Different Loving

by William Brame

  Perhaps the greatest appeal of lifestyle relationships is the degree of candor between partners in them. Many of our interviewees insist that lifestyle D&Sers form unparalleled romantic bonds, partly because submissives forfeit all privacy.

  There’s a greater level of intimacy in D&S relationships than in other kinds of romantic relationships. I’ve experienced both. In a vanilla relationship, you can hide and keep to yourself. My master requires me to reveal to him my dreams, my hopes, my ideas. We’re very close. He’s a very strong, loving, caring, tender person.

  —BAMBI BOTTOM

  LIFESTYLE PROBLEMS

  Full-time lifestyle relationships can best be understood as an anarchic conspiracy between two intimate partners where the conventional rules are scrapped and an extraordinary agreement is negotiated based on the partners’ needs. Because of their unique situation, lifestylers have unique problems. Preeminent among these is a lack of role models. The few accessible examples of master-slave interactions derive from fiction, sensationalized crimes, or historical accounts of persecution. While most of our interviewees mentioned the profound influence of D&S cult classics on their sexual awareness, many also believe that such works grossly distort the reality of D&S.

  The [fictional accounts of S&M] make us look like emotionally unhealthy people. In 9½ Weeks the dominant was obviously emotionally disturbed. He scared her. He went too far too quick, he thought only of satisfying his own desires and not working for something long-term, not paying attention to the submissive’s particular psychology.

  —BAMBI BOTTOM

  Those who rely on fictional role models for inspiration or guidance regularly encounter stumbling blocks to romantic satisfaction. It is common for novice male heterosexual dominants, for example, to emulate the master in Story of O. As a result, they may expect submissives to be one-dimensional erotic objects and may be frustrated when ordinary problems intervene.

  I met dominants who wanted me to drop everything in my life. I was not willing to give up my kids. I wanted to get married, I wanted to have a home, I wanted to have a family, plus I wanted D&S. I wanted a man who wanted those same things.

  —LISA W.

  In marked contrast to erotic myth, lifestylers confront the complex challenge of integrating an unconventional sexual dynamic with the typical stresses and demands of family, religion, career, and citizenship.

  I’d like to meet the dominant woman of my dreams. [She is] not someone who dominates me 24 hours a day and keeps me down, but someone who, not only in the sexual aspect of daily life but in the regular aspect, is the boss and enjoys it.

  —JOHN H.

  Another serious problem for many submissives in lifestyle relationships is accepting the control which they have deliberately sought, for the fantasy rarely translates smoothly into reality.

  The problems of lifestylers can be summed up in one word: resistance. It takes a lot of getting used to, to live at someone else’s whims, to follow someone else’s commands 24 hours a day, to do exactly what you’re told despite your will and your desires.

  —BAMBI BOTTOM

  For the submissive, keeping his or her ego in check may be extraordinarily difficult even when this is precisely his or her goal. In this respect, the attempt to live out the submissive role in a lifestyle relationship may resemble a religious struggle between the temptations of the world and an inner craving to surrender to a force which one sincerely believes will ultimately afford serenity. Not all surrender is necessarily good surrender: D&Sers consistently grapple with clarifying or modifying their goals within the lifestyle relationship. Extent of control and type of control are negotiated and renegotiated.

  A significant problem for all who regularly engage in D&S is the failure of professionals—medical, psychological, legal, and spiritual—to provide informed assistance. Many fear consulting either doctors or clergymen lest they be censured or urged to forswear their sexual desires; few helping professionals are trained to work with D&Sers. Spiritually, some D&Sers are turning to New Age religious beliefs, and increasing numbers of peer counselors are now a prime source of third-party assistance for troubled D&S relationships.

  INTERVIEWS

  FRANK W.

  [D&S] is not 100 percent vital with someone I really care about. [But] I have both. I am madly in love with my slave, so it’s wonderful. I’m heterosexual and quite definitely a dominant. I haven’t had any real submissive fantasies since prepuberty. My D&S needs were extremely important. They were not irresistible driving forces. There were cases where I would get into a vanilla relationship, [albeit] with serious trepidation.

  I have given an awful lot of thought to where my needs come from. I am afraid I do not have any real answers. I, along with many other people, have noticed the tendency for people in D&S to be more neglected than abused as kids. But clearly there are many kids who have that kind of upbringing and don’t end up in D&S.

  I remember tying myself up and doing it with playmates, [dating] back to [age] four or five. I’ve got one fantasy that I know predates first grade. I have one that I can date to [age] six: Somebody had given me a pile of British comics, and I remember having all sorts of fantasies about tying up the heroine and doing horrible things to her. I pretty much put that down to the fact that six-year-olds aren’t really up on medicine. They aren’t real good on knowing when they’re maiming somebody, because all you’ve seen is cartoons. [The fantasies] died away for several years, until puberty. At that point, I started getting actual, realizable wants in terms of a particular girl from school. I was interested in her, and I was into D&S, so I was interested in a D&S way—spanking and bondage and so forth.

  The first time I really had a chance to do much was [in my] mid-20s. I went with one woman all through college. When Joy of Sex came out and made bondage respectable, she was willing to try it a couple of times. But it was ho-hum [to her]; she was basically falling asleep. Then, a year or two after I was out of college, I actually managed to start getting opportunities to do something. But the problem, really, was me. I’m a techie, [a] white-socks-and-slide-rule engineer. I simply was not every woman’s cup of tea. [I was] looking for a real, complete relationship. So I would either find vanilla women with whom [a relationship] would have worked but she didn’t want D&S, or I’d find a woman who wanted D&S but otherwise didn’t want to marry an engineer. So that was a problem.

  I lucked out [with Lisa]. I was at the right place at the right time. I was active on the HSX Forum on CompuServe. Lisa had been around for a while, mostly talking real time with people, which I don’t like to do. But she was also reading the message board, and she liked what I had to say about what I was looking for. She sent me a message and we wrote back and forth. [Then] she sent me her phone number, and I called her. We talked for a while, and [eventually] I sent her an airplane ticket. She came [to visit], and she went home with a diamond ring.

  We’ve been together now about two years. We’ve got enough stuff going on to strain any relationship of any flavor, so there certainly have been some rocky times, but at the moment, things are really, really, really going great. Both Lisa and I had decades-long arrears of hugs and kisses when we came into this thing, so we still like a whole lot of catching up on cuddling. There are no real hard-and-fast stops in our life for anything, but as for D&S-type stuff, we like to do little reminder things out of the bedroom. Before we had people popping in, any time the sun was up, she would wear a collar around the house—just a dime-store pet-choke collar, with a little hardware-store padlock on it. We’ve also had her put a chain around her waist, or we’ve got little nipple thingies that she can wear. Stuff can go on for hours with that kind of mutual reminder. I like the collar because I get to see it. The nipple thingie or the chain around the waist, well, she knows it’s there, and I know that she knows, but it’s not as good as being able to look at it. And then, of course, we’ll talk and tease [each other] throughout the day.

  [For us D&S] is out of the bedroom but no
t out of the front door. I’ll have her undress in the evenings, and she’ll wear the collar and a leash, and she’ll sit or kneel at my feet when we’re answering the messages on CompuServe. Or we will go for a walk in the woods [and] bring along a leash; we’ll stop and cut a switch, and I’ll tie her to a tree.

  Last week we did it in the backyard; that was fairly real. We had lunch [cooking] in the stove and went out in the backyard, and I had her get undressed, and I tied her to a tree. I gave her a couple of swats with my hand, and then I went back in and looked after how lunch was doing, leaving her out there. She theoretically could have been seen by someone driving up. They would have had to know exactly where to look, so as long as she refrained from doing a little dance to get their attention, she was really pretty safe. After I’d got lunch nice and happy, I went back out there and cut a switch. I gave her a little warm-up with my hand and a good solid kiss to give her some confidence, because it had been a while since we’d done anything really heavy, so she was more nervous than she would have been a couple of months ago. I gave her a dozen good, hard ones on the rear end with the switch to make welts and marks that would last for about a week.

  For a while there, she was very intrigued with the idea of marks on her breasts, and so we did some of that. I’m not really thrilled to go for marks. She squirms around too much, and I think there’s a danger of damage, but I will use a ruler on her breasts. Lisa likes bondage a whole lot more than I do. It’s very nice for the sub. She gets to sit there and enjoy it. She has all these nice fantasies about being tied up and left alone. However, when it really comes to leaving her alone while I go off and do something, it turns out that she means less than five minutes. You know, in fantasy it’s an hour, and in practice, what turns her on is about five minutes.

  When you’re talking about stuff going on in the bedroom, 95 percent of the time, it’ll end up in traditional sex. However, when we’re just going through the day, a swat on the rear end or tweaking her collar so it jingles is a full substitute for a hug or a quick peck. On that level they’re interchangeable, but when we really get into it, then it generally ends up in sex.

  There is a surreptitious agreement that the relationship is [very two-way]. [And] at least when her past is not really catching up with her, I do not believe that I’m really carrying the heavy end. She was sexually abused as a child and has nightmares. She talks in her sleep, and I have to hold and cuddle her and talk to her and reassure her and figure out what part of her needs reassuring.

  [For me], having a woman standing naked in front of me and wearing my collar is the quintessential part of dominance: “I am master here, and she belongs to me.” Something that sort of got skipped in our very crowded life together would be having some kind of a D&S wedding, whereby Lisa would give herself [to me]. [In my earlier] fantasies, my generic submissive would give herself to me in a D&S marriage. She would come out dressed in something simple—not a big, fancy wedding dress—and she would drop it and be naked. She’d come over and kneel in front of me. I’d take her hand, and she would announce that she gives herself to me and is my property. I’d respond that I accept her. There would be some verbiage on both sides indicating love and caring—all the good stuff—and then I’d put a collar and a leash on her. Sometimes I would fantasize about branding her, [but] that was optional. Like a lot of people, the less you’re actually getting, the heavier your fantasies get.

  I definitely feel that there is more that we want to do. At this point, we’re just getting back to the [intensity] that we reached around the time we got married. I finally quit my regular job. Now I’m working full-time on our business, and we’re starting to get it under control, so we’ve got time for each other again.

  We need to figure out activities that we can carry on while still being business partners and not contributing any more to the town gossip than we already do. We need a means of making this a more full-time, always-felt D&S relationship. Unfortunately, we have kids in an open-plan house.

  With children around, even if we were totally vanilla, we wouldn’t do any bedroom stuff without the door closed. On the other hand, we don’t make a big deal about it if she comes over and kneels next to me at the table or on the couch at night. She’ll wear the collar in front of them. The kids are four and six. Right now, we spend an awful lot of time explaining an awful lot of things [to them] anyway. Some of them are very hard for kids that age to grasp. We don’t want the practical difficulties of trying to explain sex, let alone a variation on sex, to a six-year-old. We have enough trouble explaining why he has to return library books.

  LISA W.

  D&S was something I really wanted. I don’t know if I can say I discovered it, but once I knew the right words [for it], I knew it was something that was a big part of me. D&S is not just in the bedroom for me. If anything, D&S keeps me from staying inside a shell and having armor between me and the rest of the world. When I’m feeling submissive, I’m more open: I feel things; I enjoy life. If I’m not and I’m in my own shell and feeling like I can’t be submissive or [that] it’s not being [elicited from] me, I tend to have a wall between me and the rest of the world. I don’t enjoy life in general.

  I was abused as a kid. I had a single mother and small sisters who I watched. My mother worked two jobs. Starting in second grade, I put myself and the girls to bed. There was no parent around. The neighbor who I was supposed to go to if I needed anything molested me for years. As soon as we moved away, I blocked it out. It wasn’t until about 18 months ago that I started having memories. I wasn’t sure what they were. Then all of the years that it happened became rolled up into one memory. [For a while] I said, “Okay, it happened, and it was no big deal.” Then as I became more secure in my relationship with Frank and finally had time [to] deal with it, all of a sudden I started having flashbacks, and all the gory details came out.

  When I first got into the relationship with Frank, I [felt that I] was hiding something and that he only loved me because he didn’t know everything about me. I believed that if he ever found out all of it, he wouldn’t love me anymore. Part of me said, “Either he takes me as I am or I’m not going to be here anymore.” Part of me wanted to shock him and wanted to say, “You think you love me, but do you know this? How do you look at me now?” When I could say that and he still came back and said, “I still love you, and the things that happened to you had nothing to do with who you are. I love you,” it gave me a lot of space to open up and to figure out what happened and how much it affected me and whether I’m going to let it affect me now.

  Before I remembered my abuse, I used to say, “I don’t know why I’m turned on by being used. That’s just the way I am.” I didn’t remember any of that stuff ever happening to me. Then I start getting some flashbacks where I did remember stuff like that happening to me. Most of my abuse was oral sex. I don’t remember incidents of being spanked or anything like that. But there were books lying around that I would read when I was [about] nine years old, and they had a lot of spanking. I can remember reading those books and being aroused by them.

  I bought a vibrator when I was in high school, and one of my biggest fantasies was being caught playing with it and being spanked. From freshman year till I graduated and went into college, that was my number-one fantasy. In my first marriage we would always talk about tying each other up and spanking each other. [But] I always did the tying up and the spanking; it never went the other way. We never said I was the dom or anything like that. We did things, usually at my suggestion, but he always took it to mean that that’s what I wanted to do to him, not what I wanted him to do to me. He said, “We’ll take turns,” but it never got to be my turn. I would picture myself in his spot, but I didn’t get real enjoyment out of spanking him or out of tying him up. It became very frustrating for me. I even bought a four-poster bed, thinking, Take a hint! He never did. I talk about it with him now, and it’s pretty funny. He never even got that idea.

  I married my first husband right af
ter high school. It was like being married to my brother. It was very platonic. We were best friends in high school, but we were never in love. It was just the thing to do. We were 18, and we didn’t satisfy each other very much. We didn’t have a whole lot of communication. Two years after we were married, we were joining swinging clubs. I don’t think either of us was satisfied. The men that I was attracted to in swing clubs were always aggressive. We probably went to a party once a month for three years. I enjoyed myself maybe four or five times, and each one of those times it was with somebody who was very controlling. I had one person one time pull my legs apart and give me head, and [he] kept telling me over and over, “The rules are [that] you can’t move.” I really liked that, [but] I never saw him again.

  After I was separated for about a year, I was seeing other people, and I was totally frustrated. I kept saying, “I don’t want the same kind of marriage. I don’t want equal footing. I want somebody who is smarter than me, more aggressive than I am, more controlling.” I wasn’t finding him. I even went into counseling. I thought there was something wrong with me. I didn’t know anything about D&S, but I was definitely worried that if I really went ahead and did it, that I wouldn’t be able to take care of my kids [or] that I would get into an abusive relationship. I didn’t know that I could find somebody who could love me and beat me all in the same relationship. I was very concerned that I would even want that.

  I joined CompuServe, and when I found the D&S support group suddenly, I met tons of dominant men. I got bombarded [with letters]. I met somebody who became my mentor. He did not pursue any sort of sexual relationship with me. He became somebody I could use as a sounding board. I had gotten to a point where I was really desperate. I had very low self-esteem. I was overweight, and my main criterion for meeting somebody was that they would meet me, not that they were necessarily interested in the same things that I was. I was excited and incredibly turned on, and I just didn’t care a lot about myself. I did some dumb things; I really did. You have to care enough about yourself to take precautions. Me, I had such a low self-esteem, I thought somebody was making a big sacrifice to do anything with me. I weighed 220 pounds, and I was five feet two. I thought that if somebody would meet me, boy, they would just be doing me the biggest favor in the whole world. It didn’t even occur to me that they could really hurt me. I was very unwilling to set any kind of guidelines or even to say that [the dominant] has to be sane. [One problem] could have been that a lot of my fantasies were very impersonal. It was always somebody who ordered things to be done no matter what I [felt]. So how could such a person like that be human and loving to me?