I’ve totally lost track of which part I’m on here, so I declare this part Q of my ongoing series of unsolicited advice to new submissive men.

If you’ve ever read anything about kink, you’ve probably heard a whole lot of bullshit about how there are tons of submissive men for every dominant woman. That’s wrong to the point of total idiocy, but I want to talk about one of the consequences of that bullshit today. If you believe that the odds are so badly against you, it’s reasonable to assume that if any dominant woman shows an interest in you then you absolutely have to accept her as your dom or risk going your entire life without ever having a d/s relationship.

NO. Guys, you always always always get to choose your dom. I’m going to give you the advice that we usually give young women here: no relationship is infinitely better than a bad one. If you try to make it work with a dom who isn’t right for you, you’ll both end up unsatisfied (and to be fair, she shouldn’t try to make it work with a sub who isn’t right for her either). When you say no to a dom who isn’t right for you, you’re doing the right thing for both of you.

Being alone sucks, I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. It sucks extra hard when you’ve finally found out that there’s a word for what you want and a whole community of people like you and you desperately want to dive in and explore. If you feel like that, the idea of turning down a dom who’s interested in you seems completely ridiculous, but hear me out. Being lonely and frustrated still sucks less than being in a relationship where you feel like you can’t do anything right and where your needs don’t get met.

Let’s imagine that you’re a submissive guy who loves anticipatory service. You feel your absolute best when you set down a fresh cup of tea for your dom just when she’s finished the last one. Now imagine you meet a dom who loves obedience. People trying to guess what she wants before she’s told them to do anything just annoy her, what really makes her feel loved is your willingness to drop whatever you were doing and tell her “Yes ma’am” when she gives you an order. It’s obvious this is going to end badly, right?

Just because one person is dominant and the other one is submissive doesn’t mean a relationship, even a simple play partner relationship, can possibly work. A smart dom will ask you what your ideal d/s relationship looks like and tell you whether or not she has that to offer, but you know, doms fuck up sometimes. You still have the responsibility to figure out whether the potential dom you’re talking with is right for you and to nope on out of there if it’s just not going to work. It’s hard to say no when you’re scared no one else will ever be interested in you, but it’s the kindest thing for everyone. If you know you’re not right for someone, you need to speak up. I mean, how much would it suck to be the dom who was trying desperately to make it work but finally gave up, only to find that your former sub knew from the beginning that he wanted a different style of relationship than you did? That’s a dick move right there.

Even if the odds were as terrible as some people say (protip: there’s a reason most of those people have so much trouble finding a dom), you would still have the right to turn someone down. Being submissive means nothing about your worth as a person or about your right to say no. You absolutely do not have any obligation to obey someone until the two of you have agreed to start a d/s relationship. Not only do you not have to obey any random dom who shows up, but I recommend you tell her to go fuck herself if she tries to give you serious orders. D/s flirtation is a thing and a perfectly reasonable dom may ask you to do something small for her or playfully tell you to go to bed if she knows you’re up later than you should be.

I honestly don’t have a lot of experience with d/s flirtation, but I’m going to guess that the key here is that your potential dom asks you to do small things that are easy to do and obviously in your best interest. If she assumes that she can give you orders that actually affect your life without you two having negotiated it, that’s a major red flag. If she asks you to do things that seem out of line with how long you’ve known each other, that’s also a red flag. If you’ve never been in a d/s relationship before, just go with a vanilla scale of what’s reasonable for how long you’ve been talking. That is, if you’ve only been seeing someone for a couple weeks, you’d probably be happy to grab her a coffee if you were on your way over anyway, but it would be weird if she asked you to drive an hour out of your way to get her mom from the airport. If in doubt, ask a friend 🙂 There’s no need to go into detail about exactly what this woman is asking you to do, you can just talk about the amount of effort involved in the favour she’s asking for.

So, that was an awful lot of words just to explain that a) you absolutely always have the right to turn someone down, and b) you should turn them down if you know they’re not right for you. No matter how much control you want to give up in your ideal relationship, you still have the right to say no at any time.