… is failure to communicate.
A great line from a great movie.
What I am talking about is something that may come as a shock to all of you, but it needs to be said.
Molly and I are human.
I’ll give you a moment to recover from that shock.
I am not perfect and neither is she, we both make mistakes when it comes to all sorts of things and that includes our D/s life. Contrary to (seemingly) popular belief I am not the ALL KNOWING, ALL SEEING DOM, and likewise Molly is not the perfectly attentive, always devoted Twue Submissive. We both get grumpy, sad, angry, forgetful and distracted. You know… like, well, everyone. What is important is how we handle that, how we handle our mistakes and move forward and this can be very tricky when it come to our D/s relationship. Let me give you an example. I sometimes set Molly tasks, like in Off the Cuff. Sometimes these tasks are simple and straight forward like A Punishment for the New Year and sometimes they are more ambiguous, She currently has a task I set a few months ago which was to find a piece of writing for me to read to her while I watch her masturbate. I set no deadline since I wanted her to find just the right thing (if you have written something that you think would work, please leave a link in the comments) that worked for her and how can you really put a deadline on that? Every now and again I would remind her that she still needed to find something and she would give me her sad face. So finally we had a chat about tasks and which ones worked and which ones she found more problematic. After a bit of communication on the topic it turned out that when I did bring that task up, she felt as is she had failed. As she put it
“I want to do the tasks and I like to do the tasks, but I prefer things I can put on a checklist and just do! Tasks like this are harder because I have so many things to do that I can get distracted and forgetful and then when you remind me I feel like I have let you down.”
This led to a conversation about failure and who might be at fault. Most people would assume that she would be at fault. After all, she was assigned and task and kept forgetting it. But that would be missing my responsibility for checking in with, not only if had she done the task, but how she felt about the task. I assign tasks not just for my pleasure (well sometimes they are just for my pleasure) but to A) try to teach her something, or B) to try and learn something about her. If the only thing she learns from the task is that she feels bad, well then I haven’t done my job as a Dom very well have I? So what we learned is that I didn’t communicate my intentions for this task well enough, and that She didn’t communicate her difficulties with doing the task. So we both failed, and that is OK, because we learned from it and now can continue forward a clearer understanding of our expectations.
What we’ve got here…
Is better communication
P.S. We shall see how she does with her new task… also a bit open ended I am afraid