And So It Goes

So I released my slave at the end of last week.

I haven't talked about it a huge amount, but I've had a slave for the last two months or so - Sunshine, lets call her. We met on Fetlife when I responded to her introductory post, and she was looking for something online-only. We talked for a while - messages on FL, then e-mailed back and forth - until we agreed to try things out - we agreed to a 30-day trial period to feel each other out and see how well we worked. It went quite well, as a rule; and in spite of some misgivings I had, we ended up negotiating out a contract and making it "real" rather than just a trial. We went into it with the explicit statement on my part that I knew this was not going to be able to meet all my desires, and I had every intention of ending it at some point if the opportunity arose for something good with someone with whom I would not have so many restrictions imposed... But we believed it would be worth it in the meantime. Things were pretty good. We enjoyed each other's company, and things actually went pretty well for the most part, but we just never quite meshed.

When I walk my dog - a one-eyed Shih Tzu who I swear is made out of pure muscle and ridiculousness - he has a habit of walking around the lamp posts in my apartment complex and not realizing. When he does it, my instinct is to just pull his leash to try and get him to walk back around it... But he just sets his feet, tenses his body, and stares me down. He knows I want him to walk where I was walking, and he's walking in that direction, dammit, so why was I trying to pull him somewhere else?

All too often, trying to take care of her felt like that. She knew what I was trying to accomplish, or at least thought she did, and she was already going in that direction, so why was I telling her to do something else? She wasn't prepared to take what I said at face value; and she wasn't prepared to ask why without being bratty and upset. I'm sure my own sense of pride didn't help; by no stretch of the imagination do I believe we didn't match solely because of a flaw on her part. We didn't work out because my methods and her needs just didn't quite jive.

It culminated in something stupid; it usually does. She asked if she was still grounded (a longer story I'm not going to bother getting into), to which I gave her the simple answer "yes", and she flipped out on me. She insisted she shouldn't be any more, complained about my always changing things without telling her, and demanded to know why rather than just calmly asking "That isn't what I was expecting - did something change?" If this had been the first time this had happened I probably would have just let it slide. If this had been the second time, I would have corrected it and moved on once the consequences were done. Being what it was, she sent me a formal email requesting me to release her, which I accepted. She then begged me not to accept it... So I explained to her why I felt this was not going to improve, and... We're done.

I will miss her being my slave, and I'll miss having someone who I believe very much wanted to serve me. I won't miss the stress and the worry involved in trying to sort out what she said she wanted from what she came across as wanting - trying to worry about what she was asking for against what I felt was okay for her.

So yes; I'm sad as I write this, and I apologize for using my blog to flush out my feelings on something that's bothering me, but things will be okay; and I suspect - if she can find someone who's a better fit than I was - she will make some Dom extremely happy one day.