#building the house

Life can be cruel, thrusting you alone into something that you have no precedent for, no experience to draw from and nothing to guide you. You can't intrinsically deal with the realisation of your submission, because it’s not an intrinsic issue. You’re not submissive genetically, just as much as you’re not an extrovert genetically, or a bookworm. I’m sure genes play a part, but it’s just as much in the process as the ingredients. That’s what the amateur sociologist in me says, anyway. 

So, naturally, you turn to those more knowledgeable than yourself. The Dominants, the kinksters, the submissives, the slaves, the masters, the lifers. Those who have been doing this for a long time, and turn up at the Munches looking like aging secret agents who haven’t quite given up on leather as a fashion statement yet. Shared glances under secretive eyes, inside jokes and welcoming arms. It’s a massive comfort. I get it. 

But I want to throw in a conflicting philosophy for you, because if you do go to a Munch, or talk to people involved in D/s online, or even mention it in passing to someone who likes to tie people up, or being tied up, you’re going to, eventually, have someone tell you that there are rules and protocols and standard practice that you mustfollow. 

I’m not talking about safety rules. Safe, sane and consensual is always applicable, and that’s the kind of tenet that you should have tattooed on your soul. Always in mind, never forgotten. That sort of thing is fucking essential, and if you throw that out of the window you’re being very stupid. 

What I’m talking about are people trying to dictate your attitudes to your Dominant, or your Dominant’s attitudes towards you. Those who say that you have to have certain rules in place for it to even be considered a D/s relationship. I’m headed into the extreme of the example here, but you get the idea, I’m sure. 

The problem is it’s a pretty comforting thing to have. It’s a framework that you can work with, something to fall back on if you ever find yourself lost in a scene, a safety net. It’s at this point that you furrow your brow and look at me with that adorable quizzical expression on your face, and you ask me something like:

“Well if it’s all those good things, why is it a problem?”

Good question, have a biscuit.

Pavlov had a dog. He’d feed it and ring a bell, every day for weeks. Then, after all this time of ringing and feeding, he stopped with the second half. Crazy thing was, the dog started salivating just because he’d heard that bell ringing. His brain had made such a strong link between the sensation of eating the food and hearing the bell that they were the same thing in its head. 

I always felt incredibly sorry for that dog. Thought it was going to get some food, and all it got was some stupid bell. Pavlov was an arse. 

Honestly, I don’t know if this is going to be as big an issue for them as it is for me, but I don’t want to be Pavlov’s dog. I don’t want to have someone else’s ideas, decided by them (or, more likely, the people before them, and before them, and before them, ad infinitum), making links in my head about the way I live my life. And D/s is such a big part of my life that to have someone else’s ideas about it dictating my behaviour is genuinely scary. 

Far more importantly is that D/s is such an unfathomably broad umbrella of things that to be prescribed to anything without your explicit considered thought and decision is doing a disservice to yourself. Yes, you’re new and completely overwhelmed with the options and choices presented to you, but that’s not an excuse to blindly follow the first dogma placed in front of you.

You don’t have to call your Dominant ‘Sir’, or 'Master’, or anything. You can call him by his first name, his surname, or an invented name that you’ve come up with together, that means something to you. Just because something is accepted practice doesn’t mean it has to be your accepted practice. 

Just because you’re in a D/s relationship it doesn’t mean you have to be in a sadomasochistic one. Just because you want to be owned doesn’t mean you have to be spanked, or tied up, or anything. I’m going to give this next sentence its own paragraph.

You do not have to do anything you do not want to do. 

This is your fucking life, and your fucking relationship. Have it however you want it, so long as you’re both happy. Do the things you want to do, and leave the rest of them on the buffet for other people to enjoy. Mob rules are, by and large, the most ill-informed, idiotic rules that exist. So don’t go with the mob. Find an alleyway away from the crowd and start making out. You’ll have much more fun, I promise. 

Build your own damn house. If you want to use bricks and support beams that other people give you, then that’s absolutely fine. Just think about it for a while, make sure that you really want those bits and pieces of other people’s lives become bits and pieces of yours. Because, if you leave it long enough, you’re going to have a hell of a time getting them out.

And you don’t want to be the dog salivating when the bell rings. Trust me.

Somewhat related part one here, about approaching D/s with a partner that isn’t into D/s. Yet.