Discovering Myself

When I cry in scene, he strokes my cheek, tells me I’m hot, and continues to be a cruel bastard. I should be used to this by now but it shocks me anew every time.

Crying isn’t a safeword if you’re in a BDSM dynamic where you know the sub is enough of a masochist that they enjoy being taken that far. 

Otherwise? Seeing tears is a good reason to at least check in! 

For some, being able to cry and have your partner know that you aren’t wanting to stop can be a really freeing thing, as described above. 

For others, it could feel very cold and uncaring, or scary. 

We were having fun, doing things we both love to do, and something inside my brain flipped and I was no longer having fun being used the way I was. My brain does this really awesome thing though, where I go silent instead of saying the words i need in the moment. He saw the tears and stopped immediately and asked if I was okay and all I could do was cry. That question seemed to open the flood gates. He started asking what was wrong and all I could manage was a head shake. He coaxed me into the shower, held me while I stood under the running water, and then proceeded to guide me back to bed where he continued to hold me while I sobbed. To this day, I still don’t know what happened or why I reacted the way I did; I just chalk that one up to PTSD. We have done the same type of play since then with no issues.

It just seems a bit...I dunno, sad? an oversight? unfair? that the slinky fuckers don't have talons.

It might seem pedantic to be a stickler about these things, but once you begin cultivating a culture of responsibility around limits and boundaries in the relationship, personal responsibility and accountability increases. I think I would explicitly point out that I cannot simply impose a rule that forbids texting and driving without them agreeing to it, but that I personally refuse to participate and that I would hope they would have the respect for their lives and the lives of others and refrain from it.

First, of course everybody can make everything a hard limit, that's absolutely right and valid in itself and has to be accepted. Then, of course anything can be made a rule and no rule should be unilaterally imposed on the other, that's also true. But still, in this particular case of "texting and driving" (or drinking and driving, or playing with loaded guns, or not cleaning up the huge oil stain on the roof before the handyguy comes to fix the roofing tiles, or anything like this) to even define this as a "rule" or a "hard limit" feels very awkward to me like it gives off wrong signals and sounds a bit like a strange, in a negative sense, relationship in which that would be done this way.

Because...

@ anon already mentioned the right keywords in this context: common sense & no-brainer. "Rules" and "limits" are very strongly connected to and associated with the BDSM/Dynamic-level of a relationship (which isn't entirely so of course since limits as in boundaries are important in any relationship, but using this terminology and done in the suggested forms it still feels very much like a D/s thing), and I think it's wrong to even handle this matter within this D/s context at all. It's very much beyond it in my eyes, and kind of pulling it into it will give the submissive the wrong idea about what D/s is and what a Dom's 'job' is.

It is not a Dom's job to compensate, eg. by rules and limits, for a complete lack of common sense on the submissive's side. D/s does not mean you can just behave like a total idiot and put yourself as well as others at risk, that you don't have to think about it anymore if this or that activity could kill yourself or others, because "Daddy"/"Sir" will say or do something if it occurs. Being a submissive in a D/s Dynamic is not giving up on all of your capacities to function like a normal, adult human being at all times and in every situation. This has nothing at all to do with D/s and I wouldn't treat it that way.