De Facto Difference

de facto:
adv.
In reality or fact; actually.
adj.
1. Actual: de facto segregation.
2. Exercising power or serving a function without being legally or officially established: a de facto government; a de facto nuclear storage facility.

Two actions can look quite alike but have diametrically opposite intentions. Fictional plots are full of this sort of thing: the person who tries to save another person ends up on trial for murder because it looks like they killed them, the one in love with another is treated as an archenemy because of the communicational disconnect between meaning and intentions. How often have we heard

I assure you we have no intention of (this thing); we only intended to do this (other completely opposite thing) – which only just happens to look exactly like we intended (this thing).

and feel as if forced to choose between naive (guarded, hesitant) trust of intentions and being taken for a gullible chump, mark and sucker. Things aren’t always what they seem, people’s intentions aren’t always clear and our conscious interior choices can look from the exterior like other things – even things that as a matter of character we would not consciously choose.

Does my wife want a “female led relationship” or does she just want to have what she wants?

Do I want to “submit to her” or do I want to intimately experience and participate in her desire and passion?

Are these at some level the same thing – just different?

Sometimes the point of having such a plot of contraries is to show how different sides are still part of one coin, opposites as aspect and facets of each other and so the author reveals the essential similarities in character, situations, actions and even intentions of the opposite — to love is sometimes to hate, to be an ally is sometimes to be an enemy, and vice versa, etc.

We don’t practice “orgasm management” or “orgasm denial” or “male chastity”. Yet since porn and other women are out and we’ve decided (whether I’m merely deciding to do somethings her way or not) that we’re going to only have sexual experiences that edify our intimacy together, since she doesn’t choose such physical intimacy as often as I would choose it  –and I certainly wouldn’t press such an issue regardless if her reasons are health reasons, that she’s tired, or irritated with me or anything else–, our conscious choices and intentions have amounted to the de facto practice of ”management”, “denial” and “chastity”.

But there won’t be any locks on body parts or ticking clocks on blog sidebars because our attentions, as our intentions, are focused on increasing and maintaining passion and intimacy, not on (near as I can tell) the length and duration of the exercise of force or coercion. It’s not that I think people who practice ”orgasm management”, “orgasm denial” and “male chastity” do not focus on increasing and maintaining passion and intimacy, it’s that I think we do it differently – and that difference isn’t always bad.

Hoarding My Thoughts

I’ve never learned very much psychology because it never had much experiential explanatory power for me, but I just had a curious thought:

My mother was a hoarder, a behavior I and the rest of my family had lived and put up with all our lives, everyone knowing it was because she was unhappy on some level. When anyone would try to unbury some of the landslide the response was always along the lines of “I’m going to do something with that some day” even to the extent of “Yes, I’m going to read that thirteen year old newspaper someday.” The mundane things she had collected had clearly taken on meaning and significance for her beyond their usefulness.

Of course, after moving out of such an environment I have ever since been a spartan individual – surely a psychological reaction of some sort. And even now, though we do have our children’s bits in places we’d rather they weren’t, our house is wonderfully junk-free. But, what I do have squirreled away in many places are notebooks, scraps of paper and even voice recordings (almost my new favorite!) all with thoughts and ideas for fiction, philosophy even correspondence that I’m “someday” going to expand on.

Fortunately, for the most part ideas take up so much less physical space than things. But I wonder is there a connection between my mother’s hoarding things and my ‘hoarding’ of thoughts and ideas? Well, yes and no I think. No because I believe my mother held onto things as a way to cope with regret and the lost opportunities of her past that she blamed for her current unhappiness, and while I obviously also have a few issues with regrets, as far as all those idea filled bits I know I’m ultimately looking for a way to get at the essence of the human experience (my human experience and other people’s human experience) and be able to adequately and accurately express it, represent it and communicate it to others, in the process making people,  myself included happier, better,  more fulfilled, more at peace –with one another and themselves.

As I’ve said before, I’ve got a bit of Christ complex in wanting to save the world, but really –in much the same way as I want for my wife– I just want everyone to be happy. And considering my mother’s unhappiness well, yes perhaps there is a connection, albeit of a slightly different sort to the parent child metaphor for the power dynamics of uxorious and female led relationships — for surely the cosmic Freud is somewhere waving his cigar at my continuing adult uxory as an attempt to make the mother of my childhood (finally) happy.

Fire: Passion & Choice

How does one, no matter the obstacles, maintain loyalty, maintain focus on the love in their relationship? It is no easy thing, but I think by the constant attunement to [read 'choice of']  love, by the constant orientation [read 'choice'] of the interior compass upon love… that a lover’s loyalty is maintained.
~ OH, The Maintenance of Loyalty

But my wife doesn’t think my desire … to love, dote upon and adore her, my willingness … to clean and launder to her standard -cook to her pleasure, … my excitement over obeying her every whim wish and desire in an all-effort to please her as best I can and make her happy because I love her – is any different than those who … are interested and excited by their particular hobby … I simply happen to have made a different choice.
~ OH, Passion, Love: Odd Choice

…but I do seriously love my wife … So I made a choice way down in the center of myself, a simple choice really if difficult to make …
~ OH, The Soul of Porn

I love her will to power…
~ OH, Erotic Truth

I believe passions are a direct link to our soul, they are part of the fire that makes us alive…
~ OH, Passion Positive

Having and doing are different. There are people who want to have good health, want to have knowledge of a different language, have a different job – and there are the people who want to lose weight, who want to learn a different language, who desire to find a different job. Choice without the ‘will to power’, without drive and passion, is a vague and apathetic decision not only likely to result in failure but in (continued) unhappiness.

Out of passion for my wife I’ve been motivated to do many things and to keep doing them. Keeping our relationship porn-free is probably the most easily citable example, but it has occurred to me that choosing to pursue happiness by my passion driven uxory is another such choice. In a way it’s not much of a choice to choose between seeking self-fulfillment and continuing to limp through life trying to avoid my own personality, but –considering the amount of fear, anxiety and self doubt that was involved– choosing to ‘follow passion come what may’ was not insignificant.

That interior place where we make such a decision, before inevitably act and follow through, when there’s only the inner choice to focus one’s self in a direction and the leaning of the will, where there’s only a suddenly congealed resolve on the cusp of action, I suspect this is the beginning point of alignment and attunement to self through one’s passion, that is the point of the interior compass and the link to our deepest self and soul.

And in this manner it occurs to me that my electric and erotic truth that recognizes her fire, her drive, her will to power and her passion – every moment I continue choosing to focus my interior on uxoriously loving my wife is another seeking out of her soul through the conduit of our passion, another meeting of souls through the lens of our passionate actions, another mating of our souls through our passionate, intimate interaction.

This is the essence of what I began been calling the “numinous relationship experience” elsewhere

…on the very event horizon of our consciousness, on the ‘rim’ where we occasionally perceive, intuit and experience the cosmos/universe above, beyond and past our five normative senses, things take on the sheen of the sacred, of the highly meaningful and significant…

… I regard my wife with the utmost esteem, love, respect and honor, and I do love her intensely and deeply – and in, around and amongst these (my experiences) there is something powerful and profound, something so significant and meaningful that it is in some ways and in some aspects numinous, sacred, worthy of recognition, reverence and deference.
~ OH, Adore: Sacred or Sacrilege

I don’t really understand very well how passion’s fire, choice, the experience of the sacred, meaning and significance are (inter)related, but I do know that though our passions need be hemmed and tempered by reason, in the “direction”  of these things lies the real power behind letting your passions lead and motivate you in life and love.

Experiential Focus: Kink v. Uxory

Just when I get to wondering if I’m only fooling myself and that really I must be kinky (obedience from past post) since I like doing what my wife wants and desires well enough to plan on it for the rest of our lives, I read someone’s assessment that at the root of all unequal power-sharing in intimate relationships is someone’s kink. Well. I wrote I really long point-by-point refutation of this comment and unlogic before I realized no one in their right mind was going to read it, including me. (I ended up shortening it to merely long.)

Really I was merely reminding myself that the great thing about my passion is that it isn’t only oriented on my own experience. It’s easy to see much kink and disempowerment in how **my action** is focused on me in my ‘obedience’ and ‘her power over me’ – but it’s much harder to see great love and joy behind how **my motivation** is focused on her beauty, fire, passion and ‘her will to power’.

This of course rolls right back around to sorts of uxory and functional relationship dynamics – from what I think is my most accurate post on the subject with the added suggested difference of experiential focus:

At first I thought there two kinds of ‘female led’ relationship but then I realized it was because I had picked only two variables and ignored the spectrum between them. (See here and 1, 2, 3 and also here.) However, my mental space seems to have grown fond of these usual love symbol suspects, often thinking of them in an abstract short hand manner:

submission is to force
~ (demanded, enforced, semi-sadomasochistic obedience & power dynamic
~ that by my action is focused on me)

as

uxory is to passion
~ (free chosen, optional, semi-traditional free will & love dynamic
~ that by my motivation is focused on her)

But of course despite my efforts to nail them down better, this large scale grouping of tendencies is only functionally accurate so long as they remain inadequate, amorphous abstractions – there’s a large dose of useless inapplicability here.

And of course, useless for one purpose is helpful for another – for in realizing there are so many options, combinations and points in a spectrum as only these two ideas alone afford (and also in reading a recent forum thread) has made me ever more certain that which set of symbols and which kind of dynamic a couple negotiates for use in their relationship is less important than whether those symbols are adequately emotionally functional for both of them.

‘Obey’ for Expect & Embrace

In this great thing of us,
our ever improvised
choreography,

I am sworn this day
to do all I may to love,
honor, adore you,

to cherish you dear,
dote without fear, to increase
your peace, your pleasure,

to follow your lead,
to listen, to heed, your joy,
your bliss, to treasure.

~  023 sworn, Octopus Heart

I wrote this as a relationship vow that didn’t include any sort of “promise” because I was against fixing the future, against closing the open possibilities of reality – and I’m still against it. But recently I wanted to come up with some more ‘traditional sounding’ vows (longer story) and when I looked some up online (this is why an internet full of immediate information is horrible), of course I (re)discovered “love, honor and obey” and said to myself “Ooo, I’m going to use that!” Well of course I’ve mentioned before that the “obedience model” relationship could work for me, but that it ultimately wouldn’t work for us.

Well, due to this thing and another (next post), it wasn’t long before I (re)realized (1) “obey” is not something she is about to embrace within our relationship, and (2) much as it might work for me, it wasn’t entirely an accurate symbol. Fact is, “obey” connotes “force” to me where for us there just really isn’t any pushing, shoving or any sort of dictatorial, tyrannical or otherwise authoritarian rule. And actually neither one of us want that.

Where I was applying the “obey” symbol was towards my hope and desire to see my wife truly expect me to do what she wants because she well understands that I am happiest fueling her wishes, wants and whims. (I’ve used ‘demand‘ for this elsewhere.) It has less to with her authority, rule or rules than it has to do with her desire and passion, less to do with “her power over me” than just with “her fiery will to power”.

I just want her in the fire of her will to (more) fully expect and embrace me in the fullness of my uxory. It’s not that I want her to “take advantage of me” (as in ‘disempowerment’), but rather I want to have us (as we both truly “are” individually and idiosyncratically) “fit together” more completely, wholly and intimately (as in ‘love and passion’).

I’ll probably continue using “obey” here and there because I think the symbol association has just sort of seeped into my consciousness now, but I know and understand what I really mean no matter the connotations. Just like I know the expectation and embracement I am eager to see between us is only a matter of time. Time and trust. Time, trust and communication. And patience –

And anyway we’re on the right track, going the right direction.