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.

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