… Or maybe not a relief. I began thinking a little more about the relationship between my sexuality and how I interact with people. If you’re a long time reader, you’ll remember my discussing how sex is never “just” sex to me. While I don’t always attribute love to it, I do attribute many other things to it; may it be emotional connection, or attention, or a self-esteem boost. Conversely, many things lead me to think of sex; perhaps uncommon things. I must have reached a certain point where sex became just another way of getting to know someone. There have definitely been times where I’ve been getting to know someone new, socially or at work or anything, and I was enjoying getting to know them, and I’d randomly wonder what it would be like to have sex with them. Just a passing curiosity, you understand, I might not really want to have sex with them or even be attracted to them. I’d just wonder because maybe it would tell me something more about them.

J has remarked before that it sounds like I mix up sex and intimacy a lot, when sometimes they’re actually mutually exclusive. Some close friends have also remarked that I mix up friendship and love, or friendship and sex. Friendship, romance, and sex are all kind of blurry to me. I see moving from one to another just like shifting gears, or viewing the same thing through a different lens. They’re all the same matter, but just have different forms. I mean, it’s not like I think that I could love or want sex with all of my friends. Sometimes the possibility just isn’t there. But when it is, moving from one to another isn’t really very difficult for me. I never found much of a problem with it. Many people I know have clear boundaries between each thing (friend, fuckbuddy, significant other) but I didn’t really ever set those boundaries in place. So what happened was everything just kind of… spilled into each other. And so I ended up having sex with many of my closest friends; having undefined sexual/romantic relationships; hooking up with someone and then becoming friends with them; or breaking up with a boyfriend but continuing to sleep with him for a while after that.

I think that blurry view is changing now.

Click on “continue reading” on the bottom right to read more.

(Notice that I’m not addressing love or falling in love here. That’s too big for this conversation, I think. I’m merely referring to the nature of different kinds of relationships.)

Anyway, this never used to worry me, but it does now because I think I used sex to relate to people, when I’d have been better off doing something else. Honestly? There have been times when I felt more comfortable making out with someone I was just getting to know, compared to trying to approach someone at a party. I remember when I was first getting to know the Professional, I invited him to a rope bondage workshop with me. Doing that put a clear sexual overtone to whatever was going to happen between us, while, at the time, I didn’t even know if I was interested in him yet. Inviting him to a rope bondage event just felt more natural to me than… something else.

There could be many reasons for that, and they’re probably all correct: I’m fairly comfortable with my sexuality, whereas I’m socially anxious and don’t like interacting in large group situations; if I’m “offering” sex then the person has more incentive to hang out with me (yeah, for a long while my self-esteem was just that low). I can’t keep using sex as a social lubricant though, and not just because I’m dating J. It just isn’t very sustainable.

My lack of boundaries also worries me because… well, let me put it this way. Having multiple friends-with-benefits and fuck-buddies, when that’s all I had, didn’t matter. It’s quite different once you’re committed to someone and you have a past life that’s full of friends-with-benefits and fuck-buddies. Many of the people I slept with were also close friends of mine. They’re all over the US now, but I still keep in touch with them and they’re still a part of my life to some extent. It’s a little awkward when I want to tell J about them or when I want to tell them about J. In a way, they’re not just my close friends, they’re also my “exes,” even though we were never in a relationship. We were sleeping together for a sustained period of time, and there was some kind of interest expressed by both parties… that’s basically enough.

So every time I mention one of those friends to J, there’s a little tension there. Not too much to be unhealthy, but it’s still a little awkward. I think J is mature enough not to let those things get in the way, and that I have good enough judgement to not harp on my past sexual relationships constantly for no reason (hmm. I hope). I introduced J to the Rationalist, and he reacted with the same tenseness and shiftiness at first, but after they ran into each other more often and had more conversations, they got along pretty well, which is nice.

And, of course, my “exes” have their own reactions to when I talk about J, ranging from happiness on my behalf, to defensiveness/protectiveness, to suspicion, to silence.

As J said, it’s the elephant in the room: “we both fucked this girl at some point in time.” With my friends who I didn’t have a sexual relationship with, that tension is not there. J is friends with his ex-girlfriends as well, and I don’t have a problem with that or feel jealous, but I do think of them differently than the rest of his friends.

I don’t regret anything I did in the past. I did what I did, and I’m dealing with the ramifications now, and they’re not awful or all that difficult to deal with. I didn’t write this post because I’m stressing. These things are just probably good things to know for future use. I think I need to re-evaluate how I approach boundaries.

All part of growing up, I guess.

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I’m always slightly bemused by the large number of people (close friends and acquaintances) who have me clearly pegged as dominant. It’s not like people’s opinions necessarily have any bearing on reality, but it’s still interesting to make a note of them.

If I were to be most truthful, I’d have to declare myself as either a switch, or unsure. In my head, though, I’m most inclined to think of myself as a Domme rather than a switch or a submissive – yet the amount of time I spend in a dominant role during sex is probably only a tiny percentage. I suppose I just want to become that in a more permanent way, in contrast to the other roles/identities.

Lots of things stand in the way of me growing into a Domme identity, or make me hesitate to claim that identity outright. I’m a pretty insecure person. I second guess myself a lot. I’m easily embarrassed. I’m almost never able to bring myself to do something to a person that they might not want or that might be humiliating for them, or “force” them to do something that I want. I have a hard time expressing my desires and asking for things. Sometimes I’m not even sure what my desires are. Most of the time I can’t even approach people I’m attracted to unless I’m fairly certain that the feeling is mutual. All of those things don’t seem to be good domly qualities, even though I know that all sorts of people can be dominants, that dominants can be insecure, and that people can be very different in the bedroom than out of it.

But then there are times that I get a crystal clear picture in my head of what I want to do to someone. When those urges hit me, it’s like an ecstatic rush to the head. I become so stuck on the idea that I can hardly think about anything else. I remember that one night all I wanted was to walk up to Girl and interrupt whatever she was doing by kissing her hard; and another night when I desperately wanted to 69 with the Professional, then bend him over and fuck him roughly in the ass until his orgasm came gasping and screaming out of him.

Whether or not I act on what I feel is another issue entirely. I very rarely do.

Sure, I’ve topped or bordered-on-dominated people before. Godamnit, I belted the Emperor in front of a huge roomful of people, and I’ve cuffed K to his bedpost and then breast-tortured him. The thing is that those ideas were fully theirs. I enjoyed the fuck out of it, but I was still the one following orders, so to speak. Most of the time, my wants or fantasies actually center around what a partner has already told me that they want done to them. It’s almost as if I’m too afraid to even think beyond those things. My biggest fear when I want to do something to someone is what if the other person doesn’t want that too?

In spite of all this, I’ve found that a few things that bring out the Domme side of me. The first thing is trust; when I’m so close to someone that I know they’ll accept me no matter what seemingly bizarre desire I confide to them.

The second thing is brattiness. Mostly in hot, bitchy women. There was this girl in my fraternity who stands out in my mind very clearly. She was blond, slim, gorgeous, and perfect – like a doll. She’d act all cutesy and then turn right around and bitch you out from behind a serpentine smile. I can’t remember how many times I wanted to grab her thick, blond hair in fistfulls, smudge her lipglossed smile off her face, and fuck her so hard that by the end of it she’d be boneless in my arms.

(Yeah, that obviously never happened. She’s straight not to mention taken.)

The third thing is alcohol. Yeah… drunk dominance sounds like a horrible idea. Alcohol just knocks down the walls of my inhibitions like nothing else.

And while I have issues with dominance, I don’t claim submissive or switch because… well. Let me put it this way. I want to be spanked, bound, scratched, roughed up, immobilized, and used. The first time I was tied up, in a completely non-sexual context might I add, I coasted down into sub/bottomspace so quickly it was like magic: I was fortunate enough to attend a bondage workshop given by Dov, and the night afterwards one of my fellow frat members wanted to practice tying a chest harness on me, so I let him. While he was binding me, I became very quiet and still, looking down at my shoes. Once my wrists were cinched securely behind my back, and pulled tightly upwards towards my shoulder blades due to the shortness of the rope he was using, I found myself in a secure, calm, comforting, almost Zen-like state. I stayed like that for a while. Then someone offered to untie me, and I reluctantly let them.

My point is, while I want all of that (and more), I’m not exactly very… submissive, per se. Case in point, when the Professional was spanking me, I lay face down on the bed for him, I immobilized my arms for him, I took every one of his swats without trying to escape, but when he tried to verbally embarrass or humiliate me, I didn’t have any of it. I gave him snark and sass and started baiting him right back. In fact, if someone tried to sneer at me and call me their slut, I can see myself responding not obediently, but with an empathic “fuck you!”

One thing I can say for sure though (this is starting to turn into a rambly laundry list… forgive me) is that I’m definitely very comfortable in my bottom identity (clearly) and my top identity. God, I love topping people. Learning what turns them on and leaving them gasping for more, teasing and pleasuring and hurting and pushing them to sensory heights they’ve never felt before, playing their bodies like an instrument, knowing just the right buttons to press and the right way to fuck with their heads… it’s quite wonderful.

My sexuality seems like it just continues to grow in different ways, and I’m excited to see what I’ll find out next. Hopefully I’ll find dominants who are empathetic, conscientious and strong enough for me to really feel their control (an interesting note: up until now the best dominance I’ve received has been from people who identify as submissive, i.e. the Emperor and the Professional), and submissives who I trust and whose psyches I can sink deeply into.

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