At the tail-end of the first weekend I spent at his place, I saw him polish his shoes. Immediately I knew that I wanted to do that for him. It was hot but also that’s who I am. It’s how I love: I’ll clean your house, cook your dinner, sew the button back onto your shirt. The chores and tasks you do every day for yourself will disappear into my to-do list because I’ll do them all. I’ll do them when you can’t see me do them so you don’t even have to bear the effort of watching it happen or the urge of feeling like you need to help. So I told him that I wanted to polish his shoes. He said: That’s hot but it makes me uncomfortable.
Having me polish his shoes made him uncomfortable as it would make most decent people uncomfortable. There were many other little things that made him uncomfortable: when I first cleaned his house, when I first cleaned his bathroom, even when I took his plates to the kitchen after we first ate together. These things made him uncomfortable because he wasn’t letting his submissive/slave to do this for him, he was letting a woman he was dating do it. When two kinky people start dating and/or fucking you don’t immediately fall into a d/s dynamic (or any dynamic) and draw up a contract. He wanted me, I wanted him. Everything else we built later. By far the wisest approach I’ve ever taken, just saying.
Now, of course, he’s very comfortable with those things. Actually he gets kinda mad if his shoes aren’t polished because we’ve changed dynamic and positions drastically since who we were back then. As much as I’m trained to cater to him, he’s trained to accept my ways and adapt to them.
Really, it started with acknowledging that this really works for us. I really think that starts in the bedroom. You know, sure, there’s emotional and mental components to d/s but I’m willing to be quoted when I say sex is where the communication begins. D/s begins in the bedroom. You can’t tell someone about your deep-seated need for servility within the first couple of months of a relationship but you can get turned on while polishing their shoes and hump them while he watches. My absolute favorite thing about sex is how much honest communication lies in the act itself. From who you do it with, to why and right down to the extremely specific details of what you need to hear to come. Sex is like storytelling but it’s the only form of it that’s more fun than writing (<— personal opinion).
Eventually though, if you have sexual needs that require something other than the best physical sex ever, you’re going to have to vocalize that. This is by far my least favorite part of the process. I just hate talking about what I want out loud with a real person. It sucks. I’ve known this about myself forever so I correct for it by writing down what I feel and then being available for discussion on the subject matter presented in paper. My problem in sharing what I feel is that I feel way too much shit and I need a lot of time to explain it. My love for backstory is at a pathological point. So it just works better if I send you reading material and you come prepared for class. I mean, group discussion.
There’s that and there’s another thing standing in the way of honest communication. This is a problem I’ve had before and though I thought I’d worked it out, it’s actually more persistent than I realized. I have a moronic urge to have my partner guess what I am feeling and just give me what I want in some kind of fairy tale romantic gesture (but like an old-school fairy tale that ends in blood and fucking and maybe some mythic creature is watching from behind the bushes?). It sounds like a very bad thing when I put it in plain terms like that but I think we all have this urge a little. To be swept off our feet. Surprised. Caught off guard. Have a little mystery. Wait for him to guess exactly what I want. That story just reads better for some reason. The story where the prince surprises me and just gives me everything I’ve ever wanted without having to ask for it. And then we’d live happily ever after in our dungeon.
But generally speaking, that’s a pretty bad idea. The unfortunate thing is that you can’t cheat your way into making a dynamic work for your relationship. Any moron can (and a few have) impose(d) a hundred rules on me and beat me really hard but that’s not what I want. I know exactly what I want because when we do actually achieve that perfect balance of power exchange and life something amazing happens. I am at my most productive, it’s like my day has 35 hours. He’s at his most active. We communicate perfectly. Work runs smoothly and so does our home life. And the chemistry between us is like we’re playing with a magic form of fire that only burns you slightly so you always think you want more.
That state is not constant and I think expecting it to be constant is unreasonable. You can’t actually simulate it with scheduling butt-plugging hour and ordering display of subspace dances (I’m just guessing, I don’t know what other people do in their dynamic and neither do you). But I find this state worth working towards. Even constantly. It makes me more disciplined, more focused, more likely to achieve my goals. It makes him feel more like himself than he ever has, more assertive and confident, and also hornier. Plus it makes me feel like I’m living in an enchanted forest.
But it’s hard to remain in the enchanted forest because when you are in there you’re going to touch the magic stones and some of them are portkeys that kick you straight out back to earth.
Sometimes we don’t have the time or the energy to engage in the level of active communication and feedback it takes to keep this up and running. It just happens because I keep breaking mugs and then we have to work because we have to buy new mugs and also maybe a little basket to the keep the clothespins in and those leggings with the ankle band thing and maybe a table?
Sometimes it doesn’t work because we go down a wrong path. Either there’s nothing there or one of us is forcing it or (this one is much more rare but it can happen) it was a really bad fucking idea to take that path and now you have to kill a dragon to get out. It really sucks when you put a lot of work into something and then you just have to shut it down and start again. It’s natural to stall when you have to pick it up again.
Sometimes the d/s stands in the way of the d/s. Really. Sometimes there is such a great contrast in what you require emotionally (communication, care, attention) and what you get physically (the shit beaten out of you) that it’s hard to be in the same place. Sometimes it’s him that feels too guilty to continue treating me like that. It happens. Every sadist I know says they just want to hurt you, but most i’ve been with need the aftercare portion just as much. Sometimes how you treat someone looks bad after the fact. It’s hard to strike a perfect balance but when it works it’s like magic.
When it doesn’t work it’s still pretty top-notch fucking so really I don’t see a downside.
Ancillary Kink Support 
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