I haven’t writ­ten about this sub­ject in a while now. I needed to take a break, to dis­tance myself in order to gain some per­spec­tive. Now that I’m here, I feel com­fort­able enough to talk about it again.

But before I go on, a lit­tle expla­na­tion of my poten­tial bias is needed. I’ve always been one to believe that a sin­gle bad expe­ri­ence shouldn’t turn some­one away from any­thing for­ever. I try to keep this belief in my head when I catch myself asso­ci­at­ing the D/s lifestyle with pain (ha! get it?) and frus­tra­tion. The only hands-on expe­ri­ence I have being a dom­i­nant was with a per­son who would repeat­edly hurt me and bring me down.

However, I don’t believe that this was a con­scious char­ac­ter­is­tic. It was a per­son­al­ity that was widely hyp­o­crit­i­cal, mean, and extremely dif­fi­cult to deal with, but all of this fit the “type” of sub­mis­sive that she was. I saw her as a tremen­dous, effu­sive force that, when wielded cor­rectly, could be used to great advan­tage. The only prob­lem is there are only few with enough strength and patience to tame and guide such a force, although some­one who could accom­plish such a task would form an unbreak­able bond between mas­ter and slave. I knew that I would even­tu­ally have the strength, but I cer­tainly did not have the patience to be deal­ing with what con­stantly felt like a per­son work­ing against me.

So it’s with this cau­tion­ary step that I pro­ceed to explore the D/s branch of the BDSM umbrella. My sub was depen­dent on the lifestyle; she required it in her rela­tion­ships, and her only means of relax­ation was being a bot­tom at a party. I knew the risks of get­ting involved. One of my biggest fears was that I would grow depen­dent on the lifestyle as well. After all, what greater ela­tion is there than to feel as if one owns another mind, another soul, another per­son.

As of yet, I don’t feel some tremen­dous urge to go out and find a sub to abuse. I’m not expe­ri­enced enough as a dom­i­nant to do that. I know, how­ever, that D/s is some­thing I’d want to explore in future rela­tion­ships. I con­sider it a basis of open­ness, trust, and accep­tance. Exploring the lifestyle (as a female sub espe­cially) would lay the ground­work for a lot of other things.

Many of which I have yet to dis­cover for myself.