Shaping the bonsai

Photo by Ragesoss

It all started a week and a half ago.

I asked Wolfgang if he missed his sub, who rarely comes in anymore, because her husband discovered her affair. W refused to answer. As I expected. But my question also made him angry. Again, as I expected. And he can be harsh with his words when he's angry. So, I, too, became angry, so I didn't email him during my lunch or before going to bed, as I usually did.

The next day, he informed me that he agreed to meet an old SL friend who was celebrating her birthday and wanted to see him alone, during our usual scheduled time. He didn't ask me beforehand. He simply assumed I didn't want to log in, just because I didn't send email.

I emailed back that it was fine, and I went back to bed. When I woke up, there was an angry email accusing me of not wanting to see him, because I didn't send emails to confirm we would meet during our usual time and because I decided to just go to bed when he said he was meeting his friend. That accusation hit a nerve and I saw red.

I lose sleep to be with him. He is up there on my priority list, and I am even lower than his sub and his other SL friends on his priority list. How dare he accuse me that I didn't want to see him?


Since we met, I kept reminding him that I am neither submissive nor lesbian, and I had always talked about getting more balanced in our unbalanced relationship, which became more and more unbalanced. In the past year, our meetings had been mostly D/s or F-F or both. I'm afraid to ask for his male alt because I sense that he prefers to do something else. The last time I asked for his male alt a few weeks ago, he ignored it entirely and logged in a female alt anyway. But I did the D/s F-F for him because we became closer through those alts until a year ago, when he cut the time he spent with me. I continued the D/s F-F just to keep his interest. It was my sacrifice, but he thought I enjoyed those RPs. I suppose I was very good at RPing a submissive lesbian.

But, with the new job and not getting enough sleep, my cup became empty. It was not just empty; it was bone-dry. I cannot give if I have nothing to give. And my question was... "Is it worth losing sleep for a submissive lesbian RP?" If he saw me as just an RP buddy, why am I make this big a sacrifice?


We touched a lot of points in the past week and a half. Old issues. New issues. New questions. New ways of seeing things. We agreed on very few things. We disagreed on many things.

Yesterday, we defined what RP is. To him, everything, except the OOC chats, is RP. To me, the usual emotes between lovers is not RP, except when his character is female, which becomes "light RP," because he's not really female and I'm not really a lesbian.

In the end, we decided to continue meeting with his male alt (the only male among the four he uses with me) and the only one of mine who has never been collared (among the four I dedicated to him). And we'll see how it goes. From his perspective, our only option is to give up and go our separate ways. I'm fine with giving up too. After all, I was the first one to mention it, early in the argument. But I thought of other options too, including balancing our relationship more and doing the D/s F-F once in a while, but he refused.

He claims that I didn't enjoy his company entirely, just because that type of RP wasn't something I'd choose on my own. But I got to his more tender inner self through his female alts. I compared his more tender inner self to a hallucinogenic drug that I wanted, and his female alts were the needle that caused a little pain so I could get that drug. By taking away the "needle," he was denying me the "drug." He didn't like that metaphor.

Instead, he compared it to cutting branches. He said "the eternal question" is whether to cut the branches or cut the tree. The intent is not to kill the tree, so the "worker" cuts the branches first, although cutting the branches could still kill the tree.

I understood his metaphor. It was a good one too.

Then I thought of the bonsais that I was looking at online a few weeks ago. I used to own a couple of juniper bonsais but I had to give them up when I moved from California to Washington State many years ago. I remember the delicious smell when I pruned them. And I remember reading something about how a challenging environment (too windy, too rocky, fires, wounds on the trunk) makes a tree more beautiful. That's what bonsai masters try to recreate. And that's why they chip and burn the trunk and branches to simulate dead wood, and they prune unnecessary branches, and they wire and twist the remaining branches into shape, and they wait for new branches to sprout. And they nurture the tree everyday.

He doesn't like the bonsai metaphor either, but he said that, if it makes me happy, it's fine with him. :)

So we're trimming most of our branches this time. Hopefully, we don't trim too much that we kill the tree. And if we learn how to do it right, maybe someday we'll have a beautiful bonsai of a relationship.