BDSM/Fetish
Question:
My partner opened our relationship to give me room to explore my BDSM-feelings. And I have met my D-type last month and now I am seriously doubting wether to continue my vanilla relationship?
Answer:
Being ‘in looove‘ is a wonderful feeling. It is a strong feeling, not to be messed with, and it is an emotion that is kinda hard to stay rational about. Of course, there is no way I can give a conclusive answer to this question. But I think it is an excelent reason to talk about “BDSM-infatuation”. An emotion not so much geared to a person but rather to a lifestyle.
BDSM-infatuation
When you meet a person and you fall in love that is an emotional situation that you more or less “get into”. It is a state of mind that gets close to a little pink clouded psychosis. ‘Psychosis’ is defined by having problems to experience reality as reality.
When infatuated, one sees aspects of a possible partner that in reality aren’t there (the wonderful aspects of that person) and one really does not see the things that actually really are there (the negative aspects of that person) if they are there, in front of you.
addiction-scientists theorize that ‘addiction’ to a certain drug more or less claims the same brain-structures as the ones we see lighting up during infatuation. Some say that infatuation makes use of the “addiction-centres” in our brain… But I think that -because infatuation is probably way older than “addiction”- it is is more likely that this the other way around.
Even in the world of polyamory -where we do accept that different relationships can appear next to each other towards different partners-, even there a lot of people refuse to talk about “infatuation” and instead use the term “new relationship energy”. To me, that shows clearly how hard it is to accept that infatuations can suddenly appear (and disappear) in our lives. And how ‘loaded’ being “in love” is in our post-Disney lives.
We can misjudge the load (making emotions ‘larger’ or ‘smaller’ as they are), the direction (gearing the emotion towards the wrong thing/person -being ashamed about myself instead of the culprit) and we can misjudge the label (being angry instead of sad -or the other way around-)
Being in love actually leaves us quite vulnerable. So, in my opinion, we should really be careful when we think about the “direction” of such a strong emotion.
I think it could very well be that we direct our infatuation towards the person that gives us the sexuality that we longed for for so long. Where actually a lot of people taking up that role in our sexuality could have done exactly the same. Even if we would have trained the original partner to behave in a similar way the BDSM-infatuation could have been felt toward that person as being the desired Dom or submissive.
The same goes for fetish. If someone handles your fetish in a ‘close enough’ way (no one is able to hit a fetish-fantasy a 100% spot-on) that could give this feeling of ‘fetish-infatuation’ when that happens the first times.
Ergo
Having said this, I can only repeat that, of course, I don’t know what you should do with your life. That is totally your own responsibility. And chances are that you will be really really happy with your fresh Dom as a partner. But chances are really substantial that you will be disappointed.
Just under one-third of the experienced BDSM-ers in a study in Belgium from the University of Antwerp said that in hind-sight their BDSM role has led them to take awkward steps in their relationship choices.
Just under one-third of the experienced BDSM-ers in a study in Belgium from the University of Antwerp said that in hind-sight their BDSM role has led them to take awkward steps in their relationship choices. And because I know that relationships do not have an ‘UNDO-button’ I do hope you choose wisely (in my worldview an alignment of head, heart and pelvic floor) 😉
I can only hope that you won’t say -in a year from now- what I have heard several times during my practice from clients: “I now see that I shouldn’t have taken him/her too serious… In hindsight, everyone with either the guts or the lack of empathy that would’ve hit me with a whip could have unleashed those feelings…”
If you’d like, we can talk online about the door that apparently has been left wide open in your life and your current long term relationship (and about how hard that maybe has been with also the respect that could be given for the fact that you kept your wishes for yourself for so long), we could maybe come to a needs-wants-nice-to-haves-list in your life and getting a bit of long-term perspective on relation(s) while these wonderful emotions are raging at the same time. 🙂
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