BDSM: My Experiences and My Relationship
* this essay contains 18+ content about sexual and kink experiences
written on 10/04/2023
This is not so much a thought or opinion piece like my other essays - instead, it's just thoughts about the role of bdsm in my relationship with my partners, and why it's so important to me, as well as thoughts on "taboo" kinks and purity culture online, and how overcoming that improved my relationships a lot.
I was first exposed to the idea of bdsm when I was 15, mostly through discussions of it online from other people my age. I was curious, and so I ended up doing research using both websites and youtube. This led me to discover people like Evie Lupine who I still watch today, and were amazing for education and later for guiding myself into safe play in relationships.
Even though there tends to be a lot of heated discussion about the idea of people discovering bdsm "too young," I am personally glad that I was able to access good opinions and research about it at that age. I understood the importance of not participating as a minor, and so I tucked it away as something I knew I might want to do as an adult.
Unfortunately, 15 was also the year that I was groomed, and this destroyed my view of relationships and sex for a long time. However, after years of therapy and working on myself personally to overcome that, I started dating my girlfriend when I was 18, who is now my wife and who I still love with all my heart. A few months into our relationship, the subject of bdsm came up as something we were both interested in. We ended up consulting with friends who had been doing it for a few years, and decided we would try it and start slow, mostly by introducing it into our sex life.
First and foremost, I think this really helped with a lot of the fear and uncertainty I had around sex. I was still dealing with sexual and religious trauma that impacted my view of myself, and opening up to kink with someone I trusted allowed me to embrace my sexual wants and needs, as well as encouraged us to be open about these things and discuss what we wanted without shame.
After about a year of this, at which point we'd already had our marriage ceremony, we decided we wanted to incorporate bdsm into our everyday private life as oppose to just isolated scenes. We once again turned to irl friends for guidance on this, who were an amazing help in giving us advice and places to start.
From then on, we started slow, incorporating d/s dynamics gradually into any time we had alone together. It was amazing to see how this fostered such a sense of trust and intimacy between us - through continual communication and practice, it allowed us to fall into a place where we had instinctual trust for each other and led us through a lot of emotional intimacy as we discussed what this meant to us and how to keep moving forward.
I remember this was a point where I started to feel unsure - not because of anything we were doing, but because I started to remember a lot of the things I had been told by past friends and seen around in general internet culture. Things parading 24/7 as inherently abusive, cnc as immoral, and cgl dynamics as being wrong and disgusting - all things I was interested in for the dynamic we were working out.
It took a huge effort to really get out of my own head and away from this idea that some kinks inherently imply support of real life atrocities. One of the first rules in the wider bdsm community is "Your kink is not my kink, and that's okay" - there is overall very little judgement about what other people are into in real life communities, as long as people are being safe and healthy about their relationships. It helped me a lot to talk to people like this, find a new friend group of less judgemental people, and watch videos discussing these kinds of topics in depth.
After a year, we officially made the decision to enter a fulltime / 24/7 dynamic. We wrote our contract with a lot of discussion, chose a collar, and did a private collaring ceremony with just a few irl friends. As of now, I've been officially collared to Aucheya for almost 3 years, and I honestly couldn't be any happier.
Participating in bdsm has genuinely done so much for our relationship with each other. Aside from helping both of us a lot with sexual insecurity and uncertainty, it fosters an ability to communicate with each other openly, be honest about our wants and needs, and develop a huge amount of respect and trust for each other. After almost 3 years, we have a lot of deep embedded trust for each other in our dynamic - we trust each other's judgement for a wide variety of situations, while also knowing we're both free to express discomfort with anything and not be judged or beat down on for it.
Bdsm as a lifestyle has become huge for my health and relationships, and I'm super grateful to the people and channels that helped me explore it safely, as well as to Aucheya for being the most amazing dom I could ever hope for. I'm looking forward to continuing to learn and grow in our dynamic and experiences. I wanted to have some kins of post on my website expressing all of this - as well as noting that I'm happy to answer questions from 18+ people about bdsm, participating safely, and anything else you may want to know about it.
