Achromatic

The Decomposition of an Abusive BDSM Relationship

Content warning: domestic abuse

“Why would someone like me be standing next to someone who looks like her? Everyone can tell what we do when we walk down the street when they look at us.”

“Talk about that idea, what do you mean by that?” asks our couples therapist.

“Because of how she looks, we don’t look right together. People can tell she’s holding something over me, it’s emasculating.”

I sit on the couch next to him and feel our therapist’s eyes burning in to my face. I am picking my nails and blinking hard to keep them from watering. I know what he means.

I am not the girls in his office he stares at, with long blonde curls and slim noses, the ones that drape themselves over his finance bro friends when they grab beers after work. I am a mop of long frizzy dark hair that never lays right, an insistence on dressing like a parrot when other girls are wearing pale sundresses. I have a big nose, a loud laugh, a shit-eating grin and a heart like too ripe fruit. It isn’t the image of who he thinks stands next to him, who he is supposed to grow up to be.

I finally get the courage to look up at our therapist’s face and I see him trying to hold his gaze stick-straight without emoting. He looks in to my eyes, and then looks at the door. I know what he means.

“If the relationship was more balanced in terms of decision making, what would that look like?”

It was a question that our therapist posed to us, and I didn’t know what he meant. Ours was supposed to be a “Total Power Exchange Relationship,” or at least that was what we had agreed to when we both realized that we had the same interests in a full time dominant and submissive kink dynamic. This meant that our BDSM roles would in the background of our dating life as boyfriend and girlfriend full-time and manifest themselves in a protocol around how we would interact and divide tasks in our home.

Could our therapist tell that it had become a Total Power Hoarding Relationship? Was that why he asked that unbearably confusing question?

I lay in bed and stare at the ceiling of our bedroom watching the beams of light crawl across it, wishing I could just disappear with them as they slid down the wall. I don’t want to think about his stupid questions anymore.

“In the midst of all the indignities of my life, all of my self-inflicted pain, the one thing that gives me solace is your love.”

I always thought it strange that my boyfriend’s love notes to me were always typed, pasted in to cards or cut in to little uneven squares where he had printed it small and then trimmed away the excess. It was as if he was afraid to take up too much of any page, as if even his expressions of his love must too be disciplined and measured, small enough to tuck out of sight.

I had worked so hard to find someone who would accept me as I am, to be willing to be in a BDSM relationship with me and still want to be with me long term, who would (when he permitted himself to) submit to me in the way that I had long dreamed of as a girl.

When I put on his collar in the evenings after work he would kneel in front of me, hold me around the middle and press his face in to my stomach while I fastened the buckle. It was a moment of closeness and silence that I too often held on to for comfort as the moments around it rotted my sense of self from the inside.

We had made a home together, and now maybe if I could just be quieter, if I could piss him off less, maybe he would want to ever get married to me.

“When I let my heart soften, I think about how lucky I am to have found a girl like you.”

Maybe if I were better he would stop being so angry whenever I asked for time, asked him to eat dinner with me at home, asked him to meet my friends. Maybe he would let me choose sometimes when he would wear his collar, when he would serve me in the way that I thought both of us found so fulfilling when we agreed to commit this way to one another as dominant and submissive.

Maybe if I were less infuriating, he would stop hurling the objects at me whenever we fought, he would stop trying to show me with every plate or glass that whizzed past my head that he was missing on purpose, stop trying to show me how badly he wanted to hit me, would stop screaming at me that I would love it if he hit me because then I could take everything from him, I would be that kind of bitch that would do that, would be the kind of woman who would try to marry him just to take everything he had away.

I shrank myself to give him more space to hurl his insults, his insecurities, his fury at his own life. The space for his rage it seems was never big enough, even in this uncharacteristically huge apartment.

The dynamics of power within a D/s relationship between a female dominant and male submissive aren’t in any way a vaccine against the balance of power tipping quickly, disastrously in to the grip of either partner. In my case it became about trying to hold his attention, his love, at the end of my fraying leash. He became preoccupied, obsessed with the idea that strangers could tell our relationship had this dimension, embarrassed, ashamed of himself, ashamed of his desires, ashamed of me.

“Despite my failures, I find myself so fortunate to be loved.”

Now there were no more love notes, no more cards and typed squares and self-deprecating declarations of gratitude for my love, no more evidence that could be found and held against him. There were only the deprecations of me that were so constant and assured that on the nights he would come home at all, I hid myself in our bedroom while he watched tv in the livingroom, waiting for him to fall asleep.

On the worst nights of all I would wake to him pressing his erection in to my side, prodding me awake with a continuous string of guilting aggravation and sexual aggression, how I was depriving and ignoring him and why wouldn’t I just give him what he wanted without having to be in control all the time. He would grab my arms and wrists an insistent tussle over my refusal that would always end with me gathering the courage to wrench away and back cautiously off the bed. I would lock myself in the bathroom until I could hear the bedroom door close again.

I squeeze my eyes tight and flatten myself in to the bed, thinking maybe if I just tried hard enough I could be less of myself, turn my bright and feathered personality in to something acceptably monochromatic, translucent enough that he wouldn’t notice we were still together. Then we could be happy, right?

I can’t start all this over again, I can’t try to find someone who would accept my identity as a domme again, who would let me express that love again, who would wear my collar again, who would think I was anything close to girlfriend material, and certainly never marriage material. That doesn’t happen for girls like me, that only happens to normal girls.

I can’t bear to be this self by myself again. So maybe I have to be nothing.

“You look sad, are you okay?”

I look up from my drink, realizing I had been tipping the melting ice around and staring in to it for about ten minutes inside this crowded bar. A man I do not know looks down through his thick black lashes at me, his handsome face knitted with concern.

“Sorry what did you say?” I ask.

“You look sad. I just thought I’d come over and see how you were.”

“Oh thanks, just having trouble shaking off my week, you know? Out trying to get my mind off it but it’s not working.”

“I understand. Well if it would make you feel better, we could go back to my apartment and have sex?” I look up at him again and he shrugs, “You might feel better.”

I study his face. Normally I would consider this entire interaction impossibly rude, but there was something in his tone that felt… sincere. Horny but earnest, is that a disposition?

I replied, “No… thank you, but um… thank you for offering?”

“Okay,” he shrugged with a soft smile, “I’ll be here, so just let me know. You’re beautiful. I hope you feel better.” And then he turned on his heels and pushed back in to the crowd.

It is this moment, and it is barely a moment, that I will think about when I text my boyfriend and tell him to come home. It is this minute-long interaction that will like a razorblade cut through the tangled knots of my self-doubt. It will confirm to me for just long enough that I am not dead yet, not invisible, that someone might find me tolerable, even attractive again. “Even lovable?” asks a small voice in the back of my head. Maybe.

“If the relationship was more balanced in terms of decision making, what would that look like?” It is the moment my black and white, translucent figure filled out again with color, like a brush full of watercolor dipped in to clear water.

I spiral out and fill up my container.

“You ground me down and treated me like I was disposable. I let it eat away at me, I thought maybe this is my life now, this is what I deserve.” I sit on the couch firing off my words at him as fast as I can get them out. He paces around the room huffing in his building fury. I know I have to hurry before the storm begins.

“I’m making a choice for the first time in a long time, instead of letting my pain keep me feeling subservient and guilty,” I spit at him, “That’s not how this relationship works, how what was between us was ever supposed to work.” He stops pacing and glares at me.

“This is me, this is who and what I am,” I am nearly shouting now, “If you thought I would someday morph in to whatever fantasy domme you had in your head, then I welcome you to go find whoever that woman is. When you do find her, tell her I said good fucking luck because you’ll be her problem now. I’m done with you.”

I did it. I actually just did it. How did I do that? His mouth hangs open.

He stares at me for the longest time, and then finally shakes his head and sits next to me on the couch. “I guess I fantasized about a version of you that hadn’t happened, and I forgot to see you as a whole person.” He seems suddenly so small. His hand twitches as if to reach for comfort, and I pull mine away in to the safety of my lap. “And now I lose all of you,” he finishes, staring at the floor.

“You never had all of me, you never wanted it.” I stand and as I walk away, I realize it is the first time I have been brave enough to turn my back to him in nearly three years.

I sit on the bed that is not mine, staring out the curtains that are not mine on to the street that is not mine. This sublet room is a kindness from a kind friend, a place that is temporary but safe. No objects, no harsh words fly at me here.

I unzip my bag and begin to pull out my clothes and pile them in to the drawers that are not mine, but have been emptied for me. My hand reaches in and wraps around a piece of leather that I don’t recognize. I pull it out and inspect it carefully. It seems too short, like a small belt with a ragged end. I turn it over and then seeing the worn side, feel a chill of recognition climb up my back.

He did not, how could he?

I fish around in the bag again and come up with the other half of the object, a larger piece of leather connected to a ring, decorated with rivets holding on a metal plate. “Property of Miss” the plate reads.

He cut his collar, the gift and representation of our commitment, our love, in half and then snuck it in to my bag when I packed to move out. It’s an insult added to my injury that stabs a white hot knife in to my insides.

I permit myself to cry for a minute at most, and then drop the pieces of the collar in to the kitchen trash.

Back in my temporary bed in my temporary bedroom, I pull the heavy duvet to my chin and take in what feels like my first full breath in years. Sleep comes easily. I dream in color.