A Moment on Trust

Trust is defined as reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence, or the confident expectation of something; hope. This one word, something so simple by definition has been the ending point of so many of my past relationships, both vanilla and not. It has been enough of a problem that I doubted my ability to truly trust anyone again. Call me jaded or pessimistic if you like, but I wasn’t in a position where I trusted anyone with my emotions. I was doing your very classic broken heart thing of holing up and not letting anyone in. This behavior came about because of two of my recent relationships that ended in very messy ways. The first ended in December of 2008 the first time, she decided to leave me for some guy she met at work. It was difficult because this was a good BDSM style relationship, or so I thought. It was apparently in the end one sided, as she was unsure about what she wanted out of said relationship. So while she held parts of herself back I was giving everything I could. The story continues with the person I met a bit after that breakup. She was the type of girl that would tell you anything you wanted to hear. She swore she would never do that to me. Foolish me I listened, and the moment I was out of sight for a little while she was off with someone else. So I had pretty much stopped believing that people say what they mean or that anyone was honest and upfront. I will say this right now, it is not a good way to be, because when you start thinking that no one is honest with you or straight forward in relationships you stop being that way yourself. When things were going poorly between those relationships and while they were ending I can say that I wasn’t very honest with those two women. Not because I was trying to hurt them but because turn about was fair play. Being intelligent and observant I knew most of what they were doing before they ever actually spilled the information to me. In fact both times it was my prompting that finally got them to admit they were cheating in the first place. I never once took things as far as they had, but I stopped being as faithful to them. I allowed people to flirt more and in general pushed the line of acceptability inside of a relationship. Back to the topic at hand, trust.

Trust is something that is essential in a BDSM relationship. It permeates ever part of the relationship between a dominant and submissive. You must trust that your partner will voice their limits, that they know what they are doing, that they are honest about their past partners and activities, and finally that your partner will respect your limits and you as a person. Because the trust between a dominant and submissive is so essential it must extend to all aspects of your relationship. The second you lose any amount of trust in your partner the relationship will begin to crumble. Believe me when I tell you once you have lost some of the trust it is almost impossible to get it back. You see that is the problem, in order for many people to express their deepest darkest secrets they need to trust the person they are telling to not judge them. I know very few people that will tell someone the truth if they know that doing so will cause them to lose something they hold dear to themselves. Worse still is that once someone’s trust has been broken enough they stop trusting anyone. It usually takes an extraordinary person to restore ones trust in others. I have both broken trust and had mine broken. My hope at this point is that my transgressions have been balanced out by what has been done to me and that I can start again.

It is my intent to start things with Kai with a clean slate. I have no reason not to trust her no matter what has been done to me in the past. She has shown herself to be a trustworthy person in our interactions as friends and this person is the same one that I am with now. Just because we have entered into a different type of relationship doesn’t mean that the people we are changed. I can already tell you it has been hard to keep the slate clean. Not because I don’t want to trust Kai, but rather because I am afraid of being hurt again. You see I am of the opinion that the deeper you love the more you hurt. In saying that I must also say that I love very deeply and when things happen they tend to hurt. When that first relationship ended I was a zombie for couple of days. I just did what I needed to do and nothing else; really I don’t remember much of those days. The second one hurt a little less because I was expecting it to happen and prepared some. But everything that happens leaves scars and changes you. It is my hope that I have been changed for the better and not for the worse.