The essence of love is submission

Maybe that’s why it feels so good to explore D/s

I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately.  Also, a lot about submission.  And plenty about relationships and D/s.  And mostly, thinking about all three of these things together.  This series of thoughts was provoked by a fellow submissive who suggested to me that I am more submissive than she is.

While part of me was flattered, I also thought that it isn’t like that…we’re just different.  Without getting into the specifics of that idea, it got me thinking about submission more broadly.  I found my way to a solution from another one of the bloggers I follow, nijntje, who posted recently about the different types of submission, and highlighted three basic types: sexual submissives, spanko’s, and service submissives.  Whether this is an exhaustive list, and whether the titles or definitions are accurate, I saw myself in one archetype and I saw the submissive who told me I was “more submissive” in another.  Hence my thought that one cannot compare from one to another…and in truth, even within an archetype I would struggle to compare, largely because we must all find our own bliss and our own path to bliss.

Love is Submission

Love for me is all about submission.  I wrote recently about a conversation amongst family about why some of my siblings can’t stay in a committed long-term relationship and another two of us have what appear to be unending relationships.   In that post I wrote about how submission is a willingness to override your own self-interest in the interests of harmony and support of your partner. 

So when I say love is all about submission, I don’t mean that in a kink sense.  I mean that the feeling I have when I love someone, be they my child, a friend, my SO, that these are people in whom I can lose myself in my own feelings of love for them.  This is acutely strong when there is some degree of choice—the strongest example being my SO, but is also true of close friendships, and in the case of my children, is felt not in the day-to-day as it is with my SO, but at moments of togetherness, when I deliberately set out to do something with them, to create a shared experience.  In other words, by choosing to love you, I have chosen to put my interests below yours, for that is the essence of love, and is an existential act of submission.

No Free Ride

The love I feel for extended family is quite different—siblings, parents, even cousins…this love is more like a benign warmth, and it only has ever ratcheted up to the level described above when tragedy or loss has struck.  In tragedy it all hits you in a concentrated blast, with everything else stripped away.  Seeing loss etched on the faces of others helps clarify one’s own feelings.  Why do I make a distinction between the blood relations?  Because we didn’t choose them.  By not choosing them, both parties must earn their places in the other person’s hearts—in other words, they don’t get to keep coming in if they hurt you…being a blood relative is no excuse to not work for it, or an excuse for abuse.  Indeed, we would all be better off to ditch people who don’t bring positive energy.

True Love

True love feels like is submission.  This may be submission to myself or something in me just as easily as it can be to someone else.  Either way it is a recognition that my feelings are in overload, which produces a euphoric feeling that has at least been triggered by another person.  Sometimes, it can just be a feeling towards that other person when I am near them and feel their presence, or think about them, think about something they said, or maybe something as simple as doing something together.  This is the same feeling I have when I am in “sub-space”.  It is the same feeling I have when Mistress exerts her power.

Submission is love.  Quite simply for me, there it is.  It is the same feeling.  Submission is commitment.  When I feel love washing over me, feel submission taking hold, it is a feeling that is stronger than myself that I am making a commitment to someone.  It is a commitment to give to someone in a way that is greater than my own interests.  It is to give even when my selfish desire might be something entirely different.  And that is a euphoria-inducing feeling.  It pounds through my chest and grabs my guts and even my groin and makes me feel tight and breathless and totally and utterly swallowed up by emotion.

This shows me a few things that are really important.  Submission for me is an expression of love.  The only difference in what is happening when it is with Mistress and when it is with my SO or my family is that the trigger is out in the open.  In other words Mistress pulls the levers and we both know it.  Second, kink seems to have nothing to do with it submission.  Kink seems to be just one of the gateways to lure my id out of hiding, and it appears to me that my id is the instigator of those animal-instinctual feelings that I call love (a directed warmth that crowds out rational thought).

It also shows me that the whole conversation around alpha and beta submissives, or whether a submissive is a wimp or a doormat, or some other derogatory comment is ludicrous.  It explains to me why I haven’t been able to identify at all with the humiliation side of D/s…Love is noble.  Love is the highest feeling we can have.  If submission is love, then to submit is a noble act, nothing to be ashamed of, but something to be proud of.  While pride is a sin, I wear my submission with the comfort of knowing that when I submit, I am simply saying to the person, I love you, and serving you is more important to me than serving myself…

Submission, therefore, is not something offered lightly.  It is something that I am willing to experience with only a very, very small number of people.  That group starts with my SO, who is the only person I would willingly lay my life down for, in any circumstance, under any condition, without expectation of return.  The person we choose as soul mate and life partner deserves nothing less.  Unsurprisingly, this includes my children, whom I love without rational thought.  And I find myself gradually finding myself considering Mistress in this light.  Not in the hot throes of passion and arousal, but in the dull warmth that is there between times, when I contemplate Her as a human being, what She represents, who She is.  And why does this matter?  It matters for two reasons.  First, seeking out and finding a person or people that you can respect so much that you would give your heart to them, invest in them, help them, support them, love them is incredibly healthy, grounding, humbling.  To do this in recognition that we are all human, that nobody is perfect, that we all have good days and bad, that we all think and do things that please others but also do things that annoy, and to still cultivate love and submission, is very fulfilling.  Second, it shows how important it is that there is common passion, common ground, mutual understanding as fellow humans.

It takes a rather extraordinary human to become a Domme, and an even more extraordinary human to make a living from it.  First, there is the responsibility that a sub asks you to take in relation to their psyche, which some hold with more or less relative seriousness.  Second, there is the need to have extraordinary self-knowledge and insight, coupled with an ability to lead yourself.  Third, and perhaps most importantly, it requires a full life outside of kink to keep you centred and grounded, so that you can enter “play” as a grounded human.

For all these reasons my first feeling to Mistress is respect.  For all these reasons there is also friendship.  And for all these reasons, I also feel love for Her growing inside of me, and I am filled with gratitude that she allows me to feel this.  And while I realise that a big part of our dialog has been within a context of kink, I realise that there are enough seeds of Her planted inside of me now that if we were to remove kink from our interactions, I would still continue to feel my submission to Her grow inside of me, and that is just because She is such a wonderful person…and I don’t need to be on my knees to see that.

What I can also see is that submission is a positive and recognisably loving act, and is one that is becoming freed in me, becoming easier to express…and I am beginning to relate to the world around me in a different way.  And so too the world is responding in a different way.  And I have to say that I rather like it.