Starting a D/s Relationship

So this is the time of year when I don’t have time for doing blog writing. So posts get few and far between. It’s been a trying month, but never because of any of the people in it. Everyone has been the very best sort of people and I appreciate that. A lot of very nice surprises all around. I seldom complain about my life but when it comes to people around me I have nothing to complain about.

On a couple of occasions in the past two years, I’ve been asked questions or wanted to talk about the course of a starting D/s relationship. What I have observed to be true. So I admit this is a rewrite for time, but it bears repeating, and I think I have polished this piece better than either of the ones it is drawn from.

There is no firmly fixed way to start a D/s relationship. I don’t tend to be a big “scene” player, going to clubs to do just one scene with a girl. I’m not averse to it, I just don’t end up doing that sort of play very often. So mostly it’s been about meeting girls and establishing a relationship and plan.

It's up in the air whether to meet and do a session the first time. I tend to like to just meet and talk, make the girl wait until next time. If she’s up for it, the waiting will be good, and if she is not, it will give her time to rethink and back out. I always like to give plenty of opportunities for a girl to back out. I suppose you could think this isn’t “domly.” I know there is a certain amount of wanting you to push her up against the wall and take her. But I think because you are going to be violent are going to be controlling, then coercion becomes a real issue. And the solution to coercion is to allow an out, that doesn’t hurt.

Yes, I’ve lost girls that way. Given them outs to walk away and they were scared enough to take them. And yes in a couple of cases I’m kind of sorry. But in the long run I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So for a first session, ideally I like to meet for a drink or chat, then go someplace private for a few minutes and go over the things you can't do in public. Give a very short version of the experience of being under control, being ordered. Kneeling, a few positions, what it's like to be *looked* at that way. Maybe some handling. Not much more. Then go to drinks or dinner. After that I make an offer to go back and do a short session, because by then it's a lot more comfortable. I’ve never had anyone who stuck around for the first part who didn’t go back for the second. But I do think it affects comfort level to have a breather. I can’t always work it that way, but…it is something to do.

Typically any introductory session is going to be pretty light. And this in itself can be a problem. Usually it works out okay. Because you have a girl coming in saying “yeah baby hurt me,” but by the time they are there with toys laid out and your hands on them, they’re feeling a lot of fear and excitement, and anything you do is going to get a reaction. But still there can be problems, especially if there has been play before in fantasy…chat, e-mail, whatever. So you can have a girl who is being very hard on herself because she’s not doing those things she fantasized about. She can even be let down because I’m not doing them to her, even if on another level she would freak if I did, because she isn’t ready for it yet. A Dominant cannot rely on an inexperienced submissive to know what they are ready for, and yet cannot go too soft. You have to push, but just hard enough. I tend to start with a lot of discipline, positions, to convey a feeling of being controlled, to bring out submission. Because that gets you away from “I so suck because this hurts instead of feeling good…”

If I'm any good. this clicks…and she doesn't care how "well" she's doing, only that she's doing. Usually this is a pretty powerful experience. The mindset you want is to get a submissive girl into “space” so that she isn’t thinking about what she is doing anymore in a critical fashion, or if she is it’s a very immediate critical fashion. “Am I pleasing this moment,” not “do I suck as a person, am I fucking up…” You want all that gone…you want her acting not judging. It's hard to believe that a scene with just control and discipline can be a good exciting scene, but it can.

Not every submissive wants the same thing. The key to understand here is that there are two levels going on. One which is the stimulus she wants and one the gratification she wants. The stimulus can be control, pain, discipline, humiliation, restraint, fear, or any number of other things.

But there is something beyond that. On some level, there is also a need for attention, validation, catharsis and regeneration. And that can be a real trick because often even if that is an emotional need or desire, the girl won’t admit it, or isn’t okay with wanting it. Doesn’t think she should need it, or doesn’t think she deserves it.

Generally once she has fallen into submissive “space” it becomes easier to accept those things. And if you are a good Dominant, to me, you are not just about beating the girl or getting your rocks off. You are figuring out which of these things she needs and figuring out how to get it into her in such a way that she doesn’t feel guilty about it. In simplest example, maybe she needs to be hit hard enough that she can hear she is a good girl without feeling guilty, or maybe she needs to please you or debase herself in front of you enough to understand you really meant it. Those are horrible oversimplifications of course.

But the Dominant is there to be something solid and fill a need inside the submissive, and I think in most cases that requires functioning on both levels of awareness.

The other reason not to press a first session too hard is that the submissive is learning whether or not she can trust the Dom to pace things, to take control. To do what he says.

Once that trust has been gained the first time, there is something I tend to think of as the “break point.” I cannot say exactly when it occurs, I think it must be different for every girl. Sometime between thirty minutes and about 3-4 sessions. The girl suddenly is comfortable with where she is and wants to do more. Often this reads “a lot more”

To my mind, this is the second point where experience matters, because she isn't really READY to do everything she thinks she can. She's going to need time to process after every new thing. But she may not realize it may want to go crazy and do everything at once. So despite the fact that Doms are not mind-readers, you need to learn her well enough to be a mind-reader by this point and you have *got* to be able to tell what she's ready for and what she's not.

I think this is a point where the rollercoaster can get going pretty fast. If you are doing it fairly well, the girl is accelerating into it full force, may feel pretty much like she's in freefall. Which is a great feeling as long as she knows her Dom is in control. And as long as he’s right there.

But, crash happens. First there is an inevitable time when a girl feels that she is actually in over her head, fears she can't slow down.

Again this is something to learn, and it’s an area where the more experience I get I feel the better I do. Because you are trying to not hold her back, or slow her down, but not letting her head go under water, or let her go too fast and crash. And crash is going to happen. Because we don’t live in the Story of O, and eventually time comes to go back to work or dorm or home or whatever. And the emotions going on are real, and they are chemical and there is a lot of very real stuff happening in the mind and when those chemicals ebb away there is going to be some feeling of “crash.”

I think as a Dom you have to be prepared for the fact that you can become pretty central to a girl during this time. You need to at least be able to do a decent impression of rock solid reliable. The girl can become pretty obsessed. The same behaviors that go with love apply here. Obsessive thought, focus.
There is the potential for damage. If the girl has other boyfriends, they can even lose interest in everything but the D/s relationship. Let other things fall. And be very moody when they are not around the Dominant and “up” to the point of being in danger of crashing when they are.

This is the point where girls first tell their Doms they love them, and mean it. And a good Dom has to not get carried away, not take advantage of the girl during this time. But he also has to not lose his shit and his ability to be a Dom to her. A lot of things can happen here.

A Dom can get tender and lose his ability to control the girl and hurt her, and turn into a boyfriend, and the SM or D/s element can peter out. Become “just a boyfriend” Perhaps that isn’t so bad. But it means giving up on meeting the girl’s needs as a Dominant, and to me that has aspects of a broken promise.

There are no rules or guarantees. I have seen girls drop boyfriends or husbands and never look back. I have seen girls date a “vanilla” partner healthily all through this period, or even begin exploring other BDSM relationships. It depends. Like any new hobby, a girl can get obsessive about BDSM in general and there is some need her to keep her social and turned outward. The BDSM relationship can become very focal.

Some girls seek out 24-7 relationships during this period. They want to be totally controlled all the time. I honestly tend to think that means they aren't getting enough from their Dom in sessions, but…I can also see some reason for it. I tend to think that a girl in this period isn't ready for 24-7 even if she's really disposed that way, and it is her Dom's responsibility to hold her in contact with the real world till she gets through the first rush. Then if she's still serious about 24-7 maybe it's worth talking. But I find once the first flush is off, for most girls so is the need for their lives to center on it. I may be wrong though. That may be a reflection of my immaturity as a Dom that I am not “ready” to move a girl directly into a 24-7 setting. If so it is a limit I can live with at this point in my life.

There's no getting around this period, really. I’ve heard it said that the person needs to be mature, but I am far from certain that immaturity makes it worse, or that age makes it much better. Experience can make it better, but that only comes by going through this. It's just a matter of how strong the two people involved are, and how well the Dominant partner can handle the shifts.

The initial flush does end. I can't say how long it goes on, exactly. I tend to think twelve to fourteen sessions, which could be anywhere from a month to a year or even more. It feels like it won't end but it does. The pace cools, it's not as central anymore, other things start being more focal.

This is the final point where an inexperienced Dom can crash things. Because they can be jealous as hell that the girl is starting to look at other people, isn't as focused on him, on the interaction. The trick here is to understand that this means the relationship is maturing, and get it stable without letting it go out.
That's a trick and not an easy one. Knowing a girl's mind helps. Paying attention helps. Having a fucking sense of humor about things helps. A little fatalism doesn't hurt.
If you get through this final shift, things are usually pretty stable. By now the girl has a firm grounding, knows much more about what she wants, and is getting things she never got before and feeling okay about them.

She begins to be in control of her own submission, rather than her Dominant controlling it for her, and that makes her able to make much more critical choices about her life. This can also be exciting because it means the Dominant can push her harder now, because he’s not constantly fearing coercion

It is my experience that a good Dom is still very central, but his submissive is going to have a lot more ability to make decisions for herself, and much more able to feel confident saying "I want to do this, I don't want to do that."

You can't say really until you reach this point where things are going. Some girls are going to step to another Dominant. Most are at least going to experiment.

Others are going to form a close bond and stay with their first Dom. A Dom has to go through that middle period, hear the things that the girl says, understand they are true, and also understand that how things are at the end is going to be determined by how well he did on keeping the girl's trust, and how much he really clicks with her in terms of sexual excitement, and being able to keep pushing her in ways that make her come hard.

Possibly the hardest thing is that in most situations the words “I love you “ have been used. And you need to be able to hear them, respond to them, know the girl means them and also not delude yourself that alone will keep the relationship going after the initial glow wears off. If you have not deepened that into something else, then you will find the words dry up and blow away. They aren’t lies but they are truths of the moment not truths that last forever unless they are cultivated.

So that is sort of the first phase of submission…I think if it is successful that at the end of that you see the relationship broadening out into an experience that can really push to higher peaks and has a huge amount of potential, because that’s really the period for trust to set in and the initial frenzy to wear into building excitement. I think you can preserve sexual excitement well through this initial period, if you understand that you need to work at it, that it isn’t automatic or easy.

So anyway, for what it may or may not be worth that’s my observation on the patterns that D/s relationships tend to go through. I don’t think there is a right or wrong and I am not saying it is this way for everyone, just that it has been my experience.