By Alexander Cheves, The Advocate
Want to find the real love experts? Go to your nearest leather bar.
When a guy slides his hand in your ass, holding your body, guiding you through your fears and emotions, coaxing your hole to relax and open, something beautiful happens. You lock eyes, you sync, you take him in, and he’s fisting you.
Fisting requires the basic tool kit of love: chemistry, communication, intimacy, trust. You need these to make any relationship work. In a good fist session, power dynamics disappear. You become equals, complicit in this rule-defying, animal act of pleasure. You take a leap with someone and trust them, at least a little bit, to be good to you.
Fisting is one of many “alternative” sex practices (kinks) celebrated in the world of leather, rubber, and BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism, masochism). I started this dark, leathery journey a few years ago, seeking sex with sexy people. Along the way I found humbling and beautiful lessons in love, devotion, forgiveness, support, and care.
Want to find the real love experts? Go to your nearest leather bar. Here are 15 lessons in love I learned from kink.
1. There’s no such thing as the “right” relationship.
A common lie we’ve all been told at some point is that you have to find the “right” one — and that everyone you date until them are the “wrong” ones.
Love is a not a hunt for someone to complete your life or make you whole. You’re already complete. Others come along and share time for a little while. That’s love. You share your story with them until it’s time to part ways. You’ll share it with more people in the future. Often we share it with many people simultaneously (polyamorous relationships, multiple lovers, great friends).
Some of these people may teach you how to fuck well. Others may show you how to be a supportive partner. One may help you through your HIV diagnosis. Another may help you through a painful death. No one needs prominence. No one is “the one.” They’re all important.
Kink is a community where complex, multiple-person relationships (pack relationships, leather families) may be seen as literal representations of this.
You might have a daddy in Dallas who comforts you, offers support, and gives you sweet, cuddly, furry sex. In addition to daddy, you have a sir in Seattle who trains you as a heavy BDSM submissive. You also have a cute life partner who wears glasses in your home city who loves wearing leather with you and cooking dinner with you and having threesomes with you and whatever guy you two decide to take home. You and your partner might share a submissive rubber pup who loves climbing in your sling to get his hole used.
No one of these people is the “most important.” They each love different parts of you, and it works because you’re a complex creature with different tastes, different natures. No one relationship is the “right” one.
2. Slow down.
BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism and masochism) can be scary when you don’t know what you’re doing. So can love.
To newcomers, kinksters (kinky people) stress going slow, taking baby steps, building trust, and listening to people with more experience. How richer would our romances be if we all did the same?
3. People don’t belong to people.
I like getting flogged, hate-fucked, spat on, degraded, tied up, group-used, and simulated rape, but when someone calls me “theirs,” I freak out.
Kink is filled with labels that imply ownership. Daddies have boys, slaves have masters, subs have sirs, pups have handlers, and the list goes on. When I was getting started in BDSM, the labels bothered me. I hate possession. The minute someone talks about rules and exclusivity, I bolt.
Then I realized why these roles exist. Some sex practices require skills that are best taught one-on-one within the confines of a fetish relationship — where trust is developed, feedback given, and performance appraised. These roles serve real purposes: They arouse people, teach them how to enjoy the sex they want safely, and help us as a community preserve our kinks while sharing them with beginners.
I’ve seen countless kinky relationships blossom over the last few years. Most have been very beautiful to witness. They’ve taught me something important: No matter what you call yourself, whether you’re a “slave” serving a “master” or a dominatrix training a rubber gimp, you’re always free to leave.
When the pleasure stops or the learning ends, there’s no need to stay. Yes, romantic connections do develop from dominant-submissive relationships (and many healthy romances include dom-sub play), but labels like “sir” and “boy” exist for pleasure and growth. You keep them as long as they feel good. Nonkinky marriages everywhere could benefit from this simple rule: If you aren’t happy, you don’t have to keep being “husband” or “wife.”
Many nonkinky folks suffer for years in unhealthy relationships (with far fewer rules and restrictions than some BDSM pairings) never realizing this: If it’s no longer enjoyable, stop. It doesn’t matter what you call yourself or what’s stamped on a piece of paper if the joy is gone. People don’t belong to people.
4. There’s more to learn.
You’re not an expert — in kink or love. There are bondage pros, master bootblacks, and aficionados of leather. But few kinksters claim to know everything because there’s always someone, somewhere, with another lesson to bring you, another experience that opens your eyes. Similarly, you may know everything about your partner, but at the end they are still a mystery to you, one you get to discover a little more every day.
5. People don’t stay in roles we assign them.
My first sir called me “boy.” Then I discovered pup play and became a “pup.” As my interests have evolved and my skills advanced, “pup” is sloughing off. Who knows what I’ll be next?
Learning new kinks and advancing your skills is an exciting process that often leads kinksters through different roles. This is also true in dating. All your experiences, good and bad, change how you define yourself and make you a different person from one relationship to the next or one one phase of life to another. That’s natural and healthy.
But sometimes that can cause problems in a long-term relationship, since we tend to assign roles and see people we love a certain way, and we get scared when we wake up and realize they’re different.
I once talked to a gay couple with 20-plus years behind them and asked what their secret was. One partner said, “I had to accept the fact that he was going to change. He wasn’t going to be the same man in five years as the man I met. I decided early on that I wanted him to be everything he needed to be, no matter what, even if that led him away from me.”
It was one of the most beautiful definitions of a healthy relationship I’ve ever heard. People change. Love your partner enough to let them grow.
6. You have to talk about your feelings.
Skilled dominants depend on subs to tell them if something feels good or bad. A good dominant will learn to read your signals and your body language and learn to push you without pushing you too far. But some subs close up, retreat, freak out, or shut off. Kink depends on reading signals and responses. If you don’t give your playmate anything to read, he’s driving blind.
All relationships (kinky and nonkinky) depend on effective emotional communication. Not talking about your feelings, good and bad, is how relationships get toxic and bitter. You have to talk. You won’t always have the right words. You might say something poorly or indelicately, but it’s always better to attempt to explain your emotions than keep them quiet.
7. If there’s a problem, say something.
Kinksters are good about addressing problems. If there’s a bad dominant who ignores safe words, we get the word out and warn people. In all sub-dom pairings, the rule is that you must say something if you think something is wrong. That’s how you keep kink fun and healthy. The same goes for relationships. Problems will arise. You fix them by addressing them.
8. Your partner has to meet certain basic needs.
Many people have requirements that must to be met in order to date. Some keep a list: stable job, ability to travel, expendable income, pet lover. Others need different things: must be kinky, polyamorous, or both.
I don’t practice sexual monogamy and I don’t date Republicans. I don’t like people who are prone to yelling and shouting when they get mad. Be slow to anger and be understanding of my kinks. Enjoy putting things in my butt. Be honest. I need little else.
Some people say it’s unrealistic to have a “requirements list,” or what Dan Savage calls the “price of admission.” I disagree. I learned this from kink.
To determine a good kinky playmate, you have ample discussion beforehand. This is called “negotiation,” the pre-sex run-through of limits and safe words, turn-ons and turn-offs, things you want to do and things you’ve never done, as well as any important information they need (I have to tell every top that I’m deaf in my right ear, so if I don’t respond to interrogation questions on the right side, it’s useless to paddle me until I do).
If your interests don’t line up — if they don’t meet your basic kinks and core sexual interests — you probably shouldn’t play, because you won’t have a good time. It’s that simple.
9. Human connections resist easy definitions.
When you’re new to kink, you’re unsure of everything. You’ve enjoyed bondage porn, but you don’t know if that makes you a brutal bondage sub or simply someone who enjoys bondage as an art form (as many do).
You have to play. Try it out. See what feels right. This can take a long time. People spend years dabbling through kinks before stumbling on to something that feels right.
In the same way, people don’t come into your life with labels floating over their heads: “future boyfriend,” “soon-to-be sub.” One of the biggest mistakes we make is trying to assign roles to people we like without waiting to see what space they naturally fill. Labels and titles are off-putting to me, so I resist using them until some time has passed. I’m comfortable with friend-lovers and maybe-boyfriends. Human connection doesn’t fit into neat little boxes.
10. Trust = love.
When I was in San Francisco, jobless and homeless, my former sir bought me a plane ticket, hugged me close, wiped his eyes, and sent me home. I trusted him. When I needed him, he was there. We never said this word out loud and didn’t need to: That was love.
Poets across history have tried to define love. Some say it’s cosmic and godsent, others quantify it down to a cultural construction. For me, love feels like trust.
Remember my intro slide about fisting? Fisting only happens with trust. So do most extreme kinks. If someone is going to suspend you with rope, you have to trust them. Kink has taught me that the richest experiences in life depend on trusting others — relationships among them.
In relationships, you build trust by telling the truth. I’ve never thought cheating is an automatic relationship killer, but when people lie about cheating, it becomes one. Trust is crucial to making happy relationships happen. Lies shatter trust. Your partner would rather you tell the truth about something they won’t like hearing — something you’ve done or something you’re feeling — than hear a lie. Love them enough to do so.
11. People have hurts that never go away.
Some say sexual kinks come from trauma or abuse. I think these theories are mostly bullshit — a way of pathologizing healthy human sexual behavior — but some people do find safe space in kink and BDSM to alleviate stress, anxiety, or hurt. I’ve heard stories of people who did experience trauma or abuse, then reclaimed their power and rediscovered sex through BDSM.
After some of my intense scenes, it felt like a weight was lifted off my body. The post-play feeling is like floating on air. It’s great therapy. Many others feel the same. But with that comes baggage. Intense physical stimulation brings strong emotional responses — not always positive.
People have hurts that never go away. You can never fully understand them or predict how they’ll manifest. Hurt makes us do strange things that surprise people close to us. You have to be receptive and give care (we call it “aftercare”) the best way you can.
12. Don’t judge.
Working on your judgmental tendencies will help your love life. Kink is a judgment-free zone. If you ever go to a big fetish event like International Mr. Leather in Chicago or the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco or Folsom Europe in Berlin, you’re going to see many different people with many different kinks splashed together, probably in very little clothing. Or a lot of clothing — neon rubber ponies in head-to-toe garb, complete with bit, bridle, and mane; drag kings and queens in full leather suits and heels; hooded human urinals in Lycra. Discard anything you think you know about people and simply discover them. You may walk away a proud rubber pony.
13. All bodies belong.
Most people in the U.S. grow up believing that fat bodies are unhealthy or undesirable, and that the people you see in fashion spreads are “ideal.” When we start fucking, we take these cultural lies to the bedroom.
Fuck people who look different from you. Fuck fat people. Fuck people with different skin color. Drop your preconceived notions about bodies and enjoy people. You’ll end up with better loves, better friends, and better sex.
14. Take the leap. Do what scares you.
You can read all about kink and BDSM on the internet, but you’ll never know what it’s like until you set foot into a leather bar, plan a play date, buy a harness, and put yourself in the arena. Many people get scared at this point, but you have to take the leap.
There’s only so much pre-sex negotiation you can do before you have to just do it. You’ll have good sex and bad sex, out-of-this-world sessions and mediocre ones, but you have to start somewhere. You have to face the risk that you might get hurt, that he might flake out, that you might get rejected, before you can experience wonderful nights with people who enrich your life.
Ask him out. Try the relationship. Try saying “boyfriend.” It’s scary — way scarier to me than getting fisted — but it’s worth it.
15. Try everything twice.
There’s nothing I won’t try twice. That’s what I tell playmates. Every time I find a disgusting new fetish on the internet, I think, Some sexy someone, somewhere, is into this. If I was hanging out with this sexy someone, I would probably try it.
You don’t have to be into everything, but I recommend moving through life open to a lot, with as few restrictions as you can muster. Life has a lot to offer.
Apply this to relationships, which are a minefield of different people, complex feelings, and new situations. Each relationship is different from the last. Sometimes they feel scarier than any extreme fetish, because your heart is on the line.
Kink taught me to be brave in love. Try everything twice. Bad first date? Plan a second. Bad first fuck? We all have off days. Bad bondage session? Do it again at least once more, perhaps with another kinkster. Bad breakup, bad heartbreak? Recover, then get back in the game.
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