Relationships In The Leather/SM/Fetish Lifestyle

by Master Ron K.

From The Leather Journal
Issue 57

I have written about emotional stability, honesty, and approaches in the Leather/SM/Fetish Lifestyle. When I started this series of articles, Dave Rhodes and I agreed that the focal point of these three subjects was our relationships. The type of relationships we establish and how long they last is of utmost importance to each of us. Some of us want our relationship to be short lived; others want our relationships to last a lifetime. This article is an examination of how I view the process of establishing relationships and how I believe they should be maintained. As always with my writings, I encourage you to read and think about what I have written and then make your own decisions.

What Are Relationships?
To me, the relationships that are of import to this discussion are those based upon affinity, relationships with people we meet and like who have like beliefs and needs. I have a relationship to my community as a whole, in this case the Leather/SM/Fetish community. I also have relationships with individual members within the community. Some of my relationships are limited to the duration of our contact in public; others are relationships that we mutually want to maintain over long periods of time, if not for the rest of our lives. Some of my relationships are based upon respect, some on friendship, some on love, and some on passion.

Personally, it is my desire to attempt to have good relationships with everyone I meet. Obviously, not all relationships can be successful and long-term. It is, however, my goal that each person with whom I come into contact remembers their contact with me in a positive light, even if we disagree on issues or don't have the same views of life. I know and have good relationships with a number of people that I disagree with on almost everything. We maintain our good relations because we can disagree and show each other enough respect to be adult in our disagreements. For me, all relationships need not be friendly to be healthy. Even in those relationships that I have with people I do not like, I attempt to treat them with respect.

The type of relationship that is established is dependent upon the two individuals involved. Both individuals must be open to having a cordial relationship to establish a cordial relationship. The key for me is being willing to accept what people have to offer in a relationship, and being willing to let people know exactly what I expect of those I am involved with and what I have to offer.

Relationship Expectations
Everyone who has met me in person and spent any time at all talking with me knows that my highest expectations for a relationship are to be treated honestly and with respect. I automatically give everyone respect as humans, and I automatically respond to everyone with honesty. A lot of times people don't like my honesty, but they do respect the fact that I have the courage to be honest regardless of what others think. There is no requirement that we like each others' opinions, only that we attempt to understand each others' opinions and be honest about our own opinions.

Another expectation that I have for anyone interested in more than a passing acquaintance with me is that they must be willing to spend some time getting to know me and allowing me to get to know them. I do not enter into more intimate relationships easily or quickly, so when someone is interested in me, I let them know this expectation and that I intend to take my time getting to know them. Sometimes I wonder at how fast people withdraw when they realize that they are going to have to work a bit to have anything intimate with me. I simply am not interested in one-night stands with anyone, much less someone I do not know and with whom I may have nothing in common with on a personal level.

I have a rather high expectation that anyone I am involved with in a relationship, who is more than a passing acquaintance, must work as hard as I do on developing and maintaining open communications. The medium that is most often used to maintain a relationship is communication. To me, it matters little whether a relationship is just a friendship or a long-term love-based one. For the relationship to work I need to feel comfortable communicating with the other party and I need to know that they feel comfortable communicating with me. Not working to keep up good communication paths hinders the health and durability of the relationship.

Relationship Dynamics
I believe that all too often in Top/bottom, Dominant/submissive, or Master/slave relationships, the participants get too caught up in the "roles" they are in. There is an overlying power dynamic that is clearly defined by the nature of the relationship. This overlying dynamic is not a definition of the whole relationship in and of itself, but rather an agreed-upon definition or blueprint of how the partners see the power between them being exchanged. Unfortunately, I believe that all too often the partners in these relationships forget they are, first and foremost, humans with all the human maintenance requirements everyone else has (i.e., vanilla folk or non-leather, non-SM, and non-fetish). Our lifestyle just adds to our maintenance requirements; it does not substitute for, or eliminate the need for, the more mundane human requirements of everyday life.

As my slaves' Master, I can order my slaves to do absolutely anything I wish of them. There are no limits, no restrictions, and no boundaries. But I would consider myself quite foolish indeed if I were to order one of them to do something that I suspected would cause them physical, mental, or emotional damage. It would also be foolish of me to require that they not communicate their own concerns about their well-being to me should I require something that they perceive as potentially damaging. In the past, my slaves have communicated their concerns on specific issues and when they have, there have been times that I have modified the request to address their concerns, and times that I have not, but rather explained my reasoning on the issue to them and then proceeded. Regardless of how I decided to proceed, I always addressed their concerns for their safety and I always will, it is the human thing to do.

Each and every one of us, as humans, experience Joy, Love, Pleasure, Safety, Anger, Hate, Pain, Insecurity, etc. For me to experience these emotions and not communicate my experience to those I love and am involved with would be just as damaging to our relationship as their not communicating their experience and concerns to me. Yet there are those who would advocate the position that it is inappropriate for me to give that much information to my slaves. I really have to wonder why anyone would advocate this position. A Top/bottom, Dominant/submissive, or Master/slave relationship is only as strong as the human relationship that it is built upon. The more trust, communication, and connectedness that exists between me and my partners, the stronger and deeper the human relationship can be, and this leads to a stronger and more fulfilling Master/slave relationship.

As a Master I consider maintenance of a clear, clean, and completely unrestricted communication path of thoughts and emotions as absolutely essential to the health of my relationship with my slaves. I absolutely refuse to allow the dynamics of our power exchange to interfere with this communication path, it must flow both ways. To allow it to be otherwise for myself, or those I am involved with, would he to allow myself, or them, to abrogate our responsibility for using the primary tool of human interaction to benefit our relationship.

There is no doubt that for a person to assume and maintain responsibility for this level of communication requires a lot of internal strength and requires a lot of very hard work. But then, our lifestyle is not a good place for those who doubt themselves to be until they resolve those doubts. In my opinion, one must concentrate on being a well-centered human before deciding to branch out into our very special lifestyle. What each and every individual considers being well centered is open to more discussion; each of you must find and apply your own standard of "well-centeredness" when you are thinking about this issue. Even the strongest and most well-centered person can be and is often knocked through a loop when they really begin to let themselves fully experience this style of loving and living. Often this will occur several times as one grows and matures to their full potential. I know it has happened to me and had I not been reasonably well centered and had very strong communications pathways with my friends and lovers, I would have been in a whole lot of emotional trouble. As it was, I had a lot of love and support that I was able to use to learn from my mistakes and build better relationships with those very special people, instead of losing my relationships with them altogether.

I believe the only real rule in communications is that one must communicate everything. Not communicating something because you think it might cause your partner some distress is just as bad, if not worse, than communicating it and causing that hurt. Frankly, I'd rather have the pain and the opportunity to work through it with someone I love than not know, not have the opportunity to work through it, and have the risk of losing the relationship. Of course, there are always going to be considerations of when, where, and how this complete communication is going to occur, and this is good; it shows that we care about our partners. Failing to communicate our problems and concerns will open us up to a risk that our unspoken feelings will fester into pockets of pain, anger, and hatred. We should also be careful to monitor our communications with our partners to insure that they do not become a tool for causing hurt; this can and does happen when one communicates thoughtlessly.

Personally, I really resent my partners attempting to assume responsibility for my feelings by trying to decide what is good for me to know and what is not good for me to know. I also resent them expecting me to assume responsibility for their feelings. I know that recently I have had to communicate things to one of my partners that I would have preferred to not have to say or even to have to feel. I tend to get a territorial, jealous, etc., about the people whom I love. I don't particularly like my jealousy, but I understand it and try to manage it myself as best I can. If I were to deny my partner access to this information, I would be hiding a part of me from them and I believe that doing this would be unhealthy for our relationship.

My sharing those feelings with my lover is not a request that they do anything about their behavior that is giving rise to those feelings in me, it is simply communicating my feelings about a particular situation. It is my responsibility to manage my feelings about the situation and if it were to become a make-or-break issue in the relationship for me, it would be my responsibility to communicate that as well. Then my partner/lover/submissive would have to make decisions about what they want and how they value the relationship. Fortunately, this has not happened and I don't see it happening in the near future. But it is a very good example of what I am trying to say. I have exercised my ability to communicate my feelings and needs and they have been given necessary information about our relationship that they can use in forming their decisions about our relationship.

I truly believe that all communications breakdowns are rooted in the ill-founded desire to manage our partners' emotional states. We humans have enough problems managing our own emotional states; in my opinion, to try to assume the responsibility for someone else's emotional states is the height of arrogance and foolishness. Personally, if I am involved with someone who is unable to manage their emotional states, I would not want to be involved with them for long, as the emotional fallout from their problems would make my life rather miserable over the long run.

I have been told that for me, as a Master, to assume the position that I am not responsible for managing my slaves' emotional states is contrary to the common image of how Master/slave relationships should work. I do not believe this. If a slave comes to me who is reasonably well centered, based on my understanding and beliefs of what this means to me, I assume the responsibility of not deliberately causing them mental and/or emotional damage. I assume the responsibility for giving them my guidance, unconditional love, and support in their lives. How they use this guidance, unconditional love, and support is their responsibility. If my slaves use this out-pouring of attention and respect to maintain themselves and our relationship in a manner that causes our relationship to grow and flourish, they are meeting my expectations and behaving in a manner that I believe is consistent with my expectation that they "preserve and improve themselves as my valued property". If they do not, well, they do not stay my valued property for long, because they have proven that they do not value our relationship and themselves enough for me to continue to expend my limited energy on them.

I have had people try to convince me that they have the skill and knowledge required to step in and assume responsibility for their bottom/submissive/slave's emotional states.

There is a huge difference between offering unconditional support and trying to manipulate a person's emotional states into something you want them to experience on an everyday basis. I do not know one person who practices psychotherapy who does anything more that offer unconditional support for their clients and who helps their clients to find solutions to their problems via this unconditional support. To me, for anyone to assume that they can make someone feel a certain way because they are on the Top side of the power exchange is foolish, dangerous, abusive, and arrogant. No matter how much we may want someone to feel a certain way, there is no known way to make them do so that I consider, reasonable based on safety and sanity. A person feels what they feel and only they can shape how they respond to the variety of inputs found in their relationships. Each of us must choose how we behave and live with the results of that behavior.

Summary
Regardless of the descriptive titles that we apply to our relationships, they are nonetheless human relationships, first, foremost, and always. Each and every one of us has human needs that must be met for us to be happy and we look to our relationships to provide a majority of those needs. This is why we seek out relationships in the first place. We, the people who live our lives in the Leather/SM/ Fetish Community, have an added dynamic to our relationships. This dynamic is that we explicitly define the nature of the power exchange that occurs between us and our partners. That which vanilla folk do not discuss or consciously manage is a large part of what defines us as humans and we actively use our understanding of our power exchange in our everyday lives.

Growing up in a vanilla society did not prepare us for using and understanding the power exchange dynamic that is a part of our lives. Because of this, we expend a lot of our energy and time trying to learn, understand, and use this dynamic. Unfortunately, because of the time and effort required to learn to use the power exchange dynamic fully, we can forget to develop our other relationship skills to their fullest. We often get caught in the trap that the power exchange dynamic in and of itself is the whole relationship. To do this at the expense of all the many other facets of a human relationship is just as bad as ignoring our power exchange dynamic in favor of all the other wondrous things in a human relationship. Without a balanced, well thought out approach to both our power exchange dynamic and the other human relationship dynamics, our relationships are doomed to be plagued with painful failures.

I hope this article provided you with an interesting and useful point of view.