When Someone You Love is Kinky - 1

I've been reading several blogs (notably Jamie's) in which the writers express some concern about bringing up their long-held desires, be they for D/s, LFA, or some femdom play. Several people have remarked that it was the hardest thing that they've ever needed to talk about with their partners, and from personal experience, I'd have to agree. Those of us who have had to wrestle with feeling guilty over these desires have probably walked that conversation through in our minds hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, and each time imagining our partner reacting with shock, revulsion, or even indifference - which kept us from bringing it up in real life. Even the trial balloon method of casual mentions, or pointing to TV or movie character or situations probably were met with ambiguous responses, making us hesitant to pursue the subject further for fear of being too pushy.

My own experience in this is mixed. I've known I was kinked since I was a young teen, and often had general fantasies of bondage and instruments of delicious torture wielded by deliciously cruel women (the term "Dominatrix" didn't come into my vocabulary until my mid-teens) clad in leather and tight spandex. I was in my very late teens or early twenties before I had a girlfriend who was interested in experimenting with these and other fantasies; we both enjoyed them immensely, and I was forever hooked.

After that college romance ended, I still believed that everyone would enjoy some kink activities, and so spent several very frustrated years as various other girlfriends turned up their noses and said "You want to try what?" Eventually I became convinced that there really was something wrong with me, and tried to bury those desires. There was no internet back then, and living in a small town meant that my options for exploration were severely limited. That's why I was happy to have met my wife, who seemed to have a pretty hearty appetite for sex, and a desire to try some "different" things with me. Our dating was fun and exciting, and we seemed pretty well matched.

Then we got married.

I know that this is a stereotype, but from where I'm sitting it seems like there's nothing like marriage, children, a house, and careers to really take the intimate joy out of a relationship. Or so my thinking went for years as my wife became more interested in church bake sales and PTA meetings than she seemed in me, and I'm sure that my working 60 top 70 hours a week at a new business didn't help matters, either. But the upshot is that we spent a good ten years never talking about anything more intimate than the kids, the next vacation, the next social obligation, and the next room to be painted. I gave up on trying to improve our sex life and concentrated on trying to improve our intimacy, but without much success. Long story short, after twelve years of marriage I found an apartment and moved out, expecting that there would be no way to work out our differences. Over the next year we tried counseling, but some things just weren't "gelling", and one of those things was my concern about her acceptance of my desires. Of course, there could be no acceptance if I was unwilling to bring them out in the open.

I'm posting an edited version of something that I wrote in another group:

I've written here a few times about some of my marital problems, more on-topically, about the lack of sexual intimacy, frequency, and variety. We've been separated since February, although we're still going to counseling together. We've been working on a number of other issues that have come up in the marriage, some hers, some mine. She remains hopeful that we can patch things up, I'm doubtful but trying to keep at least a partially open mind.

Anyway, early in the sessions, I told the counselor that I didn't want to discuss the sexual stuff, or rather, that it would be some time before I'd be ready to discuss it. This was due, in part, to some rather hurtful remarks from my wife over the last few years about my desire for what she called "kinky bondage shit". She threatened to make things difficult for me to have access to my daughter, and in fact, told several of her friends about some of the things that I'd mentioned that I'm into. She also threatened to pass around some of the erotic stories that I'd written to her over the years, stories that feature some rather non-vanilla sex. I should stress that these stories are tame compared to some of the things that people discuss on this group, but they are still certainly outside the mainstream. And that's not even to mention that they were things that I had written only for her and myself, as personal, say, as passing around love letters. In other words, without any basis for me to trust that what I said in therapy would stay between us, I wasn't about to get into anything that would make if more difficult for me later on.

A few months ago, I picked up Janet Hardy's book (written under the pseudonym Catherine Liszt, with Dossie Easton) "When Someone You Love is Kinky". I found it well written, and presented some of the issues and problems of "kinky" people in a casual and non-threatening fashion. Okay, enough of a plug. It was a good read, and it helped me become a little more comfortable with myself.

Anyway, we're getting to the point in therapy where we're going to be talking about the sex. We've had sex a few times in the past few months, obviously vanilla flavored. Lately, though, I haven't been interested in having sex with her. I know that this is making her upset, and although we're just tiptoeing around the subject this week, I know that we can't put it off much longer. So I was thinking about giving her the book and asking her to read it. I figured that I could give it to her at a session, or perhaps the night before a session, so that we could at least broach the subject in the relative safety of a somewhat controlled environment.

I'm not sure what I expect to gain by this. At one time I had hoped that she would read it and it would help her to understand that my desires and fantasies aren't something that I can change (or not easily), and now that I've had a few months of breathing room, I've realized that I don't want to change; to the contrary, I want to explore further. It's as if I had started something that I had to put on hold after we married, and now I can't put it off anymore. I still have the same concerns, of course, in that in reading this book she'd have "proof" that I'm somehow perverted and therefore, wouldn't "deserve" to have access to my daughter. And of course, she could then pass around the book or read sections of it to my friends and family and social circle in order to either embarrass me, or to "prove" that there's something wrong with me. On the other hand, I guess if she's going to do that, then she's going to do it anyway with the other personal stuff, so what's the difference, right? I'm not giving the book to her to get her to change her mind, or to convince her to take a walk on the wild side. I think I'm more doing this in order to drive home the point that we have some differences that most likely can't be overcome by just "going out to dinner more often".

There are several more parts to this that I'll post when I get the time. In the next part, I'll discuss what happened when I finally did sit down with her, gave her the book, and made myself about as vulnerable as I've ever done.