Learning
CW: consent and sexual assault
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It’s shocking to me, when I look back over my dating experiences the last few years, that I hadn’t addressed this issue before. I’m a pleaser. I’m submissive. I lived in an abusive marriage for nearly a decade.
So I suppose it made sense that I’d acquiesce to pressures to have sex when I didn’t want to.
It’s was terrifying to think I might create conflict, when I could just give in and get it over with.
It was terrifying to think what someone’s reaction might be if I said ‘no’.
Yet I can only recall a handful of times, after my marriage, that I had sex when I really didn’t want to. Those were my choices then, and I own them and learned from them.
It was also my choice in my last relationship, to do the same pretty early on, because I didn’t want to lose something I thought was otherwise perfect.
But here’s the important thing:
Otherwise perfect is NOT fucking perfect. It’s really not.
After the first time he pressured me into sex I didn’t want to have, I was upset. This had never happened with someone who claimed to feel things for me that he did. I took a few hours to process, and I brought it up with him.
He pushed back.
He told me it was necessary for him. He told me his past partners were all fine with it. He made me feel bad.
It happened again.
I told him, then, that was enough. It made me feel used and unloved to have sex that I didn’t enjoy. It made me question how much he cared for me, if he could get his rocks off despite my clear lack of enjoyment or even discomfort or pain.
We dated for 6 weeks. Everything else seemed wonderful.
It kept happening.
At this point, mentally, I didn’t want sex any more. Though my sex drive is normally well above average, I simply didn’t want it, and he pouted about it a LOT. He often compared our current sex life to the first week we were dating, before he’d started coercing me into sex I didn’t want on a regular basis.
It didn’t matter if I was in pain from sex the night before, hungover, or in desperate need of sleep at 4am on a workday. He pushed and pushed.
I told him that it was taking a toll on my mental health, and he replied that going without sex was “just as bad” for him.
The last time was the worst, and the most violated I’ve ever felt. I was exhausted, he initiated sex and I didn’t give a clear no, because we’d been fighting all day, and I was hurting and wanting to fix things.
I tried so hard to get my head into it, but foreplay was minimal and I started panicking. I told him “I can’t do this, I can’t get out of my head.”
He got off me angrily, and I was frozen with fear. He abruptly left the room and came back holding the hitachi. I shook my head, no.
He pushed the hitachi on my clit on high and told me to cum. I burst into tears, pushed it away, and rolled out of bed to and into the bathroom.
No matter how many times I explained to him that it was violating, he wasn’t ever going to get it.
And our sex life was never going to recover.
And my trust in him to take care of me had been broken for a long time.
And I couldn’t respect someone that put their sexual pleasure over their submissive’s well being. We’d only started D/s in any kind of official capacity the week before. I cried all night, but the thought of ending things brought only relief, and I knew then what I needed to do.
It took me breaking things off for him to “get it”.
I’m 33 and now I have a firm grasp on my no.
But I needed to learn the hard way that even people who claim to love you won’t always respect that.
That no matter how slow you think you’re taking things, the amount of trust required to hand control over to a Dom is SO tremendous and should come in due of time. That D/s will not fix things.
As I’m seeing someone new, and the universe has forced our hand when it comes to a slow pace, I am extremely optimistic that I have learned from the pain of my last relationship.
I’ve already discussed consent and prioritizing sexual needs over your partner’s needs with the new guy. And I feel confident that I will never again in my life feel like I need to have sex when I don’t want to.
Please know that being submissive doesn’t mean you HAVE to have sex. Being dominant doesn’t mean you are owed sex. No one should have to have sex they do not want. Learn to get enthusiastic consent from your partner, no matter how long you’ve been together. Learn to say no to your partner when you need to, and if they won’t respect your no, leave.
We all deserve better than that.
Before you read anything I’m going to say please remember that I’m not a D/S Dom and therefore these are all only second-hand observations of D/S with extrapolations from 1st, 2nd, and 3rd-hand experience with vanilla relationships. Got that?
Ok. So you’ll often hear things from D/S people that sound like “Submission is when you don’t feel like it.” I think that gets confused with romantic or sexualized D/S or M/S ideals of existing only for the pleasure of the top, of being instantly accepting when they initiate, and how it doesn’t matter what you want it’s what they want.
Those aren’t the same things.
Like it or not, the Sub-iest Sub or the M/S-iest Slave still has sexual autonomy, sexual appetite, and most importantly sexual boundaries.
Taking pre-21st-Century notions of “wifely duties” or (cough*marital*rape*cought) and slapping a D/S sticker on it doesn’t make it more “kinky” it makes it more gaslighting and/or codependent.
Here’s another way to put it: Subs have to feel empowered or they won’t have any power to exchange.
Giving and receiving power in a relationship is erotic. Draining power in a relationship is… dysfunctional.
