Truths
I’m a submissive.
I will never forget the first time that sentence popped into my head. It was light and clear and true. It was fact. There was a peace in that sentence, as if some part of me had just fallen into place. As if I just unlocked a secret room inside myself. But then came the next sentence.
My marriage is over.
And that, too, felt like an unavoidable fact. I tried to brush it off. I tried to shove it in a box and lock it and throw it to the depths of the ocean. I tried to replace it with a new sentence—a hopeful one.
I have to tell my husband.
And I did. I did tell him. But that word submissive didn’t carry the same weight for him as it did for me. It didn’t feel like a new world to discover. It didn’t feel like getting to know each other all over again. It didn’t feel like intimacy. I don’t know what it meant to him, but I know it wasn’t that. And I thought, I just need to be brave. I need to keep telling him. And when it scares me, that’s when I most need to speak up. I need him to know everything that I am. Because if he doesn’t, then I know we are doomed.
I can’t do this anymore.
The first time I said these words was to our therapist, not to him. I had a one-on-one with her, and those were the first words out of my mouth when I sat down in her office. We’d spent more than a month, with me trying to explain to my husband why D/s couldn’t work with us and why I was unwilling to try again. But he believed in our marriage. He believed in it more than anything. And I really, really loved him for that.
But part of me was dying with him. It felt like starving myself so he could eat. But in the end, he was eating spoiled food, and it made us both sick. I drank a lot. I didn’t refuse him sex, but I looked for the quickest path to his orgasm. There was no connection in it for me. Then I started breaking out in hives when he touched me.
So that day when the therapist said asked what I’ve been wanting to say, those were the words that came out. And saying them felt like destruction and relief at the same time. It felt like giving birth, except I wasn’t sure what joy I would have on the other end of it. The thing is, I wanted to love him forever. I genuinely believed I would. And I tried. I tried to cut off that part of myself that didn’t fit, but it didn’t work. Those words always came back to me.
I’m a submissive.
My marriage is over.
It took nearly three years for me to accept the second part. But once I saw the truth of the first part, I couldn’t unsee it. And in my bones, I knew this was a journey he couldn’t take with me.
For years, even after we separated, I wished I could stop being a submissive. I told myself it was stupid. I told myself it was only one part of who I am, and he didn’t have to love all my parts. He loved enough of me, didn’t he? But this part was different. This wasn’t my love of college basketball. This was the part about how I need to be loved. And he couldn’t love me that way. He tried. He wanted to. But it was like asking him to see colors that his eyes weren’t made to see. And sometimes that’s all there is.
That first life-changing realization feels so far away now. Now I sit in a house I share with a man who loves me. I wear his collar around my neck and another locked onto my ankle. Every time he traces them with a fingertip, I know they mean exactly as much to him as they do to me. He sees beauty in the things I used to feel depraved for wanting. He looks at me and really sees me—not who he wants me to be, but me. I don’t have to be anything for him. I don’t have to cut off any parts of myself.
I’m a submissive.
I deserve to be known and seen and loved.
And today, I am.
