I’m not a manipulator. I lack guile. I lack strategy. For better or for worse, what you see is what you get with me. Polina wondered about that for a moment, imagining I was deploying some deep, four-dimensional-chess kind of shit on her. Or some PUA shit. [My patter did include something like a “neg,” I suppose, in my positing her lack of interest in me. Though there was zero strategy in that. I was just talking, saying what seemed true in the moment.]
Where we are is working through the dynamics of her and my respective needs for safety. I have the sense that she’s sufficiently intrigued that, if I can navigate those complex shoals, she’ll be mine. Or I’ll be hers. Or we’ll have a romp. Or something…. But we’re threading a thin needle here.
I learned two things about Polina in this same conversation:
- Prior to a heartbreak, she was confident; subsequent to the heartbreak? much less so, much less consistently so.
- Polina generally favors “dominance” in relationships. She likes to decide where dates happen, where friends drink. She likes to order for herself, and to decide for others. This has a relationship to her longing to feel “respected,” the danger she feels in the possibility of not feeling respected. (N.B. she allowed me to order for her on our recent date. I sensed some need in her to do at least a little of the ordering, and I allowed that.)
We talked about confidence, about makeup, about the relationship between confidence, makeup, and sex appeal. Punchline: confidence is sexy; to the extent makeup makes a woman confident, it’s sexy; to the extent it’s deployed to mask underlying insecurity, it’s not.
I am, in this space, quite confident. Polina and I have a problem to solve. And the only thing I’m better at than creating problems is… (you guessed it) solving problems.
How can Polina feel confident, secure, respected, while giving me what I need? (Reminder: what I need is not submission. It’s, actually, not so far from the “respect” Polina craves.) In my instance, I need to know that there’s zero danger I will want too much, that my desire will cause a woman to leave me. I’ve written several times about how this does not mean I need a woman to give me everything I want; rather, it means she has to be committed to a certain relationship to my desires, a certain way of communicating to me. She has to internalize the desire to see me have my desires fulfilled, to want me to get what I want, to the extent possible. And, to want me to get something even better when I can’t. This can happen in a context of submission, for sure. But it need not. The truth is, this is how I feel in relationships, just as much as it’s what I expect of the women with whom I have relationships.
I like some of the trappings of D/s relationships, of daddy/lg relationships, but, at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters, the only thing I really need to feel safe? It’s something I (strive to) give every woman, ever: polite, respectful communication, whenever the fuck it’s possible.
I have a hunch that Polina’s and my Venn diagrams have a bit of overlap, and we will make it work. But I have some work to do….
