I feel utterly destroyed in a bad way.
Tldr: I thought it was safe to fall in love. The sort of gentle Dom they are made it feel completely natural and okay to do so, however now they want their ex back, who previously they said was not a nice person and who had started to ridicule them about abuse they suffered. They were my Dom and Godess, Queen, Deity and I feel so utterly alone.
Full story, which I know I should be better at writing but I am not very articulate
I am so so sorry for the very long post, I think I need some understanding really, and some sympathy. I know nothing is going to fix this or get things back to where we seemed to both be happy.
I thought my someone had found me and I thought it was the beginning of something special, but it turns out I had misunderstood the relationship completely.
Last year I broke up with a long term partner, who I will call B. It was the third time B had left, previously he had gone back to an abusive partner who had then started to verbally abuse me on and offline. About a month after the breakup, I felt strong enough to post on reddit asking strangers for free compliments and to say what had happened. I did get a lot of awful messages from creeps which were clearly just after one thing, but I also got a beautiful heartfelt message from one person, I will call them D, which prompted me to actually want to communicate back.
D is such a lovely person. There was never any push to meet up, that was something I suggested but that hey seemed very happy to do, and they were always lovely to me. I will state, they are significantly younger than me. I am in my 40s, they their 20s.
Eventually they introduced me to D/s and never broke or pushed any boundaries apart from probably the biggest for me. Which was where I said I couldn't continue an intimate relationship with them if I was going to be a side chick or find out I was the person they were cheating on someone else with.
I need fairly strong certainty and honesty as I have some (lots of) trauma. This was after the first time we were intimate, which wasn't planned. No sexual intimacy had been planned but there was planned cradling, and cuddling because D said they loved to take care of people and I needed to be taken care of. Its something they are really good at and I miss being cradled by them so much.
When I had said my bit about not being able to continue to be intimate if it wasn't something like an actual relationship, D said something like, "you're not the other woman, I'm only doing this with you, " and something like "no chance of that happening " when I said I was worried about a complicated ex coming back.
I knew they had and still have unresolved issues with their ex, who for a while they were calling their complicated partner, although it was when they started to call them their ex that I felt safe to let down my guard, really get into the role of sub, finding specific titles for each other, writing a "prayer" for them, deciding on scenes we wanted to do, which led me to fall for them.
D has some chronic illnesses and we live a few hours apart so we'd see each other once a week. Although during the holidays, or some weekends they woud go to their parents and I would see them much less, we did go on a trip away in Feb.
D told me about what had happened with their complicated ex partner. This person had been really vile to them about some very significant and traumatic abuse that D went through. After this, D told their then partner, they needed to step back from the relationship. In the 6 months since we started being intimate, D first was very open, then started hiding things from me or omitting things, that I'd then see usually on insta or Pintrest, that would then trigger panic attacks. The first time it happened the ex had posted some older photos of them together and D commented how beautiful they were. It sort of triggered a breakdown in me as it was not actually that long since my other breakup. It massively poked a very big trauma wound I have about being abandoned. D was really understanding at thay point. They also pounted out the pictures were old ones. Then the ex posted another one but this was definitely a recent one as D was wearing something I made for them. D said it was an old picture again, which I knew wasn't true, and they said they were uncomfortable I'd been looking at their ex's pictures. After that, I said I just needed honesty and not things hidden from me. They said it was complicated. What we had was complicated. What I suppose I didn't expect that the ex would start breadcrumbing them after being as horrible as they were, and never apolgising for what they said. The ex started putting pics from last year up as if they were recent and creating new collages on Pinterest with D in them when they have met up recently. It all set off some really horrible anxiety for me, which added to the anxiety D was already having about the abuse, their workload at the moment and also about the suicide of two of their friends in the last few years.
I needed D to be completely honest, and D has stated to me that they have been waiting for their ex and them to have a proper talk so D can have an apology from the ex and then they will see what happens from there, D wants to get back to gether with them. They said they made this clear in the beginning, and that they are sorry for making me feel as bad as I do.
They don't want me to leave their life though. They want me to stay in it for some reason but to me, this just seems like I am going to struggle even more to get over them, and I will have to watch them love someone else.
Whenever I say I think I need to end our communications, they either get really upset or overwhelmed. We both have a lot of trauma which is obviously part of the problem.
I feel partly blindsided and partly like my anxiety was telling me all along that I was going to get hurt.
I have a trauma therapist who I have been working with for about 5 or 6 months now, and she is great but its obviously going to take a long time to fix me so I can overcome these feelings. She also thinks that Ds ex is probably slight abusive and due to Ds other trauma, they probably don't see smaller acts of abuse, that the nastiness about what happened to them as a child was a boundarythat was crossed. I have even had to explain to D sometimes that my emotions are not their responsibility, because they feel that they are. And yes I am so broken and sad, but it is neither their fault I struggle as much as I do, or their responsibility to look after me as we are not together. Again, if they would let me stop communicating with them for a bit I could find my closure maybe? It would take me a long time I know because even though this was a very short relationship, even if most of it was in my head, the D/s dynamics really made me feel whole, like a real person. Even when they called me their doll to break.
I miss having them as my Dom, I miss being taken care of by them and I know that with the trauma I had gone through, where I was emotionally and sometimes physically abandoned by my parents as a baby and growing up, then humiliated and shamed by them when I was a school child, being taken care of by D filled a very old hole in my psyche which probably has made everything feel so much worse now they are not my Dom or significant other.
I know this was very long and very rambling.
Thank you to anyone who reads and any understanding or any sort of advice at all, but understanding is mostly what I am after.