You Cannot Fix Your Dynamic By Recreating The Past.

She was telling me a story about him grabbing her hair and dragging her up the stairs to beat her. He watched her intently as she revealed all the salacious information and interjected the moment she stopped speaking.

“That was seven years ago,” he said, “And that is what I keep saying, we need to get back to that.”

It was not the first time I had heard a couple complain about the present and decide the past was the fix for all their problems, nor would it be the last. Kinky or not, this is a common relationship ailment, the insistence that if there is a problem, it can be fixed by going back to how things used to be. The promise of the mythical land of “how things used to be” seems a little bit like a trap to me. Anytime I have ever suggested to people in a relationship (who came to me for advice) that they should stop trying to recreate the past and really think about what’s appealing to them now, I’ve been met with reticence, and sure, I don’t actually have the right answers for everyone so maybe they were right to resist. I do also understand the allure of this place that used to be. When your dirty, kinky love is new and still in the stage of discovery, it’s exciting in a way that is more thrill than you’re used to. It’s the peak of frenzy, you’re up for everything, you’re willing and able to make time for it because it’s on top of your priority list, you’re proactive, you want to contribute to the building of a dynamic, you what to play as much as possible, everything you do with one another has novelty. It’s exciting and that’s amazing, what’s less amazing is that often interest seems to fade alongside excitement for some.

It’s the danger of believing that discovery is a phase in a relationship and not a continuous, ongoing, unending process and past a point you will have learnt everything about your partner, except, if you stop learning the changes in one another, the chances that you will wake up one day and be completely shocked by the person you love are high. A friend of mine slowly developed a fetish for displaying her body in various positions as demanded by a top, she didn’t tell her partner, at first, she didn’t even know it was happening. She watched a video, there was a part of the video that excited her more than anything else, she told me about it and slowly, it turned into a fixation and a masturbatory aid. When she finally did tell her dominant that she wanted to incorporate that practice into their sexual repertoire, he was resistant, doubtful and even told her that she’s not really into this because she wasn’t into it when they first got together. The people we change into sometimes threaten our partners because they don’t know how we came to those changes without them (and without continuous communication, you cannot know) and having the power to view the beginning as the benchmark provides the safety of being able to reset to a stage when everyone was comfortable and happy.

Safety is important to us, right? At least, part of the allure of D/s and power-exchange is that they are safe relationships. Let me explain. Of course, the things we do within our relationships and the methods in which we express our sexuality are sometimes dangerous, but as relationships go, D/s relationships are all about structure – everything is explicitly stated, the power equation is clear and agreed upon, accountability is built into the equation, norms for behavior are clear, expectations are openly exchanged, even methods of address and emotional expression may be expressly negotiated – and most commonly, the thing that makes people feel safe in relationships is knowing exactly where everyone stands. With D/s relationships you have the ability to map the coordinates of where everyone stands with the exactness of a cartographer and that’s part of the appeal of such a dynamic (to me), but there is another side to this overly-structured relationship, it’s the human relationship with routine. It’s in our nature to want it and then to grow to resist it, particularly a sexual routine. In the beginning of my relationship with my current top (I just change what I call him in every piece because I am so uncomfortable with honorifics until I am on the floor, getting my ass kicked, just gives me the cringe otherwise, even after all these years), the rules and protocols we instituted were extremely exciting, especially as they developed organically and felt like they had so much meaning to us. Having stopped doing some of them (or changing some of them) over the years, I can see how someone may look at the relationship and determine the “d/s is crumbling.”

That’s not how it is, though. We talk a lot about sub frenzy, but not so much about sub fatigue. I can only be turned on by polishing a shoe 500 times before I need to change the act or the narrative surrounding the act. If we paused our narrative at “how things used to be,” it would eventually start to feel like reliving the same day over-and-over again. I don’t kiss my partner’s feet before I get into bed every night as I did for the first four years of our relationship, I kiss his fingers now (and for a couple of years in between, I kissed nothing), but that never would have come about if we had sat there in fear of losing our protocol. If I thought of the ideal power-exchange as what we did before, there are tonnes of things about each other and ourselves that we never would have discovered. I would love to pretend that I have such vast amounts of devotion to my lord-and-master that I would never dare to be fatigued by an act of protocol, but I cannot do that because it’s a lie. I get bored of the same sexual expressions as much as any person in a different type of relationship may get bored of always being fucked in the same position (which, funnily enough, is like my strongest fetish right now, I’d sooner change kidneys than positions), the things that thrilled me the most, sometimes turn benign, for a while or in perpetuity. Is that really so bad? The world is filled with other things, sexuality is an endless repository of creativity.

I mean, I understand what this fear is about. It’s multi-pronged, I think. There is the baseline human fear that makes one wonder: If you change, will you stop loving/needing/wanting me? We are mostly tempted by the safety of predictability but love is an ongoing gamble, right? Just because we found and chose someone, doesn’t mean we’ll always want to choose them. It’s an active choice (which, a lot of times we make on the basis of the past instead of the present), and professing forever doesn’t make forever happen. Nothing guarantees forever, and for me, knowing that makes being honest and real more important, I don’t want who I become to be a shock for the people who love me (and vice versa), I want them to be there as I become someone else and if ultimately, that makes us incompatible, that’s the gamble I am willing to accept. However, particularly in power-exchange, we have a tendency to be a little bit pedantic about what constitutes a particular role. Many of us spend years of going through the scarce availability of compatible partners to maybe find a few who work well with us and when we do, we sometimes become a little too specific about what it means to be a sub, slave, master or whatever who is perfectly suited to us. I’ve been through this myself; I’ll be honest about it.

Once upon a time, domestic service like cooking meals, serving them and cleaning the house was a big part of how I expressed my slavery. It was a private act that happened within our household of two people, but over time, that changed drastically. It changed because we started to raise a child together and the politics of domestic work being gendered and unfairly expected from a single partner (who was also employed) came into my house. Look, of course, I could explain to the child that my choice to do all the household work is about romance and not social expectations but firstly, I don’t know if that is true, it’s easily possible that I associate service and romance with domestic servitude because that is what I grew up watching, and secondly, there are things you tell children and things they learn by observation. I don’t need my son to learn that if he just expects romance in the form of service, he never has to learn to take care of himself or be responsible for himself. He could easily learn that from watching the interplay of romantic domestic service (just like millions of men have learnt that their moms dropping everything to cook for them is love, and while it may well be, the entitlement to that form of love from all women, is patriarchy). It is way more important to me that my son learn equal responsibility, the politics of unpaid labour and to do the dishes even if he has a penis, it is way more important that he see his dad clean the house and cook a meal, than I be able to continue doing all the housework as a form of sexual service. That’s my choice, it doesn’t have to be yours, and in no way am I the authority on whether it is the *right choice, but these are my priorities (and my partners’) and sometimes those priorities conflict with the way you want to express your sexuality.

To tell the truth, there was a moment, when I too felt like I was no longer being “a real slave” because I wasn’t doing the things I used to do, the ones that we had come to accept as inherent parts of our dynamic. I’m not thrilled that I ever felt that way but I did, and I am glad that I came to the other side of it having realized that I don’t have to be the same slave forever. I don’t even have to identify as a slave forever, if it stops working, it fucking stops working. There is nothing transgressive about breaking the shackles of social conditioning to embrace your sexuality, only to then let the norms of a sexual subculture shackle you right back. For me, it was vital to learn that feeling submissive was not necessarily measured by specific symbols and actions that used to exist or have more meaning, those can change and it’s fun when they do. Even if it is a little heartbreaking to lament the loss of something you used to love, it’s all part of the experience, and it does not mean that I stopped wanting to take that role in my relationship. If I did, that may mean we have to restructure or decouple, but that’s the gamble.

If I let the fear of destruction or change keep me from pursuing myself, and I kept trying to recreate a past version of power exchange that used to work, it would be like forcing myself into the clothes I wore ten years ago. They may not fit, it may no longer be my style, they may be uncomfortable and they may convince me that I am the problem. I’m not. Kink-based relationships are still relationships, they’re not special, and as much as we want them to be super different, human beings are the same. We gon have problems. We can fix them or we can delude ourselves with history. It’s our choice.