I used to think A and I were perfect for one another. Our story seemed like a twisted fairy-tale. A young girl whose only purpose was her own erotic destruction and a slightly older man whose sexuality responded only to the violent debasement of women. I used to tell the story of how we met with the practised punchline that pierced through my exterior into my heart. The first beautiful thing he said to me: *The only part of you I am interested in is your blood*. It took one moment for me to fall in love with him, I have no idea how we went from strangers to soulmates but I know it happened quickly. In one second, we came to life.

It took nine-years for us to die.

On some level, one much more prominent in the later years, I was reluctant to leave him because I wondered how else and where else I could find a person who would want the things that I did. No one ever talks about the biggest problem with the concept of Prince Charming, when you get him, you start to believe that if you leave him, there won’t be another. He is just supposed to be forever and if he isn’t there won’t be another perfect person who gives you exactly what you need, especially when what you need is so specific, and a little weird. Until I was 23, it was most important to me that I get what I need sexually, it was more important than happiness, than peace, than safety, than being respected in a relationship. I believed the madness of the relationship was a bargain for what I got out of it.

I ignored so much because of that math, and I don’t mean that I ignored the abusive bits, I saw those quite clearly and wanted to remain there for them, but I ignored the bits that made me truly unhappy with him. I couldn’t introduce him to my friends or colleagues, he was embarassing, in modern parlance he was the kind of person who would be interested in *alternative facts* and I worked with activists, academic and reporters. My goodness. In some ways we were both very similar, extroverts with a lot of questions or opinions, and in other ways we were very different, I am analytical by nature and he was reactive by nature. I hated going to dinner with him because I literally could not talk to the guy, eighty percent of the time we left the house together, we had sex because we couldn’t stand each other’s company. He thought I purposely made him feel dumb and I believe, still, he just is dumb, but it is the kind of dumb that has the degrees to prove it’s smart. We had different value systems too. I value independence, self-reliance, discipline and creativity. He valued culture, family, stability and socially-dictated morality. I wanted to do a lot of things in the world, he wanted to settle down at the right time.

But I didn’t think any of that mattered, really. I thought, in a stoke of my own dumb behaviour, that he wanted to play master and I wanted to play servant so obviously, we belonged together. I mean what are the odds that someone would be as into genital torture as I am? Certainly, that meant that we belonged together. The problem with me and romance is that it makes me stupid and I strongly consent to letting it do so. I won’t stop doing that either, I cannot safeword from life, you know? The vulnerability it requires to take chances and get hurt, I am willing to continue to bear that because I have spent five minutes inside the life where you just turn cold and exist, and I don’t think I can do that. I wouldn’t have any motivation left to keep living, if I didn’t keep loving. I am prone to symbolist bouts of meaning when it comes to romance and so I believed in us. I believed because the romance between us was so ethereal it was like a break from reality.

That’s why it took nine years for us to die.

I know that we all *know* there are other kinky people in the world, but kink has specific and layered flavours, and we meet people who goes well with ours from time to time, but in only in rare instances does peanut butter meet choclate. When we are in a relationship like that, it seems like a few red flags, a few issues a few violations, a few broken bones aren’t really worth ending that. Surely, that is magic. A while after I left A, I realised why peanut butter meets chocolate so rarely, it’s because it is not supposed to do that. We aren’t flavours of ice cream matched up based on a single sphere of interests, that’s dumb. You can like tennis, I can like tennis, but that is only good enough reason for us to play tennis together, not enough of a reason to build a life together. Sub date dom, sadist date masochist, master date slave is an imperfect system, or at least an incomplete one.

I no longer date based on compatibility of kink. It’s because of my husband, really. When I met him, we were into different flavours of things. He was daddy with a mean side and I was slave with a death-wish. Those two things may sound like they could play well together, but it’s not always the truth. It didn’t matter though. See I won’t deny that there is basic level of kink-indulgence that is required to date in these settings, but this discussion is about forming relationships past that level, when that level has already been achieved. In that regard, it didn’t really matter to me that we weren’t into the same things. I just met him and I could not stop talking to him. He could not stop talking to me. We had so much to say to one another and the pleasure of the conversation was unexpected to me. It wasn’t the suggestion, the innuendo or the flirting that was unexpected, it was the pleasure of exchanging impertinent, irrelevant life details. It doesn’t matter at all that I had a velvet dress when I was nine or that he had a blue bicycle, but we could not stop talking about those things. It was the first time in my life that I was in a relationship where I was truly compatible with the *person* I was dating, not what their sexuality needed from people. I can never go back. I can fuck and play with people based on needs, but I cannot love anymore because you’re a top and I’m a bottom, and you will hit me exactly as a symbol of trauma from my childhood once did.

That is not romance.

Well, it can be, but it isn’t romance for me now. Romance is that I cannot wait to talk to the man I love and live with every single day. I am sad when we don’t get to hang. It’s the most important part of my day, it’s the part of my day I look forward to the most. I cannot go back from here. I now know what it is like to be able to enjoy every facet of a relationship and I cannot undo this now. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about the kink anymore. I care very, very much. I am a very sexual person and my sexuality is how I connect with the world, with love, with art, with everything, but my sexuality is also open to impact by the people I love.

The fact that my husband and I weren’t into exactly the same things didn’t really matter, like combining two compounds, our sexualities when put together yielded something completely different, and it just happened. We responded to one another from a place of passion, not of definition for what the passion should look like. The kink between us changes all the time, it definitely has a specific flavour, but it changes as we do, and as the story gets longer. This is how I love now. Sub date dom is just not good enough.