As you might have noticed from earlier rants on the subject, it irritates the shit out of me when people decide they are so special that reality doesn’t apply to them. Today’s particular irritation: people who believe that they can give up the right to end their relationship.
I want to be as clear as possible here: if you honestly believe that you can give up the right to leave your dom, you are delusional. I’m also sincerely scared for your safety because the kind of dom who would say “Oh absolutely, you don’t have the right to dump me no matter how unhappy you are” is bad fucking news.
I’m not saying that’s not a fun fantasy or that nobody is allowed to role play things that would be super fucked up in real life (honestly, isn’t that the point of role play?), I’m saying that it’s really fucking important to be clear on the difference between role play and real life. Somebody who isn’t clear on the difference is simply not safe to play with. If you believe something as ridiculous as being able to give up the right to leave a relationship, I and everyone else with the slightest scrap of common sense starts worrying about what other stupid bullshit you believe.
Seriously, that’s scary as fuck. If you’ve turned away from reality so hard that you believe it’s possible to give up the right to end a relationship, well great, now I’ve got to check on literally everything else you believe that could possibly be relevant to kink because if I can’t trust you to tell me that you’re not having fun anymore, I’m not going to play with you. If you might believe that nerve damage only happens if you’re not submissive enough so you don’t need to tell me your hands have gone numb, I’m not going to play with you. I’m not going to try to have a good scene with someone so out of touch with reality that they might believe a Real Dom ™ will magically know what they want. Someone who is so invested in their fantasy that they actually believe that it’s possible to give up the right to end a relationship, undoubtedly believes other ridiculous bullshit about whether s-types are allowed to have needs, or wants, or likes or dislikes or other responsibilities that override whatever wildly bizarre promises they made to their dom.
I want to be clear here, I do not mean to pick on people with actual mental health problems. Having a mental health problem or a mental health crisis or a break with reality does not mean you’re a bad person or that nobody should ever play with you. You probably shouldn’t play too hard when you’re in the middle of a manic episode and you shouldn’t take what someone says about themselves in the middle of a depressive episode as gospel, but that doesn’t mean that an illness that’s flaring up right now is never going to settle down again.
The people I mean to pick on here are the ones who do not have an actual problem, but have chosen to stick the fingers in their ears and yell “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” and generally turn their backs on reality. Those people are a danger to themselves and others and need to knock that shit off.
We hear all the time about how subs have to be careful choosing their doms. Newsflash: as a dom you have to be careful about choosing your sub too. If you play with someone flying that big of a red flag and things go poorly, am I supposed to feel bad for you? As the dom it is literally your job to think things through (not saying s-types shouldn’t think shit through either, I just have very strong feelings about my responsibilities as a dom), you need to get your shit together if you’re going to dominate anyone.
Everybody does have a slightly different definition of what bottom/submissive/slave and top/dom/master all mean but that’s mostly hammering out details. Figuring out those details is a lot easier when you start from a shared, stable idea of what’s real and what’s not. If you don’t have that basis to start from, well technically I could negotiate very very carefully with someone who deliberately turned their back on reality, and then renegotiate very very carefully every time we played and check in all the time because I’m worried about what ridiculous bullshit they’ve decided is true this week, but you know, I could also just not.
I could just play with someone who isn’t a walking red flag and feel confident that what they tell me before during and after our scene will still be true tomorrow and next week and next month. That’s so much easier than trying to work around a total lack of trust in someone who has decided they don’t want to pay attention to the difference between fantasy and reality. Fantasy is great, but I’m just not playing with anyone who won’t take a break from it now and then to talk like fucking grownups.
If you want to make terrible choices in life I can’t stop you, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
You know, the other group of people I know who believe they don’t have the right to end a relationship are fundamentalist Christians who “don’t believe in divorce.” I kind of want to shake them and go, “Are you *seriously* that sure of your ability to make perfect decisions? Are you so super duper hyper convinced that your choices are so right that you believe it would be a sin to say ‘I was wrong, this isn’t the relationship I want after all’ or ‘Things have changed and what was once wonderful is now harming me’? Do you actually think you’re God, infallible here?” To which I know some of them would respond “I’m not God, but God told me to marry this person and he’s never wrong” and then *my* next thought is “But are you SO CERTAIN you understood God correctly?”
In both cases, it’s sold as a measure of seriousness and faithfulness to your relationship and partner. But what it actually becomes is a way of fetishizing the structure of the relationship (het cis marriage, D/s, what have you) and neatly absolving you from having to face some difficult choices. I just don’t think that refusing to build in an escape hatch is a good idea, or that picking the perfect relationship structure will keep shit from ever going south, or think that sticking your head in the sand is going to fix things (or even that every single relationship is salvageable with enough work).
And I say this as a qute happily married woman who would be devastated if said marriage broke down, and who doesn’t see think ha that happening any time soon. But I’d be an idiot to pretend it never could, or that legal Canadian lesbian matrimony *in itself* makes the relationship worth preserving.
*doesn’t see that happening any time soon
Dammit, autocorrect!
I relate the issue you describe as a common problem brought about by the internet. Within the digital domain we can pretend anything we want and many state such disillusions and fantasies as if it were real. Take them off the internet and I would hope that such statements of not being able to leave either disappear, or are clarified as a fantasy or as you eluded are perhaps the result of a mental impairment. Too many on the internet seem to take fantasy and portray it as reality and thus the demand for dominant women by men who merely want someone to climb on top when they feel like it. As much as the internet can be fun and a great tool it also allows peoples fantasies to be portrayed as realities.