Vixen Says:

>>> Ok, I'll stick my neck out again here... <<<

Well, maybe if you can stick your neck out, I can too, just a little bit. As they say, guillotines love company .

>>> Do you really think you can get as deep into power exchange when you do it occasionally with several different partners as you can when you do it all the time with one person? <<<

>>> Personally, I don't think you can. In my own experience, it takes a long term primary relationship before I can even being to develop the kind of trust that's required to explore the deepest parts of my soul. <<<

Same here. And it took me a long time in the longterm primary relationship (years) to get to the places in submission I experience now. It's a very slow and gradual process, but it continues to get deeper and more intense for me as time goes by. I don't think you can get this sort of progressive deepening of experience without a lot of uninterrupted time spent submitting.

And if you do submission with several partners (not all at the same time, but consecutively over a span of years), I would imagine that with each one you'd have to start over, almost at the beginning, in building the requisite trust. I've only had one D&S experience. The way it worked was that I developed a large amount of trust very fast at the start; one of the reasons for this was that everything about my partner was different (extraordinary in positive ways) than others, vanilla and dominant, who attracted me. Then, over the years, both my trust in and submission to him deepened, but at a much slower rate than that initial rapid dropping of the defenses.

I speculate that a lot of what makes up a sucessful D&S relationship has to do with pacing and timing, at least at the start. If I hadn't been able to drop my defenses so rapidly at the beginning of the relationship, I don't know if I would have been able to make that blind leap off the precipice and give myself away to him. Dropping my defenses wasn't something I consciously willed myself to do, however. It was something I was able to do both because his extraordinary unlike-all-the-others presence inspired me and gave me courage and because he was consciously pushing me to do so. Had the situation been wrong for me, I suspect I would have sensed it in some way and responded to such pushing with withdrawal.