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I want to be submissive

You want it, and you have never said it out loud

That is the usual order. The wish is often there for years before a word exists for it, and the word tends to arrive only after you read a book or watch a series and think, that one.

What exactly you are looking for, you don’t know yet at that point. You don’t need to. You only need to know what makes you curious, and that is enough to bring it up.

What the word submissive means and where it comes from is on the glossary page about the submissive. This page is about something else: how you get from “I think I want this” to an evening where it actually happens.

What exactly you give up

Not yourself. A piece of decision-making, for an agreed length of time.

For The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, Ali Hébert and Angela Weaver interviewed nine dominants and twelve submissives about what their role gives them. One payoff belonged only to the submissive side: handing over control. Not the touch, not the pain. The giving-up itself.

That also explains why this so often lands with women who make decisions all day. The calm isn’t in what happens. It’s in the fact that, for once, you don’t have to think it up.

And it isn’t passive. You set the frame: what is allowed, what is not, and where it stops. Inside that frame, I decide. Outside it, nothing happens.

What people are afraid to ask

Three things, almost always in this order.

“Do you think I’m strange?” No. I have been doing this for more than twenty-five years, and there is little I haven’t heard asked. What people find strange about themselves is usually the most ordinary part of their story.

“Does it have to hurt, then?” No. Being submissive and pain play are two separate things that often get named in the same breath. An evening built entirely of waiting, instructions, and attention is a complete evening on its own.

“What if I want to stop halfway?” Then we stop. That is what the safeword is for, and using it is the point, not a failure. How that works is explained under safeword.

How an evening like this actually begins

With a conversation, and that conversation is shorter than you think.

  1. You say what makes you curious. One sentence is enough. “I want to not have to decide anything for once” is a complete answer.
  2. I ask more about what you definitely don’t want. That is the most important part, and you usually know it more sharply than what you do want.
  3. We agree on a safeword, and on what happens when it is used.
  4. We set an end time. Not because the clock is in charge, but because knowing when it stops is what lets you let go.

What happens after that depends on what was said in steps one and two. There is no script that works for everyone, and I don’t work with one.

What I see happen myself

Women consistently misjudge two things.

The first is time. Someone who asks for a long evening is often, after twenty minutes, already somewhere she didn’t expect to reach. So I would rather build up over several meetings than try to do everything in one night.

The second is aftercare. It gets underestimated, and with this role especially, the drop sometimes only arrives the next day. What that is and why it helps is explained under subdrop and aftercare.

What has stayed with me from the conversations I have about this: almost no one comes back afterward to what exactly happened. They come back to the moment when they no longer had to.

Where you can read more

On this site, the definition of the role is under submissive, and the agreements around it are under consent, hard limit, and safeword.

Outside this site, the interview study by Hébert and Weaver is the most worthwhile, because in it twelve submissives say, in their own words, what the role gives them and what disappoints them about it. If you prefer measured research, the study by Ambler and colleagues is free to download.

When you want to talk to me about this

You don’t need to know what you want in order to message me. Most first messages I get are three lines long and start with an apology, and that apology isn’t needed at all. The easiest first step is a short note on WhatsApp; what happens after that is up to you.

What an evening looks like is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

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