Guest Blogger: Screw the roses, send me the thorns

I bought a book. It was a sort of beginners guide to being a bit kinky. Reading it helped things to slot into place, but it was no use to me knowing all this and having no one to try it out with. An online friend told me she had shared this same stuff with her husband, and he had tied her to the kitchen table using a rope round and round her waist. This was a depressing thought.

Until now, I’ve never had a relationship where I’ve still fancied the other person after about six months. I thought that was normal, turns out it’s not, but that’s another story. I mean, there are all these magazine articles about spicing up your love life, so everyone must need a little help after a while, mustn’t they? The book had some helpful advice about introducing your kink to a probably non-kinky partner. Try talking to them after being intimate, it said, which was surprisingly delicate for a book about sexual deviance.

“I think I would like it if you spanked me”, I said. His face lit up like a kid in a sweet shop and he swatted my arse a few times. “Now you do me”, he said. I gave him the book, which he read with interest and then said it seems a bit like I have to do all the stuff to you and you do nothing. When we split up (after a doomed attempt at polyamory), he threatened to tell my family that I was a pervert and I was meeting people from the internet to do disgusting things. He hadn’t seemed so disgusted when he thought I might do them to him.

And that left me suddenly single with all this new knowledge and nowhere safe to test it out. If I got asked out, I thought what’s the point, he probably isn’t like me. I knew I wanted to be in a different sort of relationship next time, and I diligently went along to munches and met some incredibly arrogant young men who told me I couldn’t be a proper submissive if I didn’t want to submit to them. So I had to re-examine my labels again, wondering if this was true. Does submissive mean I have to obey everyone who speaks to me? Does being a masochist mean I should enjoy nettle stings? I have all this theory bulging in my brain and it’s like I’ve read the bible but never been to church and have no idea what it actually feels like to pray.

I sank deeply into the virtual experience and the heady creative buzz of online D/s, which helped me to learn a lot on a very abstract level. The community I was part of online was linked to a real life scene, and I tried but it was so hard to break in. I was a stranger on the outside of the group, knowing I could have a place in there, but unsure how to claim it. Twice I recklessly met up with Doms I knew online for deeply unsatisfactory experiences that led me nowhere. One of these men was a respected community leader, and I know now that he behaved very badly. He let me know, for example, that it was unnecessary to set up a safecall when meeting him. He wanted to do things I wasn’t okay with (we didn’t). He made me feel like I wasn’t A True Sub because I set limits, and he expected sex at that first meeting. I realise now what a dangerously self-destructive place I was in, and how stupid I was to place my vulnerable self in the hands of strangers.

All of this was so real and frightening and confusing. I liked a lot of the people I met, so long as there was no agenda, but I didn’t click with anyone. Not one person I had met in real life was someone I could imagine doing the things I had read about, and fantasised about. There was no-one I was prepared to grant power over me. On the one hand my life was bubbling with potential, and then I’d snap the filters off and see that it was all just impossible. That person didn’t exist.

This post was written by a RWL Guest Blogger – Emma writes a blog and some people read it, so you might know her or you might not. Either way, she’s not planning to tell you who she is, but she will tell you that “you don’t know me as well as you think you do”.

Image via Horia Varlan‘s Flickr photostream.