Do You Have The Time To Listen To Me Whine?

I feel particularly disconnected from my kink. Granted I'm busy: caring for ill, separated-yet-undivorced wife; running a business in two cities; dealing with trying financial realities; recognizing I'm not ready to meet Mistress Right. But for the first time in a long time I feel cut off and sort of lost. Even fantasy eludes me. Why can't I just sexualize all this stress? I used to do that all the time and it made difficult times so much more fun.

I went out on two semi-kinky dates the other week and wasn't even inspired to write about them. Desire suppressed infects my creative juice to write about exploits, such that they were. Maybe it's just coming to terms with the idea that if I like her well enough to play, then it's a "relationship". That connection will vie for the time I have to spend with my terminally ill wife. While I feel no need to tell her I'm still going on dates, I'd feel compelled to tell her if I found someone I really liked.

And that would really devastate my wife, even if I were clear that she came first. I've already ended or cut short more than one promising connection over just not knowing how to deal with the knot.

It's ironic that I feel more protective of my marriage in separation than I did when we lived together. Funny what a terminal diagnosis does.

It's pretty clear I'm going to have to move back in with her. Even getting dressed is an exhausting event for her. I dread it, but it is the right thing to do.

With all this going on, no wonder I'm feeling less than libidinous. Perhaps I should expand my on-line dating profile. I'm an attractive, athletic, man; anxious, lacking in libido, and virtually unavailable. No wonder I'm feeling disconnected. Who wouldn't?

Twenty Plus

When my computer boots up it automatically opens to MSN. Invariabaly there is some vapid top ten study that I get sucked into before I go about my web surf. Something like, "The Top Ten American Cities For Beautiful People". Oh yeah, major league intellectual stuff.

So this morning I sign on and there's a top ten study about lasting relationships so I'm scrolling through the amazing insights. One entry claimed that the intensity of couples "in love" actually increased once you hit 20 years. Yeah right.

And ten minutes later as I am getting ready to leave for Miami I can't help but cry. I don't cry much in public or to anyone who doesn't really, really know me. But I thought that the idiot MSN study got it right. Okay, my wife is terminally ill. But somehow even if she weren't, I think I'd still feel an increasing depth of feeling. Everything is colored by the tragic unfairness of her illness. But there's just something that's right about the power of time. Even if it's not perfect. Even if there are significant holes there's something irreplacably valuable about somebody who has been right by you for twenty four years.

Then again, a little kink is a fine thing...

Undating

I've concluded that I'm virtually undatable. Whatever "dating" is these days, I'm just not there. While I am separated I spend lots of time with my wife. There is no sex connection. No shared kink or ignition spark of the erotic. But my time with her is profound. Even as I struggle with the uncharitable feelings of the "resentful caretaker" I am a vastly better man for giving myself to her protection.

With each woman I've "courted" I've been totally honest. Separated yet undivorced, I care for a dying woman. She is number one. You are a distant second. Unless I'm her distant second, it doesn't work.

So then I appreciate my relationship with She-Who-Visits all the more. We're connected but lead totally separate lives. It works in its almost total and complete absence of expectation.

I'm entering another change phase. Will I move back in with my wife to care for her as the inexorable cruelty of her disease continues to destroy her body? And I've got to get real on a financial level. Things are not "turning around". The new reality is survival. Not a time to support four homes. Warren Buffet I ain't.

It is again time to let the feelings wash over me and try to enjoy the ride down the rapids of the mucky, dirty, chop of a river that is my life.

Compartments

One of the themes of my writing has been how I've struggled to live as integrated a life as I can when it comes to my kink. For so many years I hid it away in a dark closet and it only really came out when I snuck around to buy the latest issue of Screw Magazine or DDI and then obsessed on when and where to see which domme I was for the moment enthralled with.

Now, while I certainly don't broadcast to everyone in my social and professional circle that I'm a shoe licking submissive fetishist, most people who know me, both vanilla and scene, know I'm a perv. For myself, I much prefer this less compartmentalized, "one-life-to-live" sort of approach. Sex and what I do, or more accurately what I'd like to do, in the bedroom are private things, not secret shameful things.

But over the course of being more "out" I realize that there are all sorts of lines people draw in their own lives around who knows what about their kink. Or for that matter, how much any given kinkster will reveal to another fellow traveller about their vanilla life. I totally get it and how much anybody choses to share is totally up to them. But even accounting for the need to be discreet because of the "ick factor" of a kinkster lifestyle, I wonder is there something appealing about compartmentalizing for its own sake.

It can be fun to create different persona and be different people in diverse social circles, right? A fantasy role lets you escape the day to day grind of life's mundane responsibilities. It's a mini-vacation or a form of freedom, isn't it? Plus, you get to reveal or protect aspects of your personality as you see fit, which is often a good thing, no?

I suppose I could agonize over where someone's lines in the sand are. Will I offend them? Have I already messed up said something or written something I shouldn't have? Will they ever speak to me again? Can I tip toe through these tulips and not lose my balance?

I try my best to respect other people's boundries and appreciate the compartments of their lives that they feel comfortable sharing with me. And while discretion is said to be the better part of valor, revelation under the right circumstances is an optimistic act of hope.