Let’s begin with a corny metaphor. Once upon a time, this happy-go-lucky person was like a little stream trilling and babbling away as she cascaded her way over cold rocks, through a snow-covered landscape, forever in search of the ocean. What she didn’t realise was that the water was like her skin, and the part that was truly her were the rocks themselves. It was to say that the water was her skin, her superficial affect, but her essence was the substance over which it was pulled.
Perhaps two years ago I, shortly after being fired from the job of a lifetime, and one which I was unbelievably good at, I found myself with lot’s of time on my hands. I was on paid garden leave—in other words, not allowed to work in my field, my geography, my area of interest or expertise. Did I use that time wisely? You decide. Just a smattering of what I did: Got fit, sold a property, sold a business; bought a company for a group of investors; bought, gutted, and partially refurbished two homes, wrote a cookbook, wrote a novel, gave birth to this blog, did all the things described in it, and most importantly, found the “she” inside of me and began a transition process which is the prime unfolding joy in my life. Been busy.
I have written about how fundamental ex-Mistress was to this journey, about how she pushed me on so many levels. I continue to feel a mixture of gratitude and sorrow towards her which are not really present in the same way but linger beneath the surface. But this post is not about that dynamic or what it gave. It is about what preceded it, and what led me to her in the first place. The topic? Love.
The novel I wrote was a semi-autobiographical tale of love. They say that all good fiction carries a lot of the writer inside of it, and that was certainly true of that project. It was born in a physical form through a November writer’s challenge, where you right 1,000 words a day for 30 days, giving the ideal length for a novel. It just poured out of me. This was a period of time that came well before Ex-Mistress, whom I first met in March of the following year, well after the draft was finished.
The process of writing the book ultimately re-started my writing “career”, which has always been a side hustle. I have written and published several hundred erotic tales. I used to write them to get off. In my sexless marriage, instead of play with my wife, I would write until I was so aroused that I just came. Sometimes that would take days. But it was an inevitable consequence of crawling so deeply inside of my mind and my body. Talk about an incentive to write! It was very therapeutic. It was also extremely solo. That suited my then personality of introversion. And of course, it allowed me to not touch myself, something I really did have a problem with. And, most importantly, it allowed me to feel “innocent”, a feeling so central to my erotic sense of self that I was not even willing to despoil myself. Is that restraint? Or another form of body dysphoria? It certainly fit with being a little.
But this was like living in the waiting room of my own sexuality. It provided a very essential release and stimulation. But it did nothing for my root cause, only tickling the “lack” which was the essence of my marital life.
What did I really need? Someone to touch me. To touch me knowing me. To be erotic with me in full knowledge. Touch is the love language I never knew was my most important, so sealed off from it had I lived. My way of fighting back against my mother’s inappropriate relationship with me was to not let her touch me. And this began when I was a toddler. Can you imagine not wanting the touch of the most important person in our lives? Wanting it, but also hating the need, hating the expression of vulnerability that the need represented, knowing that the only person that could give it was also the person who hurt you?
In my household, there was no father to take up the slack. Thankfully. As he was a physical and verbal abuser. Now he is a needy and extinct volcano. I still love him. I don’t know whether I forgive him, don’t know if I can, but have found my peace. I found my peace with my mother before she died. She wanted to kiss me on my mouth as she lay dying, something I can only think she knew was so symbolic of everything that was wrong with our relationship. I obliged. How does one deny the last request of the dying?
What was I looking for? What started this whole process? What lies at the root of this journey? Something quite simple. Something quite powerful. The essence and meaning of life. Love. This was what my book was and is about. Only the twist was the kind of love that could exist on my terms. D/s and the act of submission strikes at the heart of this. Love is a feeling of surrender. Sub space is the same. When I feel love, I am in submission, feeling them together in their most powerful forms. They are one and the same.
Of course, submission to a stranger is not the same as submission to someone you know and love, but they are simply degrees on a path, a kind of continuum of intensity. I was like a drunk when I first began, and it started without even looking for it. I randomly chanced upon an image on Tumblr which was so utterly and deeply arousing to me that I opened an account on Tumblr. I had never used the site before and was really not on social media at all. After signing up, I went down the rabbit hole, and found plenty of images which appealed to me.
Two things happened next. I was bombarded by insistent “dominatrixes” and exercised very little judgement or self-protection, and was soon running errands all over town, buying gift cards, burning myself with hot wax, doing unspeakable things to my genitals. The most retrospectively hilarious of these was tying a full bottle of water to my balls and jumping up and down. I videoed myself doing these things for some, or sent photos of myself having completed various tasks, and was generally just “playing” with anyone who approached me and bossed me around. It was a blast but was also unfulfilling. I wanted something more genuine.
While I was happy to play remotely—it was still COVID, I did want to know who I was dealing with, and ended up getting really good at piercing the identity veil of the people I was playing with. Mostly they were women in the Philippines or Nigeria. I did play with a woman who worked in a call centre in Texas. They all invariably used various stolen images of porn stars or dominatrixes, but some were so good that they were able to rip the profiles of unsuspecting mid-Western college kids.
To be honest, I am extremely fortunate that none of them made good on their threats to blackmail me. In the end, I put this down to being a good person, a person of faith, and finding the patience and desire to connect with respect with even those who sought to harm me.
I did this for a year. In the end, I preserved relations with two of them. They shared with me who they really were, we exchanged photos, in one case, I met the entire family of a Nigerian woman, her siblings, her parents, all on live video. In a way, they became friends. The call centre woman in Texas is a pro-Domme in real life but found that the scourge of racism forced her to adopt a white woman persona. She is black. She is also gorgeous, and I liked her much better, found her far more attractive in real life than the porn star persona she uses/d. This woman most enjoyed playing with chastity and feminisation. Two areas I sympathise with but was never erotically inclined to pursue. Our near-daily interactions quickly moved towards personal effectiveness, setting goals, getting things accomplished, and exercise. She was an exercise bunny, and she more than encouraged me in this direction.
The Nigerian woman was very adventurous with anal play, and that was awfully fun for me. But our relationship soon evolved towards respecting her through keeping my house spotless. And more importantly, she was very into controlling me through baby games. She is the one who put me on an early bed time schedule, having me shut off my devices at 8 pm and getting into bed at that time.
The measure of the impact of both of these women is that the things they introduced to my life have stuck. Ironically, they have stuck more than things introduced by people who I have met and who have played a much more important role in my life.
The adopted persona of the Nigerian woman actually belonged to a very well-known NY dominatrix. I didn’t know it at the time but did eventually figure it out. Her dynamic with one of her subs became absolutely symbolic of this journey, of the question that sits at the very root of my essence, and became the trigger for everything that followed.
Can a dominant woman love a submissive man?
My desire to answer that question led me to some of the most deliciously wonderful people. I “met” several women bloggers, some of whom read these pages (thank you ladies), who are themselves professional and lifestyle dominatrixes. They all graciously spoke to me and corresponded with me at length on the topic of love within D/s. This process also gave me a reading list which I still plow through, and which is a gift that gives to me in new ways, as my current “play partner” has effectively given me a library of books to read that explore the entire female experience. Knowing that I can never finish, and that each title only deepens my bond to her, to myself, to life, to everything, is a fresh and powerful motive to go on reading.
My desire to answer this question also finally led me to wanting to meet an artist in the world of D/s. And I do think of the pro-Domme as an artist. The first person I approached was the domme whose persona my Nigerian catfish had stolen. I knew everything about her. It’s actually quite scary how much the Nigerian woman knew, and how much a newbie like me was able to find out about a real person as I sought to find out if she was really the person she was pretending to be.
I was also terrified of her in real life. The things she did with her clients were beyond anything I “wanted” to do, and she seemed to specialise in something that I really had no interest in, humiliation. But what drew me to her was that she seemed to have transcended the provider/client relationship with a small number of people and had created a master/slave dynamic that existed outside of her own love relationship. It inspired me.
I eventually wrote to her and never heard a thing. I sent her gifts from her wish-list as it said that she was busy, and this was the best way to get her attention. I still didn’t hear from her.
I searched through hundreds and hundreds of profiles to find someone I thought I might like, and with whom I might explore this concept of love. And in the end, completely by chance, ex-Mistress popped up as visiting my city…her announcement retweeted by someone who I was teetering on the edge of reaching out to. I wrote to her, scared out of my mind.
And then I heard back, and yes, she was willing to see me. She wanted to know what I was looking for, and over lunch one day, I told her that I wanted to explore the topic of love. That I wanted to see if it was possible to love someone utterly and completely as a submissive, to learn to let go of the self, to experience a kind of ego death, but to also know that this was a mutual process, that a dominant woman could love a submissive, a client, in the same way.
My best friend said I was asking for the impossible to do this with a pro-Domme. I simply said, “well, I was and remain totally upfront. If this isn’t something she wants, she will say so.” In the meantime, we began to see one another. The first time we played together, I cried when I asked if she would push me to be a better person, to be the kind of submissive that she was proud of, to please mould me in her image of what a desirable submissive me, to help me to become the kind of submissive that she could actually love.
What else happened? The original domme finally wrote back to me. She wrote to me with the beauty of a beautiful voice, with patience, and with real understanding. She was not only totally forgiving about how much I knew about her as the result of my unpicking of the Nigerian catfish’s identity, but also began a pen-pal relationship with me that had the most uncanny feature of having her messages land in my inbox with pearls of wisdom, care and understanding on momentous days in my life.
In a way, she became a coach on my journey with Ex-Mistress. We wrote to each other about love, about her feelings for her own clients, about mine for the dominant woman. She also shared with me beautiful glimpses into the economic life of a successful pro-Domme, and how she was taking steps to build herself long-term economic certainty through investments of various kinds, and she very graciously asked for and received my advice on such topics.
We corresponded infrequently, but her messages landed at critical junctures, even when unsolicited. It was as if a spirit spoke through her. She wrote to me out of the blue the day my wife said she wanted a divorcee. She wrote to me out of the blue the day that Ex-Mistress set me free. She wrote to me out of the blue the day of and after the first time I met Mistress and the first time we played together. It was uncanny. We continue to be gentle with each other.
Similarly, new Mistress came into my life for the same reasons, only she became that figure as the other one left the stage. I absolutely miss the connection with Ex-Mistress, in part because there was so much left unexplored, but the bus has a fixed route, and in order to reach your destination, you need to ride a bus that is going where you need to get to. The process is the journey, but the wrong bus will never give you the right process. Ex-Mistress and new Mistress are both deeply inspiring people. Their significance to me, however, is very different in that new Mistress and I do not have conflict in our goals. There is an ease that means that things just flow. It feels effortless.
Have I answered the question of whether a dominant woman can love a submissive man? Can a pro-domme love a client? Yes, I have. Have I found it for myself. Not yet. But I’m also not looking anymore, because the question has been answered. And what I recognise as my needs are changing.
Being a dominatrix and sex worker
My whole life is a side hustle. All aspects of it. At the very beginning of all of this, I just wanted to be a dominatrix. Simultaneous to my birth as an “out” submissive, came my desire to be a sex worker. And believe me, I tried. All the tricks of the catfish were at my disposal. I had a wonderful coach in this process, who is a fantastically talented catfish who taught me so many things about her art. She set me up with a persona, and we had a deal, she promoted me and taught me in exchange for a piece of the action. That I loved being in her stable, a part of her posse, was kind of hot to me.
I explored this at the same time as I followed the path of submission. I worked mainly with people whose kink matched my own. The adult baby. The femdomme loving submissive male. And I played with quite a few through Twitter, Tumblr, Kik, Google, and other platforms. And do you know what? I kinda sucked at it. Pardon my French. I was really bad at it.
It wasn’t that I was bad at the dirty talk. No. With that, I had many a man get off. What I was no good at was my desire to “fix” them, to heal them, to get them to let go of their own shame. This was most acute with cross-dressers, the forced femme crowd, the sissies. It didn’t take long for them to tire of my desire to “help” them uncover their base motivations, to “heal”, to let go of shame. A nightmare really. These poor souls just wanted a little kinky fun, and what the got was kink-laced therapy.
I sold panties and sweaty socks too. Exercise gear.
What did I learn from the experience? Respect. The woman who do this to make a living really have to work hard at it. And they have to have incredible talent. Going through this process made me love and respect the Sex Worker on a much deeper level. I get the work and the talent having seen how hard it is, how much effort and talent it takes. And that goes for the catfish as well as the in-person player, and everyone in between.
I am not really all that experienced in this world. And my dabbling is decelerating, as I have found what I have set out to find. And that, even though I didn’t know I was looking for it. Or rather, I didn’t know that what I was looking for, I already had. Myself. All of this journey served one purpose. To find myself.
What has that meant? To realise that the process is the goal. To discover that how we are as people is the only thing that we can control and is the only thing that has real value in life. Knowing that these two aspects of the same thing can be a life’s work, only enhances them.
It is strangely wonderful to realise that the people we are friends with either change our reality or reflect a changed reality. I have made so many new friends in the past few years, reflecting just how different my world is. Vanilla comes in many flavours. It is like the universe is bending. And these new people just seem to slot in as though they were always there. Everything is becoming easier. It is as if I don’t have to work at anything. It is as if the universe is laying itself at my feet.
It isn’t about me at all. It is that the essence of the universe is harmony. Our life quest is to find harmony. That is love. It is the essence and meaning of life. To find the harmonic vibration which is the essence of being yourself. When this happens, we just slot right in.
We become what we always have been but strip away all the noise. Silence. Harmony. Love.
Beyond Non-Binary 
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