Trust, Torture, and Transcendence

Sometimes I think the universe hears your deepest desires and finds a way to give them to you, much the same way our phones now hear you mention you need new shoes on a call and give you ads for shoes for the next month. How else can I explain discovering kink creators on TikTok and, less than a week later, randomly matching with a dom with 10 years experience on Hinge and ending up in my first kink relationship?

This isn’t the story of my revelation that I’m kinky. I’m a certified sexual health & violence educator who graduated with a minor in Gender & Sexuality Studies. I’ve studied histories, evolutions, and theories of sexuality and been trained to educate others on modern, Western sexual culture, including kink. I also read extremely explicit fanfiction in middle and high school. I’ve known quite a bit about kink and known I was personally interested in it for years. But knowing you’re interested in being tied up, choked, whipped, slapped, and otherwise trained and punished is very different from finding someone you trust to do those things to you for the first time. And I had never put in the time and effort to actively seek out that person. I certainly wasn’t looking for that when I downloaded Hinge.

No, I was just horny and touch-starved after four months of quarantine. After a few disappointing hookups, I updated my profile with the prompt, “Let’s make sure we’re on the same page about: reciprocal oral sex.” And of course, the weird, cringe-y, sometimes mildly funny, more often bewildering responses started rolling in:

“Depends on if you’re good.”

“I’ll make you cry!”

“That it should only be done after marriage or else you are sent to Daddy Satan’s when you die?”

But one stuck out to me so much that I made a TikTok about it. He messaged saying, “Oral sex doesn’t have to reciprocal, you can just sit on my face and ignore my dick, I won’t mind.”

Scrolling through his profile, it checked a lot of my personal attraction boxes. Dark hair, bright blue eyes, check. Head turned in profile, displaying a sharp jawline, check. A boxer with a motorcycle, check.

I raised my eyebrows at the last picture: an artfully arranged collection of ropes, a whip, anal plugs, a clitoral pump, and what was clearly a large dildo despite being blurred. The caption read: “A special talent of mine.”

Sure, it was a bit aggressive for a Hinge profile, but to be honest, my first thought was, finally someone who knows how to have good sex. I’ve studied sex, talked to a lot of people about sex, and had a fair amount of it myself, and I’ve learned that if a straight man owns sex toys, they probably know how to have good sex. They’re not married to the idea that their dick is the be-all-end-all of sexual pleasure, which I’ve found to be the key to fulfilling sex that too few straight men have invested in.

So my interest was piqued, but I wasn’t yet aware of what I was getting into.

We exchanged numbers and made a plan for him to pick me up the next evening to hang out. I was out with friends, and I was incredibly nervous to get on a motorcycle with a man I’d never met.

But he kissed me on the cheeks when I met him on the corner, showed me how to put on his extra helmet, explained how to lean into the turns with him, and I learned that being pressed against an attractive person on a motorcycle late at night with the wind skimming your bare legs is the best way to get around Paris.

He took me to a garden next to the Louvre, and we sat on the damp grass for over an hour, talking about places we’d travelled, movies, music, how I miss seeing the stars, and how he wants to move away one day to have kids. When he offered to drive me home, he said casually that it wasn’t out of his way, he could easily drop me off. It was clear that sex wasn’t expected. But I invited him up, and we sat on my bed for another hour, finally discussing his experience in the kink community, both as a dom himself and as an educator. We talked about my lack of experience and the not-so-little voice I had in my head that kept whispering how much I wanted experience. We talked about the research I’d done, the things I was interested in.

The openness of communication, the clear non-sexuality of it—we were sitting on the bed, yes, but not touching, lights on, voices at a normal pitch, completely sober, having an almost academic discussion on shibari, impact play, dom/sub dynamics, and more—it all made it so easy to feel comfortable because it didn’t feel anticipatory. The eventuality of sex had been on explicitly on the table from the get-go, now we were negotiating terms. I learned later how deliberately he had created this atmosphere, and not even for me, but for himself, to keep himself safe while exploring a potential partner.

We did have sex that night, after coming to the agreement that we were both interested and our desires were compatible enough to at least begin exploring. And it kicked off a month of meetings, each one deepening the intensity of our dynamic, each one a little more strict, each one a little more violent, a little more vulnerable, trusting.

And I learned that I fucking loved it.

Did I love everything we did at the moment it was happening? No, sometimes I felt humiliated, inept, ashamed. Sometimes I was in pain or uncomfortable. But when I felt that way, it was the point. I learned that the point was that I accepted what he gave me, did what he told me, was rewarded when I did well and punished when I did something wrong.

There was of course, a learning curve, and he always took that into account. In our early encounters, he was lenient and forgiving of slip-ups, like me forgetting something he’d asked me to do the last time or being slow to follow an order or making too much noise. But he also had expectations of me, born of his belief in my capacity to meet those expectations. And as I learned what was expected of me, the punishments for mistakes were stricter and harsher. Because we both understood that I knew the rules and the consequences for failing to follow them.

So why did I love it?

Every minute of every day, I’ve always felt like there are at least six different trains of thought thundering through my head, and I have to expend an immense amount of energy to keep the tracks organized so they don’t cause a wreck in my brain. This means it’s hard to just stop thinking about things like work, anxiety, the news, conversations with my mom, my fears about our rapidly declining climate, the current global pandemic, the state of politics back home in the US, the injustice and pain that people face around the world on a daily basis, the terror of an unfulfilled life purpose. Just little things like that.

This isn’t always a bad thing; it’s contributed to my academic and professional successes, it makes me curious and driven, it’s the foundation of the intense care and empathy I feel toward others. But it’s exhausting, both to have all that happening in my head, and to keep it all from spilling out. Every second is an exercise in control, holding back the deluge from pouring out, monitoring my every word, move, breath, flinch. And that self-surveillance, it doesn’t go away during sex. No, I worry about my every action and reaction, if I’m giving enough, if I’m taking enough, am I enjoying this, are they? How late is this going to go, am I staying after, I have to write an article tomorrow, and if this goes much longer, I’ll oversleep and won’t have time to go to the gym and write before I have to be at work—

In this relationship, I learned that the inkling I had about my interest in kink was correct. When I trusted him to set the rules, to tell me what to do, and how and when to do it, to make painstakingly clear what I should be doing at every second, to bring me back into the moment with punishment when I slip up and lose focus—all that anxiety went away. When I let him push the limits of what I am capable of and what I can take from him—the space in my head for self-consciousness and outside thoughts shrank and shrank until I could only be there, experiencing what he gave me.

Did I always achieve that state of clarity perfectly? The number of times I was punished would indicate that I did not. But it was a state I learned to love and learned to work for, to strive for. And I learned to take the punishments as I deserved them for breaking the rules I agreed to.

At the same time, I always knew I had an out that he would respect. The first two times we saw each other, any time I said stop, hold on, slow down, he listened and followed what I asked for. The third time, as he was checking the tightness on the rope he was using to tie my hands behind my back, he said, “Can you say ‘rouge’ for me?” I did. “If you need to stop for any reason, I want you to say that, okay?” “Okay.” In the five weeks we saw each other, I only used it once, but the moment I did, he stopped what we were doing, held me and reassured me I was okay, called it a night, and got in a warm shower with me.

Yes, we only saw each other for five weeks. No, nothing went wrong in our sexual relationship. It came down to our different views of the way the world works. I believe very strongly in taking responsibility for the society I was born into. He believes very strongly in taking responsibility for his individual actions. A very simplified summary of the many differences we discussed, that we always knew were there, and that eventually put us too much at odds with each other when we weren’t having sex. Both of us believe so fully in the conclusions of our experiences, and neither of us could give ground to the other. And to be honest, both of us have very good reasons for believing the things we do. But they couldn’t co-exist without causing friction in our emotional relationship.

Because as tempting as it may be to view kink relationships as purely sexual, the truth I learned is that they’re primarily a mental and emotional relationship. The pleasure is in the complete trust you have for your partner, the trust to hurt and be hurt, to control and be controlled, to be violent and be vulnerable, to be ugly and crying and sweaty and bruised and bleeding and vomiting, and to know through it all that you’re safe and loved. And if you have even the slightest bit of doubt in that trust that you are safe and loved outside of your scenes, you can’t reach that place of pleasure together within them.

The relationship required so much connection, vulnerability, and exposure, and that is what I loved about it. But that’s also what makes it so agonizing now that it’s over. Inside of it, I wasn’t fully aware of how deeply that trust had rooted itself in my heart, so I wasn’t prepared for the violent grief that has absolutely ravaged my emotions (and tear ducts) since I received the voice memo that was the beginning of the end. But I’ve learned how much and how quickly that connection became a part of who I am. I’ve learned how I’ll always hold some piece of that connection to him inside me. And I’ve learned to be grateful for that grief because it means I reached that deep place of trust, something I didn’t know I was capable of. I’ve learned to be grateful for it because it means I’m capable of it again.

Now I’m relearning to be grateful for him and for the relationship we had. Relearning because now it’s in the past tense. I was grateful for it when we were in the middle of it, but in the midst of grief in having someone you trusted and loved so deeply, that you exposed so much of yourself to for the first time, suddenly utterly absent from your life, it is easy for anger to replace gratitude. It is easy for hurt to overshadow the joy you got from it. And it is a process of healing and relearning to get back the good things that I learned.

And finally, before my first kink relationship, I knew a lot of the terms and the theories. And I could have spent this whole article talking to you about safe words and sub drop and consent and after care. And I learned that all of those things are useful and important. But at the end of the day, the most important thing I learned is to look for the trust and the comfort you get from the people you practice kink with. And to treasure that trust, even (or perhaps especially) when it comes from unexpected places, because that’s where the pleasure is.

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Art submitted by Rossi Charmoli