Curiosity and Desire: Journeying Into Kink

The beginnings of my first D/s relationship

At 11:00 on a Friday night, I find myself alone in bed, negotiating terms. The light on my bedside table is the only light on in my mother’s house, where I’ve been lucky enough to land after the final collapse of my marriage 6 months before. My home reduced to one room, at the same time the world is opening wide before me.

My introduction to kink and BDSM came in nibbles and sips, tiny bites here and there that piqued my interest and grew my curiosity about the real people beyond Christian Grey caricatures. Once I discovered that polyamory was a really-real thing that people do, the leap to understanding that so-called normal people can be kinky wasn’t a hard one.

Now, in the near darkness, two copies of The Ethical Slut are piled underneath my planner and the remainder of my four year old’s goldfish bedtime snack. First, the copy I borrowed and devoured, full of tiny slips of paper marking the pages where I had explosions, revelations, awakenings. Underneath, the new copy I bought knowing I want to read and reread to think and grow and develop all of these new ideas I’ve been having about the world. About myself.

My phone buzzes. Months before, when I was still with the person I thought was forever, I never imagined that a text message could hold so much anticipation, trepidation. How can tiny words on a tiny screen possibly be so large?

I think it’s time we formalize our relationship.

Splayed open on the bed next to me is the impulse buy from that afternoon. Yes, Sir the title is splashed across the corseted brunette, Erotic Stories of Female Submission. I can barely get two paragraphs in to any of these stories before my mind starts to wander into daydreams and possibilities. I am learning the intricacies of the freedom to be found in handing over power willfully.

I read 50 Shades of Grey in 2012, partially because its popularity was a cultural phenomenon, and partially spurned by my book club. My opinions on it were skeptical at best, and it made for the longest blog post I’d ever written. It wasn’t the first exposure I’d had to erotica or kinky stories, but it was certainly the most in-depth. It made me think a lot about the people the book might be mis-representing. Even then, I knew that there was more to BDSM and kink and healthy relationships within those realms.

Two years later, I fall asleep at night thinking about sex and love and friendship and intimacy and relationships and societal constraints that seem so completely, laughably arbitrary. I look at the tattoo on my wrist, the Who Says? scrawled in my own handwriting as a constant reminder that we determine our own worth. Now, I wonder: who says there is only one way to have love and happiness and pleasure? There are a million little in-betweens.

My first real-life taste of something darker came from a man I met after my divorce, when I finally allowed myself to explore desire and pleasure in ways that I’d never known possible.

I still remember the feel of the soft fabric cuffs on my wrists, the breathy words in my ear reminding me to breathe, the first taste of pleasure brought with pain. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days afterwards, wondering about this hidden world that seemed to be coming to life before me. I never saw him again.

Then came Henry with his soft body, sweet smile, kind eyes, and curly blonde hair. He described me as low-maintenance in a good way, and taught me that a bag full of items from the dollar store can be a treasure trove of playthings. Our conversations and our sex were comfortable, and easy, and full of new discoveries. He was the first person to use the word polyamory with me, the first person who alerted me to the presence of a sex-positive space in our own town.

Now, this. Last night, my new… what do I even call him? It’s undecided and foreign, and we’re still feeling it out. I’ve already submitted to him. It was easy, like drifting off to sleep in a warm embrace. I’m beginning to understand the deeper roots and intricacies of dominance and submission, the whats and whys of it all.

Last night, he gave me orders to write. I’m a writer who hadn’t been writing. “Just write,” he said, “don’t think.” I sat at my computer and typed for an hour straight. 5000 words or more poured forth, in what felt like seconds. It was a jumbled mess to be sorted out, but the words within were another sign of this awakening, opening to the world and all its possibilities.

Thoughts tumbled from my fingertips, curiosity and desire and the blooming wide I feel inside, made solid and real. Musings on polyamory, love, and relationships gave way to burgeoning curiosity about safe words and submission. I don’t have a map, but I can feel that my journey is just beginning, and the paths of pleasure, pain, boundaries, bonds, limits and learning are laid out before me waiting to be explored.

This is not a novel, and there is no written contract, still an agreement is building, forming between us as another message arrives and he asks;

Are you ready?

And I am. Readiness is alive in my veins, every inch of me poised to jump in. I’m ready to discover the possibilities I didn’t know existed, to explore my edges and the sides of me that have never seen the light.

When I imagined my life, I didn’t imagine that my time would come at 33 years old, divorced with two kids, broken but rebuilding. I can’t regret the things I’ve been through because without them, I wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be who I have become.

Discovering myself in my thirties is so much better than having done it as a child. I am the most confident, self-assured, sexy, self-aware, and in love with who I am that I’ve ever been. I am finally me.

I’ve had a taste, and I want more, I want to feel things I’ve never felt, to feast on fantasies made real. When I dive head first into this new adventure, the word comes off my lips like a whisper, hot and beautiful.

Yes.