For the past few months I’ve been writing weekly about my feelings about the M/s part of my marriage on a social media site. I am currently completely fucking melting down and I shut down my social media because I will do something I find embarrassing in the long run if I don’t. I can tell. I’m in that kind of place. I want to run my mouth. That’s not safe.
I should give a tiny bit of explanation about what I mean when I say M/s because out here on the open internet I could run into absolutely anyone. Y’all may not have any idea what I am talking about.
M/s refers to a Master/slave relationship. It is a formalised way of having power or authority transfer inside a romantic/sexual/maybe not either but still super intense emotional relationship. Noah has been questioning what we should be calling it.
I should stop referring to M/s then.
He is currently saying that the closest thing is like owning a feral cat, which isn’t actual ownership. I guess that means I won’t be doing a lot of these updates going forward because what I am doing with my life does not count.
I feel like the ways I serve are mostly devalued lately and Noah doesn’t acknowledge them existing outside sexual monogamy. That’s the only service he seems to value these days.
If I am not naturally, instinctively monogamous I am betraying him. I am not serving. I don’t count as property or as a slave.
Cats don’t capitalise titles.
> He is currently saying that the closest thing is like owning a feral cat, which isn’t actual ownership. I guess that means I won’t be doing a lot of these updates going forward because what I am doing with my life does not count.
I’m responding in a pretty limited way on your blog. As you say, social media is a rough place to have a breakdown. I’m not in the best shape either.
I’m actually quoting you on that. More specifically, what you said in person was (and I’m going to get a few words wrong, but mostly the same) that the problem is we never decided what we wanted to have, whether we wanted it to be M/s or Owner/property or Owner/feral-cat. I said something about how I tended toward the O/p direction, and you told a story about elephants needing more space, and every human intervention tending to hurt them. You then said (I’m going to get the details of this wrong) that I needed to think hard about whether the interventions I was making were going to get me what I wanted.
I’m responding a lot to that. Like, it felt to me like we decided and tried to do it and a lot of that isn’t working for you, and now you’ve told me we never decided. It feels like you gracefully letting me out of something you’ve decided I don’t want. I *did* feel like we had decided on that. I wrote some things about what I wanted. Saying we “never decided” feels like ignoring that. Telling me human intervention goes badly, and offering the feral cat thing as the third alternative sounds a *lot* like “here are two things I’ve told you are bad and will only harm me, plus your actual option”.
So: I’m saying that to you because it felt like you held that up as what you wanted. It did *not* feel like what I wanted. But the reason I wrote what I wrote, how I wrote it, and asked you what you thought the details of a feral cat ownership relationship looked like is because it sounded like you were turning down our previous options and offering me that one.
I gave some details on what that meant in my mind and asked you what it meant in your mind.
If you told me you were done with M/s (and it really sounded like you were telling me that), I wouldn’t go away. I’m willing to take a *lot* of renegotiation and stay. And my first question, even at those times, is going to be “okay, tell me more about what you’re willing to have with me”.
I was trying for that. I was trying to make sense of what you told me, and basically to repeat it back to you. I sometimes talk about “pet ownership” as what we did before this. But I don’t normally say “feral cat”. That one’s me repeating you, though apparently without understanding what you were saying.