unless I’m in a Bad Bar. That’s just plain fun. I like Bad Bars, and they like me too.)

I quite often feel like a belonging, an ornament to his home. I go to great lengths to get all my shit done and to make this place run by itself for a while so he can display me and use me however he wants. That’s true love right there. And lust. No one ever said I wasn’t horny.

To be honest, most of my interest in a third person would be for that reason — so that he could have one in the cage and one in the kitchen, or whatever. I’ve just always been afraid I’d end up in the kitchen or playing bridge with him, being the “vanilla slave”. All of my jealousies come raging to the front at that idea. Squick.

You and “Dr. Freud” feel very vanilla to me. It reminds me of when we were Section Leaders on Compuserve’s 12B in the early 90s and someone would wander into the kinky section and be horrified by us perverts. It used to stimulate all sorts of interesting discussions, but ultimately, I found it very boring. I got very tired of explaining that being kinky is just different than vanilla and is actually ok. We love differently, but we still love.

The sanctimony and judgment in your comment are really tedious. Get out of my kinky bubble! Heh. Why would someone vanilla read me, anyway?

The couple of times we’ve sought out kink-aware therapists over the years, one of the things they both pointed out is that by objective standards, we are pretty healthy. We’ve had a very stable relationship since 1990. We raised two kids. We have stable income. We pay our taxes, take our vitamins and use sunscreen. There’s very little angst or drama between us, lots of affection and comfort. Just because you can see what we do in the privacy of our own home and it is more extreme than you like doesn’t stop us from being productive members of society.

“Few enjoy our lifestyle”. Really? There are vibrant kinky communities all over the world. Go check out the Wikipedia as a start, then FetLife or CollarMe or Bondage.Com or The Folsom Street Fair or hundreds of other places. Kaya just wrote about SpankFest. I don’t hang around online communities very often anymore for the same reason I don’t play Farmtown on Facebook. I’d rather actually do it than talk about doing it, and I don’t seem to need the validation of my relationship that I think I used to want.

Sorry, too wordy! Blah blah blah. I’ll stop babbling now and go back farming for a while. It’s gorgeous outside and being inside is making me miss M. I like it SO MUCH BETTER when he is home.