If I had to pick a role model from within my family, I would pick my mother’s sister. I spent summers with her and her husband until I was eighteen and much more time with them after I was eighteen. She’s what many would call a “cold” woman but it’s only an impression, what she really is, is uncomfortable with showing emotions, and childless (and let’s face it a lot of women without children are given the labels of cold and emotionally stunted). She’ll love you and take care of you, but because that may demonstrate that she has a heart she’ll constantly engage in merciless verbal jostling and old-lady tough love along the way. She’s an electrical engineer obsessed with running marathons, her dog and being left the fuck alone. A few years ago she retired from full-time work to our hometown in the mountains on a “farm” (there’s a sauna, a hot tub and closets the size of my bedroom so I don’t want to mislead with bucolic imagery) decorated entirely in black-and-white (as were all her houses), with her husband.
Her husband, my uncle, is exploring his lifelong passions of farming, being left the fuck alone and teaching students things in nearby universities after retiring from his 30-year corporate career (which contrary to expectation he liked and never lost his humility and passion for). He used to ride to school on a horse over three-hills and he never stopped being that person. He never stopped being kind. No one would ever be turned away from his door, no matter what they needed. Even when he tipped with extravagance, it was never a demonstration of wealth as much as he painfully related to knowing how much a little bit of money means to people who may be struggling. Everything I learnt about handling a financial struggle with integrity; everything I ever learnt about a realistic, prudent, respectful approach to money, I learnt from him. And we don’t like to talk about this but money is a hard or important lesson to learn depending on how much you have. I remember when I was once visiting them in Toronto, only a few years after they moved there, they had a jar on the kitchen counter where they would put all their loose change so they could go out to their favourite Thai restaurant once a week. The weeks I was there, it cost them more, I didn’t realise it and they never let it show. They just enjoyed allowing me to experience a new thing.
Which is why if I had to pick a couple as a role model for my relationships, I would pick them. In the first 18-years of my relationship with them, I never even saw them argue. Every day, they are excited to spend the day together. Everything new they ever wanted to explore — wine, yoga, Egypt, obsessive pet-parenting, being left alone — they did with each other. That’s the person they wanted most by their side. They never made spouse-hating jokes about one another, not even casually. They only ever talked about each other with pride. He always loved how amazing she is and she always loved how amazing he is. He brings her her favourite flowers, wrapped in newspaper, and without fanfare or even ever handing them over puts them in the designated vase twice a week. She buys him all his clothes because he hates going to stores. They say loving things to each other, often dispassionately because they are so built into their speech patterns. If any one of them ever wanted to move to another country for a job they really wanted, the other went with them. Both ways, always. They still struggle to spend a few days apart from each other. They still spend their life most excited about one another.
That’s the couple I always thought was wonderful. I always loved being around then especially when I was kid because it felt like a vacation from my own dysfunctional family. They actually talked to me about how things at home made me feel; they spent time with me doing things that were fun and made me feel welcome. They were familiar with me which is a thing we often take for granted but not all children grow up in homes where they can be familiar with the adults around them. So my massi and massu (specifically denotional terms for aunt and uncle that means mom’s sister or like a mother and massu or mom’s sister’s husband and not exactly like a father), they’re fantastic, and they are also sexually the most vanilla people you will ever meet. They like sex just fine and love it with each other (and yes I know, because I talk to my massi about her sex life), but the conversation I had to have with my massi after she read 50-Shades of Grey gave me contact trauma. She really took it hard. She literally could not understand why the fuck any of this was happening. It was like aliens to her. She’s not a whimsical creature. It took a year of structured debate for me to convince her to buy a red lace bra. It never really occured to me that their sexual preferences mattered.
It never occured to me until among kinky folk I noticed a trend of routinely placing kinky relationships as better in quality than vanilla ones. Just to be clear, I hate all these terms but I don’t get to pick them so whatever. There’s this idea that inherently all kinky relationships are better and somehow more real or honest. I kinda get it. Having relationships with altered structures, violence, open admission of fetishism does often to lead to more honesty and better communication. It does. And if one does actually adhere to a structure of communication you put in place in a relationship via a hierarchy, it does make communication efficient. The whips and chains and getting punched in the face are a plus. I also am not blind, I see a lot of unhappy relationships around me that could technically be qualified as vanilla. I don’t believe there is any rational reason to think of one as the cause of the other but okay, I can see how one might think the vanilla leads to the unhappiness. And I certainly don’t deny that an honest introduction of a fetish into a relationship could rescue a struggling relationship.
However there is something else that goes on with kinky folk. I didn’t notice it until I community-d and met and communicated with other kinky couples. I’ll often see a couple and they’re like, really happy. They only talk about how amazing their d/s is and how thoroughly one must clean floggers, they’ll gush, and then two days later they’ll have the ugliest break-up imaginable. (Please bear in mind that by this I don’t mean people who get out of relationships and allege abuse/rape, that’s a different thing. It’s not an “ugly break-up”, it’s criminal activity). I know a lot of couples break up in the world after seeming happy together but the frequency at which kinky couples have really ugly, out-of-nowhere break-ups is alarming. There’s something to investigate and think about here. We may always be honest about our sexuality but I believe that within the enamour and glamour of actually having found someone who likes the same sick shit as us, we aren’t always honest about the states of our relationships. It would be nice to believe we have fixed relationships with paddles and voyeurism but really what we have done is, at best, found an activity that two people like that they may or may not enjoy doing with one another depending on how they feel about each other.
After all, being kinky is not what allows for honest and open communication. Being open to communication is what allows for communication. Calling your partner ‘sir’ doesn’t necessitate that we will handle conflict well when having money or other life issues alongside ‘sir’. Genuinely working on healthy conflict-management is what helps you manage conflict. Being kinky doesn’t mean you feel love more or less intensely, either. It may mean you express your love differently. Ultimately though love and compatibility (sexual and otherwise) are most apt descriptions of what may help a relationship keep working than latex and rope. And one look at my massu and massi, you know they work. You know they genuinely love each other every day. You know they are each other’s favourites.
I don’t necessarily need to be spit in the face to be happy but I necessarily need that. I necessarily need love like that.
Ancillary Kink Support 
Leave a comment