Hi.
How are you?
I feel like it’s been a year since I posted here, but it’s only been since Valentine’s Day. Time sure flies when…well. Hmm.
First things first, if you don’t follow me on Twitter or Instagram, then you probably haven’t heard that brunette Rayne has been cancelled. I’m actually planning on doing something like this (click link)(I don’t know why I felt the need to put that there, but I’m leaving it) in the very near future, but when I finished bleaching my hair, and looked in the mirror, I fell in love. So I’m putting that on pause and enjoying this unnatural blonde for a while. Next step is a second processing when I do my roots to see if I can’t get it lighter so the colors will be more pure when I decide to do them. That’s probably happening in a couple weeks. But that’s as much of an update as you’re going to get right now. I came here on a mission.
Every once in a while, I pop on FetLife to see what’s going on. I don’t interact much anymore. I got tired of the backbiting and one-upping and “your way’s wrong”ing, of which I was absolutely a part, so I removed myself from the situation.
I popped on today and was surprised to see that a local dom who used to throw hissy fits about being expected to get permission before touching people in a kink space talking about how important consent is to him. I guess you can teach old kinksters new tricks.
(Sometimes I tell the same joke on my blog that I told on my Twitter, only on my blog, I use the correct words. Shut up.)
I poked around in an international group and found some questions I’ve had in the past, and thought I might suggest some things that have worked for me, but because I’m also tired of responding to threads 100 pages long and realizing I’m saying the exact same thing as at least half those responses and contributing absolutely nothing new (which is a lesson I learned on Twitter, not FetLife), I decided to read the comments.
Why do I do that? I know I’m gonna walk away mad. I know some bitch is going to be in the comments all, “well, my master does it this way and we are infinitely better than you,” because when I was a bb kinkster on bondage.com and Slave Farm, I was that bitch. I tried to be less that bitch when I was on FetLife all the time, but I was young, and dumb, and easily goaded into an argument about whose relationship was more relevant or valid or well led.
In short, I was an asshole.
I’m still an asshole sometimes, but I’m far less of an asshole these days.
I think? Anyway.
So the international group has a thread from a desperate submissive. Her dominant doesn’t seem interested in any of the fun parts of D/s. He’s only interested in the punishment part. She agrees that she should be disciplined when she’s done something wrong, and doesn’t want that to stop, but there’s nothing ever to offset that. No real play time, or reward when she does things right, or anything like that. She later clarified that by “reward,” she didn’t mean being rewarded for good behavior, but getting a reward from the relationship. And neither of them are happy. And she was looking for advice because she’d brought it to his attention once before, and it changed for a little while, but then he resorted back to this behavior.
And within three comments, there was that bitch. “We don’t have rewards in our relationship. You don’t deserve a reward for doing what you’re supposed to. I obey because I said I would.”
And really, good for you, bitch. Nobody fucking asked you how your Relationship Works.
“But Rayne, you always include how your relationship works when you give advice.”
Yeah, I do. But that wasn’t advice. That was some bitch looking down her nose at another person because their relationship is supposed to work a different way. When I talk about how my relationship works (in my more recent blogging past…probably not before, like, 2009, or so? In fact, disregard most of what I said before, like, 2011. A lot of it is garbage.), it’s usually to explain different relationship dynamics, not tell someone they have to do it our way. I try to remember to also include other relationship dynamics to illustrate the point that everybody does it different.
No way is the only right way.
Except, you know, the whole consent thing. Without that, what you’re doing isn’t BDSM.
Other submissives dove in and repeated the same basic message (that there are no rewards in D/s). One felt the need to tell everyone that she and her master would never be married, as if that’s some badge of honor. A “master” popped in to define punishment for the OP. Someone said D/s is always supposed to be unfair; that it’s designed that way on purpose. Someone accused her of being petty and aggressive because she said she wasn’t interested in holding up her end of the bargain if her dom didn’t hold up his. People told her that if she’s not able to handle not receiving any sort of reward from the relationship, then 24/7 wasn’t gonna work for her, and seriously? What the fuck?
Were we really that…mean and disingenuous and misguided back then? I think we really were. Gaia, I’m a dick.
So look, if your relationship isn’t going how you want it to, it’s not because you suck at relationships, or because you suck at this type of relationship, or because you suck. Maybe you are an asshole sometimes. Maybe your partner is an asshole sometimes. Everybody’s an asshole sometimes. Or maybe when you started this relationship, you had unrealistic expectations. Or maybe they did. Or maybe you misunderstood each other’s expectations. Or maybe things are just hard right now.
It could literally be anything.
The only way to solve it is to talk it out. Figure out how hard you want to work on this. Do you want it to work? Do you want it to work with this person? If so, figure out what you want from the relationship, and what you need from your partner, and tell them.
Relationships take work. All of them. None of them are perfect. No matter how much those weirdos try to tell you they are.
I really do wish we could all be a little kinder to each other.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
