Practical Dynamics & Meaningful Purpose

You know it’s my suspicion that a great many men desire a Female-Led Relationship (FLR) for the sake of kink and eroticism, but if they looked at my life closely they’d see little more of either than any ‘traditional vanilla’ couple. ‘Course we’re not in an FLR for those reasons (in so much as the label accurately applies to us), so perhaps it’s all apples and oranges.

I’ve made a joke out of complaining about exercising, about the exercising itself mind you not the fact that my wife has told me to do it everyday (and told me on multiple occasions including when she made my New Year’s resolutions for me). So I’ll call her up before, during or after exercising and say something like, “people who do this for fun are either insane or part of the conspiracy of aliens trying to take over the world.” She’ll laugh and say, “yes but you’re doing it anyway because it’s good for you and I don’t want a saggy flabby man who dies of a heart attack at 50.” And I’ll jokingly hem and haw, and finally say something like, “Aye Captain, obeying orders.” And she’ll say something like, “Good. And you should. I have good ideas and you need me to make sure you stay on track.” (Yes, I often call her ‘Captain’, but sometimes when she’s delegating she’ll call me ‘Captain’ too.)

Well there’s a kernel of truth here: I don’t particularly care for exercising all that much and probably wouldn’t be as diligent about exercise as I currently am without my wife’s expressed interest –she’s always been more health conscious than I. But on the other hand: I certainly don’t really NEED her to “take care of me”, I’d merely find some slightly less rigorous standard of maintenance and stick with it because **I** don’t want to be flabby, saggy and dead at 50 either. And neither is she forcing me in any to do that extra bit of exercising (up from my standard to her standard), I’m choosing it because I know it makes her happy, because doing so feeds the fiery self that she is and that I love so much.

You know, most of the things that she actually tells me to do (which admittedly often takes the grammatical form of asking but again it’s about an understood dynamic) probably boil down to she and I having slightly different standards on something. We’ve just agreed that when this happens that ‘we’ll compromise’ by my ‘obeying’ her (fiery, willful, want, desire for her own) standard instead of my own –instead of oh say, me **arguing** for my standard and both of us ending up unhappy. Though again admittedly my opinion, ideas, and feelings are heard first, and admittedly we’re both certain that if I felt strongly enough about something (also admittedly rare) that she’d bend to my standard simply because she wants me to be happy too.

Perhaps a lot of this is simply about getting and staying on the same page as it were. Perhaps our dynamic is ultimately just a way to maintain mental and emotional closeness throughout more aspects of our lives together than the closeness we’d manage without this dynamic. Perhaps it just gives me a reason to call her up in the middle of the day and talk for fifteen minutes about something so uninteresting and mundane as exercise.

There’s a thread on the She Makes the Rules forum titled “sexualizing the mundane” which at first blush again might highlight slightly different motives –kink/eroticism vs emotional intimacy– but honestly I think of people’s focus on kink/eroticism as their way (path/manner/symbols) for achieving emotional intimacy. The kernel of truth I see is that the meaningful and abstract (‘transcendent’ if you will) experiences of love and intimacy between two people that we may WANT in a relationship must still happen amidst a daily context of mundane, material, NEEDS. The integration of of these semi-dualistic aspects (mundane v transcendent, need v want, meaning v. drudgery, etc.)  probably happens differently from couple to couple, to varying degrees, incorporating different and varying aspects of their relationship, and of course with varying degrees of perceived satisfaction. But perhaps the process of working out the manner of that integration might be more directly labeled “making the mundane meaningful”. Or “making practical life a basis for meaningful relationship intimacy”. Or something along those lines, and to this extent perhaps ‘kink’ and ‘vanilla’ isn’t all so “apples and oranges” after all.

Um, let’s see, my wife told me on Thursday evening (and reminded me Friday morning) to clean out the fridge and make a preliminary shopping list as she was doing the shopping Saturday morning. I used to do the shopping during the week because I wanted to spend more time with her on the weekend and not have her run errands after working all week, but she usually does it now –because she’s more naturally more health conscious, she enjoys making health choices more than I do, and she likes having her standard met more than I care about not having mine met. So when she tells me what to do to help her get dome what she likes doing I of course say, “Aye Captain” and just do it. But we still discussed the myriad grocery choices, ideas and planning for the week before the final list was made this morning and our conversation was probably indecipherable from any other couple’s conversation about such a thing.

Aaaand just now she stopped back in after hitting two stores and I can see that she changed the bread I’ve been using in my diet regimen. I might have made up my diet regimen, but just now she –without asking, without consulting– changed the bread I eat. Because she decided her choice was more healthy than mine. Aaaand she only told me to try it, and after I expressed my sincere concern that I mightn’t like it she said ‘then we’ll freeze the rest, I’ll eat it eventually and you can go back to your less healthy bread’. I tasted it and true to form I don’t think it’s as tasty as my bread, but I also think it’s tasty enough to eat instead of the bread I choose –because it’s not something (i.e. as a standard) that I care enough about to change. Especially when her choice means so much to her, when her choice has such clear reasonable benefits, and when I enjoy participating in her fiery, willful existence so intimately.

So how different is this from and vanilla couple’s dynamic? Possibly not so much at all. But it’s what works for us. I figure some people find more kinky dynamics to be easier for expressing their emotions and intimacy, some don’t, and some are in the grey area in between the spectrum’s poles. For functional relationship intimacy in the “making mundane meaningful” area, whatever works –well, works. And I think that’s the point.

Uxorious, Female Led, Other

All animals are equal – but some animals are more equal than others.
~George Orwell, Animal Farm 

I have somewhat discussed before how ‘uxorious’ is different than ‘submissive’ (on basis of ‘passion’ versus ‘power’ and on basis of ‘my disempowerment’ versus ‘her empowerment’), yet neither word seems to quite be adequate or accurate to my experience and even ‘female led’ in many ways doesn’t seem to be a very accurate symbol for our relationship. Now over the past few days I have been having an unprecedentedly wonderful conversation with my wife about a great deal many things I discuss here – mostly on the themes of differing interests and differing love symbols in our relationship and love symbol negotiation.

On one level it’s unprecedented because my wife is a very holistic, compact and immediately experiential person, that is to say not even remotely close to as unendingly reflective, introspective, philosophic and differential as I am (see compact and differentiated). She likes enjoying her relationship rather than constantly talking about it and reflecting on it – she certainly is not interested in a forum on relationships (such as She Makes the Rules) or anything else (books, CDs, other websites) about relationships of any kind, and even regarding my own blog, she perfers I engage her in (the ‘higher’ experience) of artful conversation about anything important to our relationship rather than (the ‘lower’ experience of) simply reading my opinionated monologues. (Though I honestly do not think experiencing enjoyment and reflective communication are necessarily mutually exclusive, I know there are downsides to my point of view, and since her viewpoint well suits her I naturally respect her wishes as a matter of general course.)

But on another level it’s unprecedented: Whenever I have broached the subject of a ‘female led’ relationship, she has from the very beginning maintained a fairly skeptical or even negative attitude since she prefers the way experience works things out rather than resorting to any sort of systematic set of ideological rules. And, even though I have often thought the female led symbol and dynamic could work well for me, I also know how I would need to be selective and limiting in its application and so I often hesitate to use it for us. And hesitation is not only where we agree, for my wife also admits of her dominant personality, of my deferring personality and that she does like me the uxorious, doting, and ‘foolishly fond of’ her way I am. But she appreciates that my deference is aimed at her and her happiness rather than merely at an (eroticized) power differential, or even at just the (eroticized) power dynamic, and ‘uxorious’ does not differentiate well enough between power (possibly tending as far as ‘obsequious sycophancy’) and emotion (say, the happiness ‘doting’ is ‘foolishly’ aimed at).

And so the surprising part to me is that we also agree about the lack of available accurate and adequate symbols and the cause of this lack. The labels and phrases generally used (especially on the internet) such as “female led”, “wife led”, “submissive,” “dominant”, “topping from the bottom” etc. all have the feel and indication of an inequity of personhood; they focus on gender and the relative position of power within the relationship – or the (agreed upon) restriction or enlargement of ability to directly exercise power within their relationship. (Not that I think there’s anything necessarily wrong with those who do kink on power. And as a side note: the freewill option of kinking on power is different than Orwell’s piggish cooption of power. )

My wife and I feel it’s a more holistic (and possibly a more romantic) perspective to view a relationship, regardless of the ‘dynamic’, as an emotionally functional single unit. A unit comprised of two individual parts, granted – but on the basis of emotional functionality neither is whole without the other and the two people are as equal when together (one ‘half’) as when apart (one ‘half’). Thus we want relationship symbols that are focused on this ‘equality of emotional functionality’ rather than the ‘unequal distribution of power’, and want labels and phrases without any feeling or connotation of inequity of personhood.

Even though we’re left wondering the answer to something like, as ‘submissive’ is to ‘dominant’ and female led, ‘doting’ is to _____ and _____, I do think we surely still have, and will continue to have, a relationship dynamic others are going to label ’female led’. And if in many instances the differences won’t even be worth noting or significant enough to point out – I’m also sure these are labels and phrases we just won’t be using ourselves. And lest this brouhaha over labels seem either overly exacting or too intensely important, I attach here my very first post for some fascinating perspective; perhaps like everyone, I not only want the relationship I want but also the symbols I want to represent it with.

 

Why Female Led?
December 2, 2009

They call it a female led relationship, or wife led marriage, or who knows what by someone else – I’ve seen enough terms, phrases and acronyms to realize there is no hard and fast codification. Sometimes when I think about all this, I just end up wondering why all the descriptive baggage. Let’s face it, it’s only called female (or wife or woman, or whatever) for the contrast with traditional ‘male led relationships’, or ‘husband led marriage’. Yet making either distinguishment, male or female, has always seemed unwieldy to me, perhaps because when it comes to what I want to do in my personal relationship I just don’t really care so much what is or isn’t ‘traditional’ by the majority or what even what the rest of the minority might be doing. I just want what I want. 

And as far as names go, I want to believe this defies perfect codification precisely because there are more shades, tones and variables within what people want for their personal relationships than can be accounted for in the base ideology and gendered stereotypes that lie behind such a woefully inadequate grouping of words. That is rather than simply believe it’s because so few people have ever heard ‘female led’ differentiated from the leather clad dominatrix before. Perhaps I’m really bothered by how lackluster ‘history’ and ‘tradition’ seem as excuses for the false dichotomies used to represent human experience.

And of course on the other hand, sometimes a label is just a label, just a temporary net designed to catch just enough meaning and haul it across the void between persons and sometimes what we receive isn’t quite what was sent. After all, although it is something slightly different for me, when I start describing what I want with the one I love, I still start with this thing, this concept, however it is people name it.

Friend, Lover, Other

I was recently musing on the only opportunity I’ve ever had to make a lover out of a friend, back in high school’s dark ages, a girl who to this day I somewhat regret never having the experience of dating. Only ‘somewhat regret’ because certainly I don’t want to be anywhere other than where I am now – with who I am with now, but I liked this girl in high school, had fun with her and – and I always dated someone else.

It is commonly said one should marry their best friend, and I have alluded to this motif in thinking about the intimacy of symbols between two people in a relationship. Of course, there’s then also the ‘falling in love’ trope and the ever present theme of ‘love at first sight’. Yet I think all these guidelines exist to help assure people of some long term intimacy, viability and love symbol compatibility. And while on one hand it’s perhaps easy for me to make a straw man of the ‘marry your best friend’ idea because my wife is only my best friend now (we did not start this way) and I think we turned out wonderfully, on the other hand, neither was it love at first sight for us or any other ‘traditional’ version of ‘falling in love’.

So I wonder if what ‘guideline’ (did) work for me (and why) and what ‘guidelines’ didn’t work for me (and why) might somehow be indicative of the nature of my love, my relationship (and) or of human love in general.

For instance I know now several lesser reasons why I never dated my friend in high school: we were neither very popular and, high school dating often being about status than ‘romantic feeling’, I usually opted to try dating a more popular girl. I felt guilty and shallow about it even then, but even now, when I am constantly trying to be a better person than I am, I don’t think I would have well handled the opprobrium back then of two unpopular teenagers dating each other; children can be cruel.

Another easy reason was that I think I had difficulty (as perhaps nearly all teenagers do but also as often even adults do) separating friendship’s fun from romance’s love from lust’s simplicity, differences that then seemed very important (this was before the category of ‘friends with benefits’). But in retrospect I realize I really just had a friend who happened to be a girl; none of the available standard compatibility guidelines were functional enough (as love symbols) to say ‘I’m in love with her‘.

And this leads me back to my wife because neither did any established guideline work for me with my wife either. Fact is, when I think about it, the biggest reason I don’t really regret never dating my old high school friend is that she and I never had the fitted-ness of the numinous relationship experience that my wife and I had from very early on in our relationship. But of course, this isn’t an ‘established‘ compatibility guideline or love symbol: 

[W]hen I feel perfectly at peace with my wife, perfectly one with my wife, when I feel I was born to love her (c.f. Love’s Fate, Love’s Destiny), when I feel I am 100% there for the purpose of participating in her happiness process. And, well, I want that frame of mind for me, for my sake. It is a beautiful passionate moment, it is like getting to safely stand on the sun, it’s a powerful and numinous thing, and I want to feel this way all the time – because it’s when I most feel as if I am fulfilling my purpose in life, doing what I am supposed to be doing here on earth, learning the thing I am supposed learn here on this earth.
~OH, An Uxorious Frame of Mind

However, as sure as I am of this love symbol as a guideline for me, since it’s absent for the majority of other people I’m lost as to any significance for ‘human love in general’.

Emotional Experiential Existence

[Language and myth] are both resolutions of an inner tension, the representation of subjective impulses and excitations in definite objective forms and figures.
~ Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, p88

 As I have few other books, I have much enjoyed Cassirer’s essay in the context of my reflections on interior experience and intimate relationships (see also here and here). Having finished it, I think the above quote is a safe summation of his point, however since from the first pages I saw a correlation of his ‘primitive mythic image’ with my numinous relationship experience, and now at the end I am left with some interesting correlative conclusions.

First, if the numinous (female led) relationship experience and the nature of language itself share an essential manner of expression, it seems no wonder I use the latter to express the former, i.e. use and unending stream of writing to better understand what is so powerfully meaningful about my intimate relationship with my wife. In fact, I have always turned to writing (whether a journal or creative) to ease my tensions, and especially tensions about my interior experience and intimate relationships.

Also, like language and myth, I think my writing about my numinous relationship experience works so well (for me) because both are reflections and expressions (ah yes, even art in the case of stories and poetry) of my interior emotional experience. This (for me) goes back to my assessment that (individual, emotional, interior) passion and (relational, emotional, exterior) empathy is at the root of the female led impulse and the female led ‘love-symbol’. Even in passion from puzzle pieces (or meaning from puzzle pieces), the idea is to find exterior expression of an interior emotional experience.

Lastly, that all of this – this very journalistic excursion (and why I create so many self referential links and pingbacks), my (seeming excessive – ) philosophic analysis and constant (occasionally needless - ) differentiation, the female impulse itself – all of this (and indeed much of life) is an attempt to make sense of, to make meaning of (also here), to adequately understand, an emotional experiential existence.

[T]he mind […] uses [both words and mythic images] as sensuous forms of its own, and thereby recognizes them for what they really are: forms of [the mind's] own self-realization.
~ Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, p99

Bright Line

Back when I did enjoy porn (I don’t anymore) I liked it so much I wished I had special glasses to view naked women nonstop. Similarly I now would love to constantly dwell in the numinous relationship experience, but as recently noted “excitement abates” and I rather think this is true whether or not the desire is fulfilled. What is numinous is just so partly for its specialty; I think a constant numinous experience would cease to be numinous. (This is for many people what is also the essential problem with porn in a relationship: what they want to be sacred becomes profane.) The sacred is by definition a rare experience; the profane is by definition a common experience.

I also think my (greedy? selfish?) desire to have everything in my life motivated by something I really like (here too), the numinous relationship experience in this instance, is near the heart of my interior darkness - trying (even if unconsciously) to foist that stand up motivation off on my wife through the carrot of the numinous relationship experience within the female led relationship dynamic. I think this is not only wrong because it would ultimately lead to an untenable relationship with my wife (being detrimental to both intimacy and trust), but also wrong because I would not have been finding my own self-motivation, my own internal bravery and heroism, would not have been standing tall on my own two (interior) feet, for my own self. And too, I rather believe this is part of (my own) life lesson number one: being myself, my own self.

And so, where’s the line? Because doing what she wants, helping her to her happiness in any way I can, is also part of who I am.

I think this line (for me, right now) needs to be (lest I fall into either error) that my motivation for female led be clearly based on love, pleasure and eros, but only as a ‘second layer’ added on to the relationship after (and not mixed with) my self motivated responsibility (to my self) is adequately met. One limit of female led I think (at least for me) is that it cannot be a substitute for standing tall on your own, or be a tool to get your partner to stand tall for you.

Female led is for those already standing (and I’ll save the ‘tall’ part for qualitative ‘heroic standing’) – perhaps the bright line is to ask myself (before I act, endeavor or encourage life lesson two): am I already standing on my own two (interior) feet?