Why D/s Relationships Feel Like The Safest Relationships To Me.

Written by Ancilla L.

For a long time, I wondered exactly what it was about power exchange and the D/s relationships that appealed to me. I’ve been a masochist for as long as I have been alive and the allure of pain is so easy for me to understand because it’s so simple—it feels good—whereas the allure of structured power dynamics has been harder to comprehend. Obviously, there are emotional, sexual, artistic and probably political reasons as to why I gravitate towards certain aspects of it. I enjoy the sentimentality of powerlessness, of being held in vulnerability, in perpetuity, and watching yourself adapt to synthetic conditions that mimic the nature of the human condition, with the expectation that you chose them. I enjoy the rush of nothingness, of objectification, of belonging by way of ownership. I love the various microcosms that are enabled by the intersection of love, violence and power. It appeals to my sense of romance.

However, all of those things are about the role I take within the relationship. The sentimentality and the sexuality of it are about the nature of the role, and in parsing through that for years on end, I missed a major part of the appeal, because it doesn’t lie within in the nature of the role, it lies within the structure. I love D/s and power-exchange because of the structure, they feel like the safest relationships.

I love structure. You don’t understand, that sentence is not enough to explain exactly how much I love it. I live with entire life within structures, I relate to the world because I understand people through structures of society, politics, emotion et al, I know myself because I was able to deduce a framework which enables me to deduce my emotional being. Structure, to me, is not rigidity, it’s comprehension. Within it, everything is defined, everything is clear, one thing leads to another, the world makes sense. D/s is about clearly-defined structure. In other relationships, I have often found myself in situations where I had no idea what was going on. In my previous long-term relationship, even though power and pain played a major role, there was no structure, and as a result, I never knew what was being expected of me and why.

The why makes a huge difference. I find, in most of my relationships (non d/s and not necessarily sexual), I often have no idea what is going on. People say and do things for a reason, but they rarely state that reason honestly and openly. I have spent most of my life trying to figure out what people really mean because I have also spent a lot of my life being told I have missed signals, hidden meanings or failed to identify someone’s emotional state correctly. Very often, my understanding of situations and that of the other twelve people in the room is completely different, to the point where mine seems stupid and naive, like I missed the most obvious things. I wish I could explain that I literally cannot identify them unless you explicitly tell me. I have learnt some conventions from the world, but they only take you so far, most of the time, I have no idea what I have done or what I was supposed to do. And even though, objectively, I understand that obviously people don’t always say exactly what they mean and I shouldn’t assume they do based on experience, in practise, it amounts to nothing. I cannot change my way because the wiring only supports one method, and so, often, I don’t know what to do.

I always know in D/s, though.

It normalizes certain conventions of clear and open expectation-setting which then translates into other aspects of communication. In structured and negotiated power exchange, everything is so beautifully and clearly-defined. The fucking practise is encouraged! You don’t have to insinuate that you would like me to kneel at 5 PM every day, you can just tell me, we can have explicit systems of accountability. I don’t have to hope that you understand not to violate me in constant vulnerability, I can just state my need for security and expect you to adhere to the guidelines to provide it. I don’t mean that everyone in D/s is automatically more honest, there are many who are not, but it provides a structure in which honesty and detail can be so efficiently maneuvered to create clarity. It requires you to clarify the scope of control and power, and eliminate spaces where you don’t wish to cede any without being made to feel like you are being worn down over time. In my experience, when it works well, it completely eradicates emotionally-driven power struggles. It also caters to the fact that vulnerability is a necessity for the functionality of the relationship and makes room for conventions that make vulnerability as safe as it can be.

And you know what else?

I find, in relationships, I am often confused about where people stand. I don’t just mean that in terms of dating but even there. I have recently learnt that the fact that I state my intentions extremely clearly to anyone I pursue (ie; express my interest, ask if it is reciprocal, state my intentions and delineate the nature of relationship in which I am interested) is not always received well. People like to play games with romantic pursuit, we call it push-and-pull to make it seem more playful, but to me it’s just a headache. I don’t need only serious, committed relationships, but I always need explicitly defined relationships. Even in friendships, when people change and the roles we have in the lives of one another evolve, we refuse to state that is the case, and maybe for some it is a form of emotional protection but to others, like me, it’s confusion and confusion is like a needle in the eye to me. It completely debilitates me. I am never confused within the structures of D/s because it is always okay to ask exactly what roles we take on for one another and define those roles in terms of nature, expression, scope etc. The clarity is like rolling in warm, fresh laundry.

Even all of the practises of communication that I have learnt from my involvement in D/s—negotiation, debriefing, development of protocols, definition of roles, defining scope of power, limit-setting, redressal, delineation of aftercare, clear questioning and individualised answers, development of personalised structures, exploration of boundaries—have been practises of communication for which I have been looking my entire life. If I could apply them to all of my relationships, I would. They make sense to me. D/s makes sense to me. That is why it feels like the safest kind of relationship. I’m never guessing, asking is always the right answer, I always know where I stand and what I am expected to do, truth-telling is encouraged and accountability is built into the system. It’s a beautiful structure. It makes so much sense to my brain.

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