A Married Couple Tried to Make Me Their Pregnant Unicorn

Encountering the wrong sort of kinksters helped me better define my desires.

When I found out that I was pregnant in September 2013, it was a strange time in my life. I had a pretty good idea that the man I’d been living with since May was going to leave me. I loved him, and I was very apprehensive about motherhood, so I hoped I was wrong.

I wasn’t.

He ended our relationship in mid-November and insisted I leave our apartment. Part of me felt like it was a silly request. We were having a baby and our apartment had an extra bedroom. But I underestimated his dedication to dating other people during the pregnancy.

Not knowing where to go or what to do, I drifted. In December, I stayed with a Facebook friend in Iowa. It was hard for me to hang out with her, her husband, or her brother-in-law. I mostly just holed up in the makeshift room she’d made for me and watched true crime shows on television. Oh, and every day ended with some sort of argument with my ex. Before my month in Iowa was through, he got it in his head that I should come back to Tennessee and be his fuck buddy. As if he wasn’t the one who drove me more than 12 hours away and dropped me off with a social media friend we’d only met once.

I doubted that the whole fuck buddy scenario was in my (or the baby’s) best interest, so, in January, my friend in Iowa drove me over to her father’s house in Missouri. His wife had suggested I spend the duration of my pregnancy with them.

My daughter and I were incredibly fortunate that people were willing to take us in. Between the pregnancy and up until my daughter was about 15 months old, it happened several times. It usually wasn’t the greatest scenario, and I learned a lot about how many “helping hands” had agendas of their own. Even so, people helped us and that gave me time to sort some stuff out before I gave birth or began working again.

These days, I don’t encounter a lot of loneliness in my day-to-day life. Motherhood has solidified much of my introversion, and I tend to crave more alone time, not less. Things were different back in 2014, however. When my daughter’s dad left me during the pregnancy, it seemed like I would never survive the depth of loneliness and heartbreak I was feeling. In those days, I was convinced that I needed other people in my life if I was ever going to survive as a parent.

Of course, I was still grieving the loss of my daughter’s dad and the life I (naively) believed we were building together. My whole sense of self was tied up in him, so when he left, I was lost too. I spent an awful lot of time just trying to cope and numb my pain.

Much of my time was spent in my room. I took up some knitting projects as a way to relax and have something positive to show for the pregnancy. But I was not excited about or even looking forward to motherhood. The pregnancy, in general, left me feeling very depressed. I looked around and saw all of these happy couples raising children. I couldn’t relate, and I had a lot of baggage from my own unhappy childhood.

When I wasn’t knitting, I was actively avoiding my feelings with games like Candy Crush or Castleville Legends (RIP). And when I wanted to do something about my loneliness, I often hopped onto FetLife.

FetLife is a lot of different things to different people. Part social media platform, part hookup site — but for me, it’s always been something of an outlet. Whenever I use it, it tends to be a way to express myself or learn about my sexuality on my terms and without pressure. As long as I remain selective about friend requests, it feels like a pretty safe place.

To be fair though, I don’t befriend too many people on FetLife and never have. I’m most comfortable adding folks whom I know through other avenues or parts of real life. During, my pregnancy, however, some of my loneliness got the better of me. I was more indiscriminate in accepting various friend requests and I welcomed many diversions.

My ex at the time was still doing a number on me. He called me “ungrateful” for refusing to return to Tennessee right away and for not accepting his fuck buddy offer. And even though he’d always said we had a great sex life, he began making comments that made me feel as if I should have been kinkier (and into threesomes). Maybe if I’d been kinkier, I thought, we might have stayed together.

All of that baggage went into my experience on FetLife. Six years might not seem like such a long time ago, but emotionally and sexually, I was in a completely different place. My ex’s comments and criticisms weighed heavily on me until I felt like I needed to either prove him wrong or somehow make him happy.

Of course, it didn’t help when I saw his want-ad for hookups in a Tennessee discussion board on FetLife. Seeing his picture and words there left me wondering why I couldn’t just move on. I felt like I should move on and as if I owed it to him, myself, and everybody else to do it.

For a person who grew up as sheltered as I did about sex and dating, sites like FetLife can be a little strange. There are times when I find it equally interesting and off-putting. A lot of it simply depends upon the people I chat with and how they treat me. Being demisexual, I have a hard time connecting with anyone sexually if there’s not a “deeper connection” there. Even if the connection is 100% my perception and I’m only fooling myself, I’ll have an easier time feeling some sort of sexual attraction. But if I sense a person just wants to use me from the start and I feel no connection, it’s pretty much a no-go.

At the same time, I really did feel like I had something to prove back then. If I didn’t try to move on, I worried that it made me a loser. The whole thing was ridiculous, but I didn’t understand at the time that I was coming out of a toxic relationship. So, I couldn’t see most of my naivete or even my own motivations.

What I did know was that I didn’t believe I could ever fall in love again. My heart felt way too bruised and I didn’t think I could love anyone else as much as I had loved my ex. Between getting more active on FetLife, putting a profile back on OkCupid, and chatting with various guy friends I’d known, there were lots of starts and stops. Relationships that weren’t nothing, but they also never really took off either.

Eventually, I thought maybe it was a good time to explore my bi-curious side. After all, I couldn’t see myself with another man again. Maybe I could try chatting with women. My ex said something about how I ought to date a married couple, and I, having such a little sense of self, thought, Yeah. Maybe he’s right.

So, I wound up answering a message from a woman in my ex’s hometown through FetLife. She was married, but she and her husband were looking to add another girl to the mix. I thought it might work if I got along with both parties.

For a few weeks, the connection seemed fine and like nothing too unusual. She wasn’t very pushy at first and she asked appropriate questions about my situation, the pregnancy, and my ex. My understanding of the whole thing was that we were being friendly and getting to know each other to figure out if we would eventually want to meet and explore something in person. There’s pretty much always a big if for me when I enter any sort of connection online. For a while, then, we seemed to be on the same page.

Until one day I realized we weren’t.

I’m still not positive about how or when it happened. But at some point, she got the impression that we were already in a relationship. As if I owed them my allegiance. I still hadn’t had any interaction with her husband. Literally zero. Yet suddenly, she was telling me what I should or shouldn’t say in my FetLife profile. As if it impacted both of them.

Where I had previously looked forward to our chats, I realized I was starting to dread every interaction. Her unsolicited advice constantly came at me under the guise of wanting to help me and make sure I didn’t get used.

She didn’t like it whenever I accepted a new friend request. Or, she’d ask how I knew a certain person and suggested they weren’t on the up and up.

The fact that I was pregnant probably didn’t help things either. There’s something about being pregnant where people love to tell you what to do. Plus, the pregnancy sort of puts a time frame on things, especially for folks who get turned on by it. I know, I know. Plenty of people don’t want to hear that pregnant bodies or nursing women can be sexy or a part of some sort of healthy fetish, but let’s try to be adults here and acknowledge that a woman does not suddenly lose her sexual side because she’s becoming a mother.

But there I was, living pretty miserably in Missouri and longing for some human connection before my daughter was born. And maybe after her birth. I didn’t know what the future held for me, but I’d been upfront that I wasn’t positive about moving back to Tennessee. I wasn’t positive about anything. Yet this woman was suddenly behaving as if I’d given her my word that I’d join some throuple with her and her husband, whoever he turned out to be.

The whole thing was weird, and I thought I’d been open about the fact that I was still getting my shit together. I realized though, that some folks in the kink community really don’t give a damn about you and your boundaries. It’s not much different from the men who take you out on a date and then expect to get sex because they think they “paid for it.”

This woman had never taken me out, and never paid for anything, of course, but that didn’t stop her from feeling entitled to use me. As she kept making more unwelcome suggestions, I kept stepping back and saying maybe this is not for me. Instead of having a natural conversation about boundaries and expectations, she doubled-down and suggested we list on my profile that we were all in a relationship, or more to the point, that I was “under their protection.”

Things like this have happened to me a few times over the years and what I’ve discovered is that there are certain people within the community who get a little bit frantic once you identify as a “baby girl,” and then they don’t seem to hear anything else from you. Obviously, there are countless ways to be a baby girl and it may or may not mean you see yourself as inherently submissive or subservient.

I don’t see myself as much of a submissive personality at all. Not in the bedroom and not even in kink play. I am more of a brat. But even with a supposed “daddy dom,” I gravitate toward a more egalitarian dynamic.

It’s not that I think certain dynamics are wrong, of course. I just think certain dynamics are wrong for me. I also don’t mind being a bit unusual about my personal expression and experience with kink. To be fair, I believe there are more people like me, though many have felt themselves pigeon-holed or typecast into the roles other people think they should fill.

In this case, a very persistent woman expected me to happily become a unicorn for her and her husband. The type of unicorn that a married couple likes to “own” and “protect.” While I can’t speak to either one of their motivations, I can say the entire thing was off-putting because she treated me like an object intended to fulfill a very specific role in her life. And honestly, I wasn’t privileged to all of that information. Was I in the picture to simply spice up their sex life? Did they think a unicorn would save their marriage?

Who knows. All I can be certain of is that the dynamic she kept pressing upon me was not my thing. So, I got out before more boundaries could be trampled.

Sometimes, I think people forget that boundaries really do make your happy place. It’s easy for people to think that delving into the kink community means letting go of all their boundaries but that’s a common misconception. In my experience, the healthiest kinksters are those with plenty of boundaries because they know who they are and what they want. They know how they want to be treated and they understand how to treat others well too. And the reality is that everybody has some sort of boundary — even those among us who say that “anything goes.” And even those who are actively exploring or stretching their limits.

It took plenty of time for me to better understand myself and to create my boundaries accordingly. It took more time to finally heal after my ex and to understand that moving on from one relationship isn't about ditching your single status. It’s about building a life that you love and healing that broken heart, which may or may not involve looking for love again.

The most important thing I’ve learned about moving on is that it happens once you quit repeating the same mistakes. In my case, I realized I had finally moved on when I quit getting into more dysfunctional relationships with people who didn’t respect my boundaries. Better yet was when I recognized myself consistently turning down those sorts of dynamics, instead of making excuses for the various red flags.

Another big thing I learned about moving on is that it happens when you give up on making other people happy. Or, when you quit seeing your happiness through other people’s eyes. It’s funny for me any time I write about the person I was six or seven years ago. I can so clearly see these ridiculous and limiting beliefs that I never could have understood back then. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Perhaps I simply hadn’t learned everything I needed to learn at that point.

However it happened, I’m so happy to report on those years now from the other side. Anyone who’s really been through the pits of despair and depression knows just how hopeless the future can seem when you’re not sure if or when the loneliness will end. Of course, my story has been a bit unconventional. I found my happiness as a self-partnered single mom.

That doesn’t mean I’ve given up on love, sex, kink, or romance. Just that I’m able to live my life without the incessant, nagging feeling that I need all of those things to be satisfied. I find self-satisfaction strangely more fulfilling, and it leaves my life in a good place — open to such things without any desperation.

I’ve discovered that’s my favorite place to be.

Untethered, and open to possibilities.