Ancilla's Dirty Diary: Too Tough Love.

Something strange happened this week. I was at my best friend's home, she's had a really rough two years. She had a baby, the adult daughter of her partner moved in with them six months into having the baby, then there was lockdown, she finished her PhD, she had many visa issues and her relationship with her partner suffered some serious setbacks coming dangerously close to the end. It's been terrible for her and a few months ago she just broke completely. I drove down to see her, and found her is a mountain of candy bars, joints and Filet-O-Fish burgers, which doesn't sound so bad, but my friend is a vegan, Buddhist psychotherapist who wouldn't do any drugs not really drink, so for her, candy bars, joints and burgers are indicators of something horrible.

The last few months she has been at rock bottom. Vodka with lunch and cheese balls for breakfast. Please do not judge my friend, she is as close to perfect as a human being can be, and after 41-years of holding down the fort for everyone in her life, she just cannot anymore. She needed to break because if she hadn't, i suspect she may have died. She reminds me greatly of the women in my family, she doesn't complain about things, she doesn't waste time talking solutions she just does things, she takes charge of everyone's needs, she gets shit done all the time, she doesn't whine about anything, she doesn't treat herself like an entity that matters at all, she has a deep darkness inside her and she has always been in control of it. She reminds me of my mom. I call her that sometimes. Well, I don't call her "mom" but I tell her sometimes, that she is my stand-in mother.

That should be more uncomfortable for me, I can't even associate motherliness with my own mother, but it's not that difficult. It happened very naturally. She is the only person in the world whom I trust to handle things without my intervention, and the only person around whom I can let go. The only person who reminds me that I am a human being and I should check in with myself every now and then. She's the one who taught me to identify emotions and where to search for them. She is the only person I ever reached out to in a moment of vulnerability, and the only person whose soul is essentially replaceable with mine. We are cut from the same cloth. She never has to explain herself to me, and I never have to explain myself to her. We just know.

But aside from that, our relationship has another component. It's not exactly sexual, though I must admit, that there was a period when I was actively in love with her, and while I am not hoping to "achieve" her someday, the nature of our relationship does go past friendship. In the past I've had some sexual interaction with her partner, mostly based in sadomasochistic play, and some of it in genital play, but all of it very "casual," and during the course of that, and a few times independently of it, we played together too. Again, it was very casual, and I do actually mean that, as far as I am concerned sexual interaction with a person is the same as any other form of social interaction, it's the same thing as having a real conversation with another person. Even though the sexual interaction between us last happened years ago, between her and I, there is an alternate relationship that only exists when we are alone with one another.

It's not sexual, but it's not unsexual. She's essentially a voyeur who gets off to terrible things happening to other people, and I'm sort of a prime candidate for something like that because terrible things are my playhouse. She enjoys my sex life, and she enjoys planting seeds in it, and it's immensely entertaining to me especially since she identifies as asexual, and carries deep, deep shame associated with arousal, and all of that seems to evaporate when we are alone. When she tells me she has never been as real with anyone else in her life as she is with me, I believe her. I know where all the skeletons are in her closet, I know where all the bodies are buried and while I am a deeply honest person, she is more deceptive and more invested in preserving her image in front of other people, especially the people who are in her life every day. We know each other on a level where all propriety, boundaries, social rules, emotional evaluation and norms of interaction fall away. There are two dispassionate voices of detached amusement that treat everyone in the world as a character in a sick story, including themselves, and one soul. Together, alone, by ourselves, that's who we are.

But we have other partners.

Both of us have relationships with each other's partners too. I've known hers for 10-days longer than I have known her, and she knew my husband years before I ever met him. Years before she ever met me, even. He wasn't the one to introduce me to her, and she wasn't the one to introduce me to him, all of us just knew each other by virtue of running in the same circles. After my husband and I got together, she genuinely got to know him though. I already know her partner very well, he is one of my closest friends, close enough that a month ago when she came out onto the balcony and saw us sitting there, holding hands, and snuggling together, she only thought it was weird that I would volunteer to hold hands with someone, and nothing else. We sort of exchange service sometimes, if I am not home she will tend to the needs of my owner, and if she is out, i'll tend to hers. If we're both there, we'll just jointly tend to everyone. Not sexually, but in most other ways.

In the process of my husband and my friend getting to know each other, I came to realise, as did they, that they are quite similar, and get along rather well. Their similarities are interesting, some are small like the same taste in stupid horror and SciFi movies, and some are bigger, like the measured way in which they express themselves to the world. In some ways, their relationship with me, it its approach, is quite similar too. They can both access my vulnerability, and they both hold the power, and the will, to destroy me within it just to see what happens.

So earlier this week, the three of us were in her room at her home, we all had the day off, the kids were with the nanny, and we were just sitting there, interacting with one another while we ate grapes and smoked pot. My friend has a fetish for coldly dispensed military discipline, and my husband is the poster child for that, and while I won't tell her to snap out of it, he would. He did. He took away her cheese balls and threw away her coke, and told her, quite plainly, that her 6-month bender was over and she wasn't going to engage in self-destructive nonsense anymore. He had been itching to give her a talking to, and she really needed one, but I am way too gentle with everyone I love to give them a firm hand. He is my firm hand, and to the people in my life who have come to love him, there is a space for him to apply himself. We bring him in when someone in our lives needs a little too-tough love.

They had a very beautiful, intense moment between them. It wasn't exactly sexual, but there was an eroticism to it, both in his delivery and her response. In the absence of all the other constructs in our lives, me or her partner or our children, it would have been the moment when they slept together and fell in love. They don't like it when I say that, makes them feel like it's "incestuous" and they don't like me reminding them that both of them have a fundamentally incestuous relationship with me as well. It wasn't dismissive of either one of our relationships, it was an accidental moment of casual intimacy, today it means nothing, but in that moment it was beautifully deranged and deeply loving.

Which is why, of course, I got so turned on i almost passed out. They both noticed it, at the same time, and while his response was to ignore me with a cruelty only he can dispense, hers was to criticise me for losing my composure. A thing i never do, and a thing she will never allow me to do. She is a lot more like my mother than she realises. Their responses were perfectly in keeping with the parental roles I associate with both of them.

But when I asked them to fuck for me, they wouldn't. He just told me to fold the laundry, and she sat there criticising me for doing it wrong at every step.