Between My Sheets

 There’s an UPDATE at the end of this post!

Almost everyone you meet will tell you that they want to marry their best friend. Of course, most people want friendships outside of a marriage too, but few people will say that a close friendship isn’t important in a relationship.

There’s only one problem with that - people treat you differently and expect different things from you when there is a “more than friends” potential. People can tell me that I’m wrong about that until they’re blue in the face. But I’m not. When someone hopes that you could be something more, they see you in a different light. It’s something that really bothers me about dating - not because this difference exists, but because people don’t acknowledge it.

As a sub, it’s something that annoys me on perhaps even a deeper level.

If you talk to any dom out there, they will tell you that they enjoy a significant other who is a bit…well, clingy, for lack of a better word. A dom’s nature is to want a sub who needs him, looks to him as a master, wants him fully. I mean, I’m sure there are some bedroom-only doms who don’t really want this, and I’m definitely simplifying things here, but when a dom sees potential for a relationship, a sub who is a little needy is a turn on. Most doms want to swoop in an take care of a sub.

But then, what about a dom - or any guy - who doesn’t want to look at a relationship with someone as something with potential? What about a pure friendship? That neediness suddenly becomes a turn off. It’s overwhelming. It’s annoying.

Now, in most situations, this manifests itself at the end of a relationship as a sign that a break up is necessary. Because, with most relationships, you don’t move from “potential” to “friendship” and then back to “potential.” That’s not the natural way things happen. Some couples rush into potential right away, never really building a strong friendship. The best couples I know, especially in the D/s world, moved from friendship to potential. But it’s never a roller coaster from potential to friendship and back to potential. Potential to friendship rarely works. It’s why most couples don’t stay friends after they break up.

Yet, this is what happened and was expected of me. Today, I spent a lot of time thinking about it. The Cowboy was 100% right in recognizing that things were being rushed and that we needed to build a solid friendship first. But as a sub, moving from potential to friendship? He was able to switch it over, but I can’t flip the switch like that. At some point, I did start to feel submissive toward him, at least in the beginning stages, and that wasn’t something that just happened spontaneously. He knew he was doing things to evoke those feelings. He had to. And to be honest, I don’t think he was doing anything wrong. I think he was just going with his feelings too. It felt nice. It felt right. It felt good to even give the smallest piece of submission to someone else, just like I’m sure it felt good for him, as a dom, to receive that. I think it was really, really special, and I would be surprised if he didn’t think it was really special as well.

But that friendship base, it wasn’t strongly cemented into place. He realized that before I did, and his expectations changed. I am a SUPER clingy person in a relationship, which is something that I’m working on about myself. Suddenly, though, that fact about me went from ok, because I was a potential love interest, to very overwhelming, because I was just a friend. Suddenly, he went from telling me that he hopes “I’m his Christmas gift this year” to feeling claustrophobic.

It was too much. It was too fast. It felt so very good, but he wanted it to survive long-term, and the only way for that to happen, for him, was to go back to the friendship.

And I couldn’t turn around as quickly. I tried. I hope he knows that I really, really tried. It was like I was traveling 80 miles per hours on ice and suddenly had to go the other direction. I could brake and brake and brake, but when you’re on ice, it takes time to stop and turn. I don’t think it was fair of him to expect me to go back so quickly, like he did. But then, life isn’t fair, and it was what he needed. It sucks to admit that you can’t do something. The Cowboy self-admittedly needs and wants VERY different things from a girlfriend than from just a friend, and I wasn’t able to exist as a friend again so quickly, when in my mind it was so damn exciting to meet someone who wanted the kind of girlfriend that I am. He says that we’re very different people wanting very different things in life, and that’s not true. We just were at that moment.

I would just like to take a moment here and address something else. I received a handful of VERY nasty emails over the past few days, relating to my life right now. They are from someone claiming to know The Cowboy in real life, claiming to be “his best friend in the whole world.” If that’s true, it means that he told one of his friends about my website, which is something that I thought I could trust him never to do. It breaks my heart to think that about him, and also to think that he’s friends with someone who is so mean-spirited. I don’t think that I’ve been an ugly person in talking about my feelings The Cowboy, as this emailer claims, and I see no reason why he’d be upset with anything I wrote.He may disagree with me, but he’s always respected me in the past.

When I try to reply to the emails, it says that the inbox is full, so it looks like it’s a fake account. And just some of the things this person has said…I want to believe that this is just some crazy person who gets off on pretending that she’s important. She’s certainly never said anything to in any way prove that she knew him in real life. She just spends her time bashing me. Whether or not she is who she says she is…that’s pathetic.

I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt here, because seriously, I have a really, really, REALLY hard time believing that he’d go out of his way to start some kind of middle-school drama over the Internet. Give me a break.

So my public appeal, since I’m blocked from emailing her directly and trying to respect his wishes to not contact him: I get it. Whomever you are, you don’t like me and you think I’m a horrible person. But please, save me the drama. I can’t imagine that The Cowboy would actually have someone like you in his life, so I’m fairly certain you’re just pretending that you are, and that is really beyond crazy. If he truly “has this growing problem with me and my pathetic tell-all site” like you say he does, than he is a much more dramatic, sad person than I thought was possible.

Furthermore, he knows how to contact me if I say anything here that makes him uncomfortable. He knows I respect the wishes of my friends when they ask me to remove certain details, and he’s fucking mature enough to talk to me about it like an adult. This isn’t third grade. Jesus.

Leave me alone. If you’re some random crazy girl, seriously, get a hobby. And if you really are his friend…seriously, get a hobby.

Nonsense. Seriously.

UPDATE: The crazy girl who was emailing me, claiming to be The Cowboy’s best friend? Yeah, she’s not. She’s just crazy. IMMEDIATELY after posting this she emailed me again, giving me a bunch of generalities “about him” to “prove” that she was really in his life. It was much in the same way a fortune-teller fraud would throw out a bunch of generalities that are true of most guys.

Dude, if you want to prove you know someone, all you need to do is tell me their name. It was a good try assuming that he’s a “very dominant person” (duh) and the other things you said, which apply to most guys in my life. But referring to The Cowboy as a “meat and potatoes type of guy”? That just proves to me that you have no idea what you’re talking about. You have waaaaaaaaay too much time on your hands, kid. Go bother someone else.