Passion, Love: Odd Choice

…though the emperor of the world had been willing to honour me with the name of his spouse, I would rather have been called thy mistress than his wife and his empress.
~ Heloise d’Argenteuil in a letter to Peter Abelard

…my wife and I, individually and as a couple, don’t quite comfortably enjoy either the ’female led’ or ’uxorious’ label dynamic … And if I, she and we also do not use ’obedience’ or some plainly ‘kinky’ dynamic, clearly I (at least) neither feel quite entirely comfortable with the normative ‘vanilla’.
~ OH, Obedience, Intentions and Expectations

Exactly what is so odd about loving your wife?
~ My Wife

In a word: passion. To me passion just seems out of place in this postmodern age; but more so I think it’s the sheer similarity of potentially functional love symbols (say obedience or female led) for my interior experience of passion tend towards the distinctly non-vanilla. I still avoid labeling ‘our kind’ of relationship and dynamic, but frankly, after listening to my wife this evening phrases and variations such as ‘Vanilla Fire‘ have been coming to mind.

My wife thinks people only have such passion (as I) for their partner (after as long as we’ve been together) by intentionality, a constant everpresent choice in the face of what she called the ‘meat and potatoes’ practical and pragmatic aspects of living life together in a relationship. She believes it takes effort to think of one’s partner in the specificity of what is loved about their character and personality rather than ‘I hope s/he remembers to pick up the dry cleaning at lunch today’.

And then of course there are all the ways people entertain themselves by distracting themselves from each other even when they are together, movies, television, video games, even a couple who sit together but only to read their respective stacks of books  end up making a choice about how they will interactively think, and thus feel, about their partner.

But she doesn’t think my desire as her partner to love, dote upon and adore her, my willingness as her house husband to clean and launder to her standard -cook to her pleasure, my wife doesn’t think my excitement over obeying her every whim wish and desire in an all-effort to please her and make her happy because I love her – is any different than those who come home and are interested and excited by their particular hobby, be it television, books, movies, music, entertaining friends, their religion, their politics, etc. I simply happen to have made a different choice.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with her but obviously – she makes a lot of sense.