Last night I asked my husband how much he would like to know about the search for a Dom. I don’t want to be actively secretive, unless that’s what he needs – in fact, I want to involve him as much as possible.

Things rapidly deteriorated.

Seems that I’d completely misunderstood what he’d meant, and he’d misunderstood what I had meant. He thought I was looking for a hookup or a friend-with-benefits type of thing – a “simple” opening the relationship. I was talking about a mentor whom I could develop trust – I am not going to let just anybody tie me down and do whatever.

I think what led to me to feel that he was OK with it was that this was the very situation that I described to him the day before. He also said that he thought he needed to form some kind of emotional attachment to somebody before sex anyway – he used the word “polyamorous”, although I’m now not certain that it applied to what he was saying. Again the term “demisexual” feels like a better fit, if one were to label anything.

This turned into him thinking that I wanted to keep him on standby, as though he was some kind of backup. I tried to explain that I wanted to explore my psychology with an experienced Dom, investigating how I felt about each scenario that we enacted. He asked why I didn’t want to speak to a counsellor about this, thinking that if I want to explore the psychology of it that a therapist might be better; admittedly that wasn’t something I’d considered. It might be appropriate, it might work, it would be less fun, but it is worth considering.

He accused me of having already made up my mind and that it was going to happen by no matter what he said. I said that I wasn’t going to do anything until I was reasonably confident that he was “OK” with it. That it had only come up now because I thought that he was “OK” with it.

My husband asked what his role was in my life. I said everything except this area of kink – my future, my past, my partner, my companion, my best friend, my lover – we could and should still be intimate, but there would be no pressure on him to be anything other than who he is. This didn’t satisfy him.

He was angry and hurting.

He doesn’t want me to not do it because he’s told me not to: he had enough to deal with my resentment if him in the past. I think he’s afraid that if I don’t do it for whatever reason that I will resent him. I must admit, there is a risk there – many years ago, not long after we first met, I said I wanted children. He didn’t. I accepted that and was for with it … most of the time, but every now and then I think “I have to the possibility of children for you”, which isn’t fare – it was my decision after all.

I was feeling confused. I was certain that I was saying nothing more than I’d said a day or so ago.

I closed my eyes and thought “I am being unreasonable. I’m effectively asking him to be not only open but polyamorous. I cannot do this. This is hurting him too much.”

I opened my eyes and he asked “why did you close your eyes?”

I said “I’m shutting this down. I can’t do this.”

And then he said “I can’t do this”, followed by those two little words:

It’s over

Then he told me to make arrangements to move out.

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The atmosphere tonight at home is practically arctic.

I have royally fucked up and hurt the one person who matters most to me in the world.