A (Female Led) Progression: Empathy and Sublimation

Occasionally I reread one or two of my past entries and in recently doing so I realized I had three separate and slightly different ideas about the progression of my interior in the choice to pursue a female led relationship. The curious thing about these ideas is that they developed separately (retrospectively) over the two years after deciding in favor of a female led relationship, each idea being the product of a separate and distinct line of thinking, but the essential commonalities of their progression is fascinating: empathy and sublimation. 

Empathy:
- Of her desire, passion (physical and otherwise), what she wants
- Of her feeling free, her freedom, her choices, her available options
- Of her (felt) ability to control her present and future
- Of her sense of duty (physical relationship and otherwise), the weight of  responsibility and obligation (the [moral] hampering of her freedom, choices and options)
- Of how the weight of duty, obligation, etc. above hampers her active happiness, pleasure, joy, contentment, etc.

Sublimation:
- In valuing her freedom (and etc.) over my freedom (and etc.),
- I experience her approval as my own success (?) and
- I experience her happiness as my own happiness (?) and
- in the successful result (or even pursuit) of her passion and desire (in happiness) I find accomplishment of purpose and
- (vicarious though the engendering experience may be) I experience this fulfillment of purpose as numinous (having existential meaning and significance) as any such fulfillment of purpose might be

I have been, am still somewhat am, concerned about this ‘sublimation point’ in all its manifestations wherever I come across it, that it may not successfully continue to endure the transfer of emotion into meaningful, accurate and adequate, (relationship love) symbols. However, it seems (as part of the functioning of our biologic meaning matrix) entirely reasonable to suppose when such sublimations break down, we naturally search for and find other expressions. I might, moreover, apparently and fortunately take comfort that “psychoanalysts often refer to sublimation as the only truly successful defense mechanism“.

The three ideas in original context follow.

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One idea I was developing was because I was ill at ease with my uxorious nature I was attempting to gain her approval of me by giving her control over the uxorious interaction in our relationship. A (somewhat revised) quote:

I gain her approval of my sexual feelings, urges, desires etc, which I might find otherwise unacceptable or at least uncomfortable, and I thus gain her validation.

By placing her desire before mine as a matter of priority and as a positive template (to follow), and so long as I comply (whether compliance is tacit or overt, whether under her direction and expectation or not) with it (or her), I get permission (even approval) to feel comfortable and accepted (i.e. to be physically intimate, act out my desire) with her. Thus by giving up authority over my own pleasure and gratification, I get and gain her approval of my desire and self. By giving up control (over physical intimacy), by giving up the authority of ‘acceptability’ to her, and by complying with her (tacit or overt) standards, I get to have ‘approved’ interactions – with her.

Regarding life choices, it is also the same: by giving up control over my life, I gain her approval of my otherwise ‘poor choices in’ life, and gain her approval of me.

Another line of thinking (and the only one I’d put a finishing polish on) dealt more with prioritizing her freedoms and passions over my freedoms and passions in order to optimize our happiness:

I want her to be actively happy chasing her desire and passions, since if she were actively happy we would then be happy together because I know I am happy just to participate in the process of pursuing her happiness together.

I often saw my wife valuing individual freedom (hers or mine) over relationship concession or compromise, and valuing the individual pursuit of desire and passion (hers or mine) more than any compromised joint pursuit of desire and passion. While I myself continued (in general) to value passion and desire over individual freedom (or perhaps to value passion and desire as the primary reason for valuing freedom), I think I eventually learned to generally value and prioritize her freedom and desire over my freedom and desire in most things, to sublimate some gratification of my individual desire to the gratification of her desire.

I wonder if neither of us want her to ‘lead me’ so much as to simply not have her individual freedom impinged upon by having our lives lived together, by having our desires living together, our passions alive together.

A third line of thinking dealing with empathy and the numinous relationship experience was incomplete at the time I realized the parallel structure of these ideas:

- Sensing (empathetically and through direct conversations) some guilt and dissatisfaction with physical intimacy in general
- leads me to attuning to her passion (away from guilt) and eventually to the
- vicarious experience of her (physical) passion and
- experiencing resultant fitting of purpose with prize as ‘meaning’ with a numinous quality attached to ‘serving’ and helping her passions and life lessons
- giving entire relationship numinous sense of service ‘meant-ness’, of fate and destiny.