What to do if you're HSP and submissive she's not HSP and but is maybe dominant...
The Highly Sensitive Submissive meets the Stoic Dominant
I am very much a sensitive and passionate soul. Even in my 50s, everything about my ways of perceiving and reacting to the world is dialled up. Of course, these days we have a name for it: Highly Sensitive Person, HSP for short.
It’s not a label I lean into, partly because for an adult in middle age, HSP can be functionally the same as “bloody annoying”.
However, once upon a time, it was a useful way of understanding my relationship with Xena, who, as you might have gathered, is not HSP, but is rather self-contained and quietly dominant.
Right from the start, we felt right together, but at the same time I had this nagging feeling that it lacked that sense of crazy deep intimacy: it wasn’t that Xena was really holding back, it’s that where I had volatility and a need to introspect, she had stability and certainty.
I think that f you complement each other the way we do, then you need to recognise that that very nagging asymmetry is probably why you are together and why your relationship works day-to-day.
She's your rock, you're her kite. It's your job to fly, hers to keep you anchored.
She’s not boring, she’s just quietly illuminated. She already has the tranquillity and focus other people spend lifetimes and salaries chasing through endless therapy and mindfulness retreats. Maybe, like Xena, she rolls forward in life with her own confident momentum. Not much worries her. Not much stops her.
The end result is that you have a quiet, sane, intimacy as a baseline, but maybe you can’t help measuring that intimacy against the HSP/HSP connections you've experienced in the past.
I think maturity lies in realising that those HSP/HSP relationships didn't last because that powerful intimacy was brittle, volatile thing, or an all consuming feedback loop. Was it even real intimacy, since you were likely feeding off each other’s projections to create transient realities?
So you should probably stop pestering your partner to “open up.”
Instead, learn to revel in the shared moment.
Rub her feet, enjoy her beauty, marvel at her humanity, worship her mystery.
Then we come to kink.
If you are submissive — and I think HSPs probably tend towards submission, if only to reduce the sometimes overwhelming input from the world — then you probably read her stoicism and stability as dominance, and that continues to be part of the attraction. If you are lucky, that translates into actual sexual dominance, but one that’s cheerfully self-focussed.
If she’s interested in exploring the dominant path, then you can square the circle of intimacy by finding a style of Femdom which she likes, which gives her the experiences she enjoys.
Do that, and you will feel totally vulnerable before her majesty and might, like running naked down a beach in a thunderstorm, or being trapped in a cage with a tiger.
At the same time, she'll be sharing her secret dark side, which may be cold and cruel and certainly won’t be prosocial.
The end result can be a kind of raw intimacy and mutual vulnerability, but moderated by the power relationship.
To get there, stop talking about intimacy and your needs.
Instead, just focus on finding that Femdom style that suits her.
The rest will follow.
While I don't believe HSP is a thing (in a qualitative sense -- not even as much of a thing as most what passes for "neurodivergence" nowadays) I do think that there's something intuitively appealing to the rock/kite notion.
And I'm saying it as someone who while probably not particularly "sensitive", has a tendency to introspect and analyse A LOT as a way of doing life (and at times, relationships tho oddly less than other things perhaps...) and who has had a (vanilla ISH) LTR with another largely kite type person (tho there were rocky complications on both sides).
Yet specifically in the realm of d/s dynamics, even casual ones, I found myself rather surprisingly realising that while I love to analyse relationship dynamics *as mechanics to unpick* I ABSOLUTELY don't want to do it much with the other concerned party as a form of intimacy. Which is interesting because it means I'm more open to doing it with strangers. Not because it's threatening in a classic sense but because I feel it leads to convoluted and fundamentally unnecessary complication. I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself well, but I think I second your main point and I feel d/s is a better framework for avoiding deconstructive overanalysis.