Before me, my last boyfriend wasn’t terribly taken with bdsm. It wasn’t that he was turned off by it, it was just that he didn’t understand much beyond the stuff he saw in pop-ups or the movies. He didn’t understand the root of it, he just understood how it manifested itself.
When we met, I was shocked at how open he was to everything. Not even just sexual stuff, but the stuff that came first. He was so candid, so amazingly transparent that it was hard not to feel comfortable around him. And I think that was what made me so uncomfortable at first. I didn’t want to just give myself away to someone so quickly. When I trusted, I trusted completely. When I fell, I fell hard.
He was pretty quick to comment on how “closed” I was. Probably about the third thing he said to me was in reference to how he thought I had a wall up. I tried to explain, but he didn’t get it. I said, “I’ve been hurt.” And he says, “well, everyone’s been hurt.” And I said, “I trust people pretty heavily.” And he replied, “well, so does everyone else.”
It wasn’t until the first time he dominated me, about six months after we met, that he saw what I meant. I went along with everything he tried as he explored this new role I’d given him. He saw how fragile I could be, how trusting I could get, and how hurt I could be made. My last relationship with a man before him had ended because we couldn’t transition from dom and sub into something else. The emotions didn’t match the desire and the transition out of the relationship was terribly difficult for me.
I was afraid to give someone that much of myself again and yet, for some reason, I gave this new guy an inch. Which turned into a mile and then a whole roadtrip of a wonderful, fulfilling relationship which is now a beautiful friendship. But I didn’t know that when I first let him dominate me. I assumed I could create an emotional disconnect like I could with just hooking up, but I couldn’t. I was already giving the inch, the mile, maybe even some of the trip.
When we finished, I was curled up on the floor, clinging to his leg like a buoy post-shipwreck. I wanted to tell him what this all meant to me, how much I’d given, what he’d signed onto, but before I could even find the words, he looked down and said to me, “I get it now.”