Something Wonderful

Forgive me if I don't give the exact dates here, or for that matter too much detail. After all I'm a man and as women have known from the dawn of time completely rubbish at remembering anniversaries - and birthdays - plus I don't really want to give too much away.
Anyway, just before my birthday I got a friend request from someone on MySpace, as I usually do I read her profile and found someone who I thought would be an interesting friend, not even thinking that things would happen the way they did. Then she sent me a thank you message and we started to talk - and things grew from there and the messages grew longer and more frequent and I realised that this was someone very very special. Someone who has made me stop questioning who or what I am and given me some of the answers that I needed and someone who has now given herself to me entirely and I cannot stop thinking how lucky I am every second of every minute of every day.

Awakenings

So there I am not really sure of things and being a bit hesitant to do anything because I had been so used to being rejected and used that I just didn't want to risk any more, in short I had lost a lot of confidence and did not think anyone wanted anything to do with me.
After a lot of very careful thinking I had a go at online dating which was not very successful at all I came across was series of women who had a very clear 'wish list' for their ideal man - and I did not fit any of their stereotypes. But out of this came a greater awareness of what I really wanted and needed and these money and status obsessed desperate women were not it. All my sexual fantasies were of control and Domination and the idea of any kind of submission on my part was just not arousing.
I will at some point return to some of the fantasy and desire but there is something much more important that happened. Something wonderful and beautiful.

Doubts and More Doubts

The problem with all these failed relationships and bad dates was that it started me thinking very black and negative thoughts about myself. After all if so many people could reject me in sometimes quite cruel ways I must have been to blame surely? And as so many of these people wanted to be domineering - I will stop short of calling them dominant - perhaps that made me a bit of a submissive.
The other thing was that I wanted an old fashioned girl who wanted to be loved and controlled - which made me a Master
But how could I be both a Dominant Master and a submissive? - was I a switch or just a crazy mixed up bag of hurt confused feelings who was outside of the mainstream looking in and wanting something that was not for me?

Turning Point

The real turning point came when I broke one of my self-imposed rules - never get involved in a relationship with someone you work with. I felt happier having someone I could actually trust and turn to - anyway it was all fine to start with spending time with each other away from work and doing all sorts of things that couples do and there was a very real possibility of some intimacy but alas the woman was really quite wilful and when the rose-tinted glasses of first lust fell away I saw all the things that weren't quite right.
I'm not really all that ready to go into the details at the moment -partly because I'm still a bit messed up from it all even after the passage of a couple of years- and partly because there were still some very good things to come out of it, not least a rekindling of an enthusiasm for photography which really helped me through the dark times and gave me a way of meeting a lot of new friends and associates and even making a few pounds here and there when the going was really bad.

Dating Disaster

So there I was trying desperately to fit into a world that I was increasingly unhappy with and was surrounded by other people who were all telling me what they thought I wanted and needed to be happy and succcessful- the girlfriend/wife, a management job, the family car, 2.4 children and a mortage -none of which really seemed all that important.
So like an idiot I went along to a dating agency which guaranteed to match up people with similar beliefs and interests - but only if you were prepared to accept a date with anyone who was still breathing - and I believed that they would do what they said - poor gullible fool that I was. Anyway to spare me from reliving all those wasted evenings (and one saturday lunchtime) the outcome was a string of encounters which ranged from being mildly strange right through to full blown bizarre. I met a treacher who appeared to be infatuated with one of her six form pupils, a woman who just wanted someone to bankroll her shopping habit (you have how many pairs of shoes exactly?) and then there was miss downright sinister who wanted a replacement for her aging lover who was no longer able to perform and wanted someone to provide her with sufficient product for artificial insemination.
At this point I decided that this dating business was getting just a bit too stressful with the endless parade of women who were desperately seeking something I clearly was not, but on the plus side at least I was beginning to understand a bit about what I wanted.

New Beginnings

Every story should have a beginning, but at what point of awareness that should be I don't know - an early fascination with fetish imagery and the works of photographers like the late Bob Carlos Clark and the celebration of women as being something more than sex objects perhaps - or continued feelings of rejection, guilt and loss as yet another relationship crumbled and died and me directing the anger back at myself and retreating once again behind an impenetrable wall of my own making - I don't really know and I don't really think that endless analysing the past will help but then as someone who has worked in mental health, studied psychology and undergone various sorts of counselling it's sort of second nature to try to pick things into little bits and have a nice neat box for each.

So anyway, back to the story, about 5 years ago I was getting very very angry at work, coming to terms with a long-term but minor health condition (hypertension) and feeling like a misfit in normal life I entered into some existential counselling which in turn fired a sort of search to find out who I really am and to understand my sexuality. This is a search that is still going on and will probably last for the rest of my days.

But then something quite extraordinary, wonderful and exciting has happened - very suddenly and I have become friends with someone who has been on a similar search.

This is going to be the story of my attempt to find myself, accept who and what I am and then - to put it bluntly - fuck the mainstream and live by my rules not those that others try to impose.