feeling guilty

hub01 wrote in a comment to servingB: 

"The worst part is not the correction session but the feeling that you let her down."

What a wonderful statement. Short and pure and wonderful. And so true. It is true both for the submissive man who wrote it and for the dominant woman. I just can not stand the feeling of letting somebody down.I hate being let down, but even more, I hate letting another human being down. And the more I care about another person, the more I hate letting him/her down.

Outside the world of domestic discipline, I had not know that such men actually do exist...Men who are willing to accept correction by their wifes because they have let her down. A man who feels terrible about the fact that he let her down.  A man who is punishing himself  internally way more than his wife could punish him externally.....If a man with such an attitude lets a woman down,in such a case the dominant woman has the task of administering a sound punishment and at the same time, by doing just that, freeing him from his feelings of guilt and giving him a much wanted clean slate again.

Maybe surprisingly for some of you, in my relationship with my man, there were already 2 (kind of major) incidents in which I let my man down. I mean I let him down in his way of seeing things. Me, I have disagreed with his assessment in the beginning, but in the end, if it comes to the question whether a partner has let the other one down or not, the opinion of the partner who feels hurt is more important than the opinion of the "perpetrator". And he definitely felt hurt. So lets just face it: I hurt him. I let him down. (Can you sense my catholic background... mea culpa, mea maxima culpa...)

My man has apologised to me many times. For many small things he did or did not. But it looks as if I am the one among the two of us, who has to apologise for the big things. And I did apologise from the bottom of my heart. The question is only: what is one of my apologies really worth?

I feel terrible for hurting him. I would like for him to tell me over and over again that things are ok again. But on the other hand, I don`t want to bring the touchy subject on and on again. And I think it is not fair to expect the one who has been hurt by my actions to comfort me now.

I believe deeply in the concept of comforting the partner if he/she should need it. But I do not believe in expecting comfort from somebody who feels hurt himself.

From a pragmatic point of view, it is so much easier to sort things out, if you do not have to rely on words alone....

Right now I am stuck in Germany, with countless problems, whereas my man is somewhere at the other end of the world, with no possibility to personally fly to me either. We just do not have a chance of personally working things out. All we have are words. But sometimes, words are just not enough.