Active and Passive Pleasure

While my wife never does anything she doesn’t want to do, the soul of our relationship is not female domination. Yes, she has a dominant personality, but she is not dominating in any way reminiscent of 'femdom' and she certainly is not a ‘dominant’ or a ‘domme’.

She occasionally does things for me, or does something my way, simply because she loves me and she’s a great woman who wants me to be happy, who is happy to make me happy, who is happy even just to see that I’m happy. I rather think of her enjoyment in these instances as a ‘passive pleasure’. Of course most times she does what she wants, does things her way, her way born of her own interior desire, and her ‘active pleasure’.

Once upon a time my enjoyment of my active pleasure wasn’t particularly fazed by the status of my partner’s pleasure; not only was I was young and oblivious, but I probably never had a relationship long enough to notice my partner’s pleasure and enjoyment. Now I have a devil of a time enjoying my own active pleasure unless she is also enjoying her own active pleasure – if she is doing something for me that is only passively pleasing to her, it is difficult for me to actively enjoy it very much. Often I don’t ask her for things because I don’t want to impinge on her active pleasure, and usually if I do ask for something I ask only once in the most nonchalant manner I can muster.

On one hand I know some beauty in life comes from the making of choices and compromises, and to live everyone needs to make them. So if she chooses a passive pleasure well then, I try to let her do what she wants to and not try to make do something different and active simply to increase my passive pleasure. Yet on the other hand, with her dominant personality I often think she would be happier if she felt more free to choose active pleasures more often. Perhaps the real problem is that out of our desire to be individually happy we are both trying too hard to make the other one happy.

But perhaps that’s the real point too. Perhaps the motions of our relationship solar system are powered by the gravities of our desire, and in our love for each other our individual enjoyment can no longer be full without (or separated from) the other’s enjoyment, no matter whose pleasure is active and whose pleasure is passive. The center and soul of our relationship cannot be summed by any one word or phrase; it is a nexus between us, a matrix of our combined gravities, a complexity of love we can know only by its direction on our individual interior compass rose.