It takes two to surrender
Surrender is the deepest intimacy two people can share. It's an act of the purest devotion: devotion to the one you surrender yourself to, or devotion to the one who wants nothing more than to surrender. Both devotions are necessary. You can't surrender yourself without someone who sees and knows you enough to ask for your surrender.
Surrender is only ever voluntary, only ever wanted. To submit without desire isn't surrender—it's acquiescence, nothing more. To surrender is to admit your need for closeness. It's to admit that you want nothing more than everything: every part of your captor, your master, your owner, as dedicated to taking you as you are to being taken. You offer everything, but you demand everything in turn.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that it's easier to be surrendered to than it is to surrender. If you are prepared for their surrender, if you understand the depths to which you must receive your partner, it will feel effortless, but most make the mistake of underestimating their partner's depths. This will take a commitment from you: likely one of months, even after the years it will take you to learn exactly what you should be looking for. Master it, and they'll surrender to you in a heartbeat. But the speed there is one of genuine mastery, rather than a suggestion of simplicity.
Mutual devotion. Two people seeing. Two people being seen. Many who surrender find, to their surprise, that it's easy to turn their partner's devotion into a surrender of their own. Many who seek their partner's surrender are surprised, in turn, to find how readily they'll beg to give themselves away. Intimacy is intimacy, after all, and devotion is devotion. Deep in the formless depths of need, your need for me can become mine for you before either of us realize what has changed.
If you want your partner's surrender, you'll have to learn just how to ask it of them. And if you want to surrender, you'll have to learn just how to teach your partner how to ask. They won't know how to ask otherwise. They might not even think they need to ask.
Surrender isn't a natural part of any person. The desire to surrender may be; the capacity to surrender certainly is. But surrender must be made. It's a creative act, forged by two people seeking to sharpen the blunt needs of the present into a gutting, lethal want. The raw materials of desire must be forged into something with a point, something manufactured with a purpose, something capable of spilling blood. It won't come into being on its own, no matter how much you try and will it. Your partner must draw your surrender from you, take it, shape it, pierce you with it.
We don't surrender until we're known. We can't surrender until all parts of us are taken and accounted for. Each piece we offer up becomes a part of our ultimate surrender, the point past which there is no possible return. But all you can do is offer. It's up to your partner to take those offerings and offer you a heaven made from them, a paradise borne of your devotion.
Do you have someone who can bring you to that paradise? Do you have it in yourself to be that paradise for your partner? Are you prepared to offer yourself to them that utterly, that wholeheartedly? Are you ready to take them in as they truly are, without judgment or defensiveness or apathy? Are you prepared to find their surrender utterly beautiful, so much that you can lose yourself in your quest to make them offer it?
It feels so blissful, once you finally have it. A voice from up high. A voice that could offer you anything and everything—and makes that offer. A person willing to sacrifice themselves to receive your blessing. A soul desperately in need of your salvation. A sinner and a saint: both of them human, both of them yours. It takes both. And each is a unique form of devotion. We may call the one surrender and the other taking, but they're both surrender, in their respective senses. Each is a total loss of yourself, and a total gain of the one you're with. Each is a total acceptance of the one you have, and a complete admission that you want the one you've got so entirely that you'd sell your soul just to have theirs instead.
Give yourself to this surrender, and you'll never feel more seen and seeing, more knowing and known. Surrender to this, your private paradise, now finally, finally, entrusted to another, so they might join and share it with you.
The 2-sided surrender is a motto that I now live by every day and it is EXTREMELY important to me! I did not write this, although it is now part of my soul. All of the credit for this writing belongs to WhyTrustTomHanks from FetLife.
Wishing everyone tons of peace, love, and happiness!! ❤️
MDG
