Can You Be Sadistic To Someone You Love?

We were sitting down to lunch with a couple of friends we had known for many years. They had been involved in a power-exchange based sadomasochistic relationship with each other for a few years longer than we had been at the time. As we dug into our meal, they asked if they could discuss something with us and a question was raised –

“After having been with someone for so long and loving them so much, how are you still able to mistreat them, hurt them, enforce rules and cause them pain especially in ways you know they do not like?”

It was not the first time I had encountered that question and it would not be the last. In the years that followed, it is a question that has been posed to us, as a couple, and to us, individually, with some degree of regularity. I think I understand the basis of the question, it supposes that in order to be harsh, strict, cruel and even sadistic to a person, you have to be able to harden a part of your heart and love softens that part of your heart perhaps rendering you incapable of being hurtful in that way. In addition, I think sometimes, when you have been with a person for a long time, enforcement of rules or protocols suffers because other aspects of your relationship become more important, and as individuals, we also have the tendency to let it be or go because it would be a whole thing to start it back up again. They are different problems and I’d like to address the one about love being antithetical to sadism and cruelty.

I do get why it seems like it must be.

Outside of our conception of power-exchange and sadomasochism, we all exist in society and have ideas of love and romance that have been taught to us over the course of the years. We may continue to harbour beliefs that are socially-informed which completely disallow us from viewing hurting someone as being in keeping with loving them. It is not so much about what you think love means or what you do when in love, but about what you think you shouldn’t do when you love someone. You shouldn’t hurt, berate or demean the people you love. That makes sense on the face of it, but when you consider the nature of power-exchange and sadomasochism, you have to wonder what about those relationships makes them transgressive, and it is this. It is the ability to alter the connotation of a convention and redesign it in accordance with an individualised system of expression. Hurting someone in a sadomasochistic relationship does not mean the same thing as hurting them in a different relationship. The hurt is desired and it means something to both parties.

That’s important because sometimes the inability to see pain as a part of a loving relationship has less to do with your ideas of romance and more to do with how you view sadomasochism itself. If you think of it only as a fantastical space where you get to be wild, that is okay, but when you begin a relationship with someone as a space to explore your wildness, and then it evolves into love, you may find that you are unable to reconcile your conventions of wildness with your ideas of love. And in that, there are some questions that arise for me, and maybe should for you, if you find yourself contending with this issue. For instance, if when you say that you cannot hurt someone once you love them, and the reason for that is that you care too much about them now and you want to protect them, then how exactly do you feel about hurting the people you do not love? Do you not care when you play with someone you do not love? Do you not consider protecting those people from harm as part of your charter of duties towards a casual play-partner?

Of course, it is perfectly understandable to not want to be too affectionate or intimate in a more casual relationship, but if you are engaging in pain or control based play with anyone, a certain level of care seems vital to me. I am good to play with people who don’t love me and never will, but it feels decidedly different to me when I think of it from the perspective that those people don’t care at all about my well-being if they do not love me, and if they did, they would not be able to hurt me. It is not my intention to demonise anyone grappling with such an issue, but I do urge anyone who has not considered it from this perspective to think about. When you say you can only hurt people you do not love, what does that mean? What is different about loving someone in your conception? If your answer veers towards the direction that you do not care or it would be okay for you if you harmed someone you did not love vis-à-vis if you harmed someone you do love, it may warrant more thought. If it feels like you can envision playing these games with the person with whom you are sowing your wild oats but not with one with whom you see a long-term future, you may want to consider what you are projecting onto your partner.

Of course, not all of it comes from that space either. One of the things that comes up repeatedly for me and my partner is that people are surprised that we are so openly affectionate and mushy and sappy and pathetic with each other, and they take that to be evidence that our sexuality must not be so extreme as it seems. Eh. Extreme is a weird way to measure, anyway. I think this comes up because of the idea somewhat prevalent in the misguided zeitgeist of sadomasochistic power-exchange that masters/slaves cannot be human with each other, that one usurps power by demanding affection or tenderness, and the other loses power when they express it. In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth. It does not make him any less authoritative or terrifying when he is stepping on my face to have mauled me with hugs and kisses earlier in the afternoon. It does not make him seem weak to me nor make me less likely to cower to him because I have seen him cry over the death of a puppy he was nursing.

But I understand.

It is the range that is jarring. It is jarring to me too sometimes. I am constantly awed by the fact that he can be so cruel to me and so kind as well. That he can make me feel horrible and also wonderful. That he can be so cold and also so warm. That he can be the monster from my nightmares and the angel from my dreams. However, that is what makes it so much more meaningful, it’s because I can see that those things, while they may seem like antonyms, are actually coming from the same place. He shows himself to me, in its entirety, he is free to be all of himself, and when that looks like opposite behaviour, that is a trick of the light, it is an illusion. In actuality, all of it is enabled and an expression of our love for one another. Being hurt by him feels like love, because it is. On the face of it, it is cruelty, but when you look closer, it is also a recognition of one another’s true needs, the acceptance of that vulnerability, the trust to show yourself as who you are and the willingness to embody that space with them. What could feel more like love than that?

In that love is as transgressive as transgressive can be, because it can truly be anything. There is no convention it won’t transcend.