Saturday, May 12, 2012

We're on the road to nowhere

Today a lovely and very regular customer turned around... in the middle of chatting about makeup... and announced that she has just broken up with her partner of four years. The reason? Well it seems that she is too old to waste more time on a relationship that is going nowhere. Now, one could hardly quiz her on where it was supposed to go or where nowhere was exactly. Shame really 'cos one was utterly dying to...

The whole encounter left one with more questions than answers... as encounters with people often do.
Are relationships supposed to have a destination? Do they need one? Why is it so important that they do?

Honestly in all the relationships one has had, there has never been a destination... actually there usually has been the complete opposite.
Now, one is aware that the perceptions of this might be off never having wanted to have children, get married, or own things (and of course life being ironic one ended up as a step mother a couple of times, owned houses... actually got married once to a girlfriend... not legal then and far more cutting edge than it is now). But it seems almost like an extension of the enlightenment theory... onwards and ever upwards... on steroids.

Watching one of the girls at work enact her long term plans of matching cars, engagement, wedding, house (she would have preferred those two the other way around), child substitutes (some practise for him)... all of this with the second man after the last one let her down at the alter... and all of this achieved before 23... seems to bear this out. Phase two seems to include having children as soon as the mortgage is running smoothly. It is utterly exhausting to watch, so one can only imagine what it must be like to be the one actually doing it. Not to mention the pressure to succeed...

The same concepts seem to get applied to BDSM relationships as well. You start out as D/s which of course leads to M/s and then you might become one of the 24/7 crazy crowd. Not that people usually aspire to that last one. Most just wake up one morning to find themselves shunned by the mainstream BDSMers... if they are very lucky... and regarded with the same sense of uneasiness that people reserve for those that might be crazy J

At no stage to people seem to stop and just breathe and simply be.

But seriously, four years? It took four years to work out they weren't the person you hoped? What happened? Were there extensions of deadlines? Did they fail some periodic testing or just refuse to get with the programme?
Meh maybe one understands this whole thing even less that first thought L

4 comments:

Conina said...

I'm not sure what this means either, honestly. Four years is a long, long time.

agog said...

One of the best moments for me in BDSM was the moment when I realized my relationship was about what WE felt was right, not some ideal that was bashed into our heads by society (or the BDSM community...but that's a different comment...). Things have gone so much better since that sunk in.

Kitty the Submissive Wife said...

My rule used to be 6 months. Six months was plenty of time to know if I wanted to stay with someone longer and I always preferred single-dom to being in a relationship. The relationship had to be an improvement, you see.

Stuff is a pain in the ass - I appreciate you not wanting to travel that path. I fight to keep my life as clear of it as possible myself.

ancilla_ksst said...

I have no experience with that stuff. I just found one person I wanted to be with and that was it. I know I got lucky. We weren't going anywhere in particular for a long time, and then we got married. I was 21 at the time. Then we went a few places- Las Vegas and central Wisconsin to name a couple of them. Also had some kids as we went. Now we are here (M/s) and I'm not sure of the next destination. From here that would be up to him.