Lately, I’ve been reflecting on dominance and submission, aging, and my interactions with women, including missteps as I experiment with non-D/s dating dynamics.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about dominance and submission, the historical relationship patterns I’ve nurtured, my relationship to mortality and aging, and my misogyny and relationship to the agency and individuality and humanity of the women I date.
I don’t have any simple, pat conclusions, but I have some observations and some reflections and some thoughts and some feelings.
Over the years since 2010 or 2011, when I started this blog and began exploring my dominance in earnest, my partners have skewed younger. In some instances, substantially younger; in some instances, a couple of years younger. In most instances, somewhere in between. There’s only been one or two women that I’ve dated in this format who have been older than I am.
I will add to that that the construction of dominance and submission that I favor has me in the role of something like a boss. I’ve never especially longed to be a teacher or a mentor, at least not consciously. But I would be deceiving myself if I didn’t recognize that most of the women I’ve dated have seen me as something of that sort. Sometimes the mentorship they’ve found has been psychological or relational. I’m really good at communicating, and a lot of the women I’ve dated have become better communicators in our relationships. I’m very clear about what I want, and notwithstanding the dominant/submissive structure, I’m good at helping others uncover what it is that they want (sometimes by uncovering what it is that they learn they don’t want).
There’s an interaction, though, between the dominance and submission and the age difference on the one hand, and what I’ve sometimes referred to as my perversion on the other hand. If you’ve read much of this blog, you know that when I use the word “perversion,” I use it a bit differently than it’s most frequently used. I tend to mean something like an insistence on getting what I want, an intolerance of difference in others, particularly when it comes to desire.
I think of perversion, at least in my case, as being more than anything else a description of the anxiety I feel when confronted with the inevitable reality that not only am I not omnipotent, but other people have desires which from time to time differ from mine. In the dominant/submissive structure I favor, this all gets somewhat subsumed or absorbed in the structure itself. It’s not that Veronique or Sofia or Charlotte gave me exactly what I wanted without ever deviating from my desires. But it is the case that when things were working best for me, that was an overt, explicit longing of theirs to please me. By merging their desires into mine. By accepting my desires as theirs.
Obviously, it never works perfectly. There’s always slippage from cup to mouth. Whether because Veronique wanted me to be more possessive of her and more violent to her than was my instinct or because Sofia longed to be written about in ways different than those in which I wrote about her (and more like the ways I wrote about Veronique). Or because Charlotte simply couldn’t provide the degree of real-time communication about her interactions with other men that I craved and she promised. The point wasn’t that I was able to get perfect satisfaction of my desires, but rather, that perfect satisfaction of my desires was, if not achievable, at least desirable. The goal. A priority. And to the extent that we weren’t able to achieve it, that then became, in part, the stuff of the relationship, what we talked about, what we worked on, and space in which we played at best, and space in which we suffered at worst.
In the current moment, I’m experimenting a little with dating women who are not just older, but who aren’t arriving at me either via my blog, or with an expectation or hope of a dominant/submissive dynamic. They’re just women interested in dating. This has not been my dating world, really, ever, at all.
I’ve already had a couple of missteps. I’ve only been on dates with three women in this format.
One was a perfectly nice date. This was the first. With a woman with whom I had lots in common, to whom I was attracted, but for whom I was literally (and by “literally,” I mean it in the sense it had in a dictionary until about ten years ago) the first date she was having after years of marriage. Add to that, this woman is vanilla. Not just vanilla. Blithely, ignorantly vanilla. I don’t think she knew about, had heard about, kink, or polyamory. She saw something in my profile (on a relatively standard dating app) that appealed to her. But when confronted with me in reality, I think I scared the shit out of her.
The second and third dates I had were a little bit different. These were with women who think themselves poly, who are embarked on poly dating processes. The first of these two, though not especially kinky, is certainly familiar with the existence of kink. The second is quite experienced, both in kink and polyamory. Probably more than I am. Certainly more than I am in the communal aspects of those two categories.
With all three women, I’ve had slight missteps. Missteps born of my last fifteen years of dating in exclusively dominant/submissive contexts, with women almost exclusively younger than I am.
With these grown-ass women? I’ve been presumptuous, I’ve been demanding, I’ve been narcissistic and self-involved. I’ll be interested to see how things unfold.