Noah
Posts: 1660
Joined: 7/5/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LuckyAlbatross I'm happy to let the flowers bloom. I just happen to think if you keep pouring water that has tons of bad chemicals in it, you're not going to end up with healthy flowers. There ARE things that are needed for all relationships to bloom and there ARE things that are caustic to all relationships. Perhaps this is the one case in 1000 will be the one that breaks the rules and the odds- but I doubt it. "The Rules" sigh. [note to the OP: those "rules" LA is (uncharacteristically) talking about get talked about a lot but good luck getting a look at where they are written down; if you do find a set written down, good luck restraining your laughter while reading them] LA, if you have data which show that any approach to punishment which varies significantly from yours is caustic in 999 out of 1000 cases, I'd love to see it. In someone else's relationship, punishment might indeed be the water, and it might inded be toxic. You're right about that. In another relationship punishment might be the sunlight. Or it might be the breeze, etc. Can't one plant's allelopath be another plant's alleleotrope, as it were? I mean any sort of interpersonal physical violence would be a deal-killer for scads and scads of non-kinky relationships. Should we generalize from that that any sort of hitting is caustic to relationships in general? I get the impression that you kind of see punishment as the pruner, or something. That's fine of course, for you. But for someone else it may a the fertilizer the plant is hungry for in large and frequent doses. Presuming that everyone--or everyone but some freakishly small percentage of the population--works just like you do in terms of something so potentially fraught with meaning strikes me as careless and potentially dangerous or unkind. I've never been in a relationship in which punishment was conceived of and applied in the ways you consistently describe it, LA, and I've had and continue to have lovely, important and meaningful power exchange relationships of various kinds for quite a while now. If even one such relationship is one in a thousand, then I guess I must be one in a million, or several thousand, anyway. I'm just not sure that I and all of my partners over the years have been quite that special. To the OP I'd like to point out that a certain slice of the submissive demographic seems to enjoy few things more than taking a newbie aside to tell her how awful and terrible and wicked and incompetent her dom is, how foolish she is to be with him, etc. About half of them do it blatantly. The rest typically employ the usual passive-aggressive bullshit tactics familiar, I'm sure, from elsewhere in your life. Everyone knows a few people like that, I think. Maybe they tend to have had bad early experience themselves and can't stand the idea that someone else might have better fortune. I just don't know. When you encounter someone who is willing to pass negative judgement on you, your dom or your relationship based on no more info than a brief internet post, please read them carefully. Consider that there may be some truth in what they say but notice what they are busy doing. Decide for yourself what you think of that kind of behavior. Consider the source before you put too much weight on their criticisms of you, your partner, and the way you two choose to lead your lives.
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