Isn't that "love"?

So, on CollarMe, I glanced through profiles that I hadn't seen before (and blimey, that site lives up to its shoddy reputation so often!)   One of the bland-but-supposed-to-be-profound statements that fill so many profiles there caught my eye.   A Submissive had posted (back in July, according to the date stamp on the message):

Submission on all levels is giving someone the power to destroy you and trusting them not to.

Well, to me, this is something that I associate not with "Submission" but "Love". I long ago accepted that loving someone, or being in love with them, means giving that person the power to hurt me on a very deep emotional level. If you care about someone then they can hurt you, it's that simple.

And when I love someone, it's because I trust them. Even though I say that I go into a relationship open-eyed and knowing that it could very well end up with me feeling hurt deeply (if briefly, see my philosophy about bouncing back), I also open up only because I feel safe to do so. I trust whoever it is not to hurt me.

I'm not Submissive. But when I love, I do so deeply and that means I apparently fulfil the criteria in that statement. Power exchange and S/M have nothing to do with that. Being the Top, the Dom, the sadist, does not magically insulate me from having a human heart, from the figurative demolition or having my metaphorical innards ripped out. Far from it! And I don't believe that being 'nilla and in love would be any different.

It is very tempting to think that there is something uniquely profound about D/s in particular, and who knows, maybe there is - or maybe it just feels like there is because to those who kink that way it would naturally feel so much more profound than things that don't match our kinks. Lord knows that I have felt that sense of profundity about it sometimes, too. But this statement - this one I know is not unique to D/s.

It may be that other people experience love differently from the way I do, and that's just people being different from one another, and no way is righter or wronger than another. But I know that I'm not the only one who loves this way, and kink or 'nilla, gay, straight or neither/both, poly or mono, there are examples who match those criteria regardless of power relations.

(Incidentally, I also hate the line "The one who is in control of a relationship is the one who has least invested in it" because that again would seem to negate the possibility of me being Dominant...)

And finally, that "on all levels" bit smacks horribly of "twoo-ness" - the idea that if you're not doing it like this, then you're not truly doing it at all. You don't need to love (or submit) on all levels to be vulnerable and to trust the person to whom you're vulnerable.

So I'm not sure if I'm saying anything deeper than: Love the way you love, kink the way you kink, do what feels profound to you and your partner(s)/SO(s)/fuck-buddie(s)/whoever you're with. Live life. Be happy.

Which, let's face it, has tended to be a nice way to be (although far from profound to say it).