Comparisons--some summer musings

[tqbartleby]

This summer my wife and I took a three-week vacation, mostly camping, with another couple who have been our very good friends for many years. The vacation was in a far-off land, and we started in a hotel for a couple of nights while we fitted ourselves out for a camping adventure in the bush.

While in the hotel, my wife and I had sex. Which is to say, I performed cunnilingus and that was that. Of course, most times we have sex I don't come, so that was par for the course.

In the camping part of the trip, my wife decided that the tent was impractical for sex. Also the nights were rather cool. So she decided we would wait until we got back. She's the boss, so fair enough.

Our friends, however, did not find their tent impractical for sex. A word about them: they are an energetic couple, quick to laugh and to bicker. He is hale and hearty, early 60's, fit and athletic, and a take-charge guy. It was he who organized the trip. He ribs me about being a wimp because I bring my wife tea in bed every morning and am generally deferential. He, on the other hand, although his wife is independent and gives him hell, operates from the assumption that he is in control.

They have a strong physical relationship. My wife and I have often been guests at their country home, where their bedroom is adjacent to the guest bedroom. I'm a very light sleeper, so I know they have a habit of waking in the middle of the night, 3 or 4 AM, and having sex. I have been awakened on many occasions by the unmistakable sound of a rythmically creaking bed and the usual stifled groans and grunts. I have a voyeuristic streak and this generally arouses me. In the years before my wife took control of my orgasms, I would sometimes discreetly masturbate while listening (she is a heavy sleeper and never notices a thing).

On this camping trip, their tent was pitched not far from ours. Every three or four days I would be awakened in the middle of the night by their rhythmically rustling sleeping bags or covers and the usual stifled groans and grunts--including his louder grunts at the end, accompanied by more forceful rustling and then silence.

But now I don't masturbate without permission. My wife was asleep. So I would lie there for a while with a hard-on going nowhere and eventually fall back asleep.

These regular occurrences only served to make me hornier than I would otherwise have been. And during the day I couldn't help but meditate on the difference between my friend's freedom to fuck and my own submission. I felt envy, as he happily discharged his ejaculate through regular orgasms while penetrating his wife, whereas my balls were getting uncomfortably heavy; nostalgia, as my wife, content to have me go down on her, seems to have gone off intercourse all together; and that deliciously erotic state of submission, where orgasm is a potential whose realization can never be counted on.

It occurred to me that some of the deepest feelings of satisfaction that submission can bring depend on this kind of comparison: I could be an ordinary man, I could fuck with abandon as often as possible, I could take matters in hand and jerk off at will. But I've chosen otherwise. And while I was listening to my friends fuck in the next tent, I keenly felt the meaning of my own submission to my wife and, despite envy and nostalgia, chose it again. I no longer experience the same pleasure my friend does, the uncomplicated pleasure of seeking intercourse and getting it, but nor does he experience the more subtle pleasure of relinquishing control and being of dedicated sexual service. I think it's a good thing for a submissive to keep in mind exactly what he's missing, the more to appreciate what he's getting in return for that renunciation. There's something monk-like about being a submissive man.

[Edgewood]

Beautifully put.

[tqbartleby]

Thanks, Edgewood!

On some Tumblr porn site I saw an image that showed, side by side, a man with an erection and a man in a chastity cage. There was a slogan about the difference between a man in chastity and a "real man". I found it titillating. A man in chastity is of course as "real" as a man who is not. But it's not the natural, instinctive state. The male body itself instinctively wants erection and orgasms. The chaste man resists that to meet a more idiosyncratic desire--perhaps the desire to resist desire? Hence the monk in us.

[EDAS]

Beautiful post, tqbartleby. And I like the reference couched in your avatar, reference to Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener". In that short story, Bartleby says the now famous line: "I would prefer not". In your case: I would prefer not to come.

And that is my case too: I too prefer not to come. Yet it is odd, strange, as you suggest here.

Again: great post!