Some thoughts on polyamory, D/s, and being cucked

No conclusions, just a lot of questions.

Where I am now, and where I came from.

Polyamory and kink have been inseparable for me since I joined the kink scene eight years ago. Until now, I have never questioned if I wanted to do kink with multiple partners because the people I’ve been interested in doing it with already had other partners when I met them. For a few months now, the situation has been different, though. I am currently in a monogam-ish relationship, and it seems I like the comfort of it. But it also makes me feel ashamed.

I used to think that the way I want to do kink will always have to do with doing it with multiple partners. I loved the thrill of the first rope session, the feeling of a new dominant energy descending upon me, and everything that came with it. The way the particular alchemy of us two meeting together revealed parts of me that nobody had seen before. The intensity of humiliation of being dominated by someone I barely knew. But recent experiences have made me reconsider if my ideas around kink were just a story I told myself to cope with a reality that was less than perfect.

I started my current relationship having multiple existing partners, but, for one reason or another (not related to the newly forming relationship), they all disappeared over a few months. My partner started out with no other partners and no experience in polyamory, but a strong interest in non-monogamy. We went through a few bumps related to his jealousy over my existing partners, but it’s over now. We’re on steady waters. I can play with other people, and it does not stir him up.

What triggered this whole exploration?

My jealousy, on the other hand, seems to be growing. It doesn’t help that one of our kinks is cucking. And igniting and intensifying jealousy is a big part of it. It is not an issue when the person he’s cucking me with does not seem like a steady relationship candidate. It becomes a problem when it turns out they might be, but my thoughts and feelings towards them have been set when they were the ‘cupcake’, and are now reluctant to change. It happened some time ago, and it completely freaked me out. But it also made me think. I imagined what it would be like to have to share him with another person. To meet my metamour at social events. To interact with them. And I couldn’t. What I have done before with other partners I could not bring myself to imagine happening with him. So I started asking myself, ‘Why?’.

I’ve always wanted an owner, and I might need him to belong to me too.

One thing that came to my mind was that the depth of ownership I am interested in might not be possible when playing with multiple people. I might be made for exclusivity, at least in some dimensions, and the reason I suffered so much in my previous relationships might have been because it was not there. And not only on my side. Whether I like it or not, I might need my dominant’s full attention to be able to safely give as much as I want to. In the past, I longed so much to feel owned by someone and to be used for their fun and pleasure that I gave myself to others haphazardly. If someone seemed like the right candidate, I would offer myself to them fully, whether they were equipped to deal with all the implications or not. I dealt with them instead. But looking back, I don’t think it was a healthy setup.

With him, it’s different. I know he cares about me deeply, and even if I like to think that I also cared deeply about other people in the past, what I feel towards him is not something I would allow myself to feel towards my previous partners. And probably rightfully so. If I think about it, it would not be healthy for me to belong to someone as fully as I feel I belong to him if he had multiple other partners with the same level of commitment. I simply can’t imagine getting the same level of attention and care from my past partners, no matter how much they wished they could give it to me (which they often didn’t and couldn’t). And I start to believe that I need that level of care and attention for the level of intensity I crave.

Or am I just a jealous bitch?

At the same time, I can’t disentangle whether my reluctance to introduce new partners into our constellation is really driven by the fact that the D/s I want requires some form of exclusivity or if it is just my petty jealousy telling me that I need him only for myself. Because I do believe he cares more about me than any other partner did in the past. And that means I have the power to say ‘no’ where previously I didn’t. So I might be exercising the right to say it just because I can. It is shameful to think about it, but I can’t deny that it might be true.

I can’t reconcile cucking and poly.

Then there is the whole cucking play topic, which has always been my kink, and I experimented with it a bit before, but my current partner is the first person I’ve met who is really into it and with whom I could properly explore it. But I can’t wrap my head around how to marry it with polyamory. To me, being cucked has a lot to do with exploring jealousy and feelings of inferiority, which I find hot and intriguing. But then, if you want a healthy attitude towards your metamour, your goal is not to feel jealous of them. And if your partner wants to reassure you when you feel insecure, they should try to make you feel equally important and special, and not worse than any of their other partners. I feel like this can’t be reconciled with being cucked. Of course, you could say you do cucking with one person and poly with another, but how do you know what to do with whom? And is it ever possible to switch from being cucked with someone to being their metamour? How much emotional and mental gymnastics would I have to do to make it possible? And is it worth the effort?

I can’t(?) reconcile poly and getting my emotional needs met.

And then there is my recent realization that getting my emotional needs fulfilled is actually possible, but it clashes with being polyamorous in my case. It seems that I am not that bad at expressing my emotional needs in a monogam-ish relationship in which their fulfillment hinges mostly on one person. If I know that he is my ‘boyfriend’, I don’t doubt that I can walk up to him (almost) any time and ask for what I need (while not necessarily needing to get it, it’s mostly about the freedom to ask in this case). Things change when more partners are involved. In that scenario, I become withdrawn, waiting for the partner’s initiative because I am unsure if they want me to approach them, especially if they are busy with another partner. What I think then is something like: ‘They should be spending their time with and giving their attention to whoever they see fit. If they are talking to this person now, it means it is what they want. If they wanted to talk to me, they would come to me. But they don’t. So I need to take care of myself.’ This kind of thinking makes me feel emotionally deprived and lonely, and as other partners often don’t have these kinds of inhibitions, they end up getting more attention than I do, simply because they ask and I don’t, which makes me even more hurt and withdrawn.

(Non)conclusion

To sum it up, there is no conclusion. I don’t know what to do with all this. I used to strongly believe in polyamory. For a long while, I was solo poly and quite happy at that. I thought that this was the best way for me to be in a relationship since I needed quite a lot of personal space and freedom. At the same time, now that I’ve met someone I am comfortable with saying they are my ‘primary’ partner (I put it in quotation marks because I still don’t like hierarchy in relationships, another thing that makes poly hard, taking into account all that I wrote above), I am not sure about that anymore. It might be that back then, I just hadn't met the right person, and solo poly was a story I was telling myself to not feel lonely and worthless as a relationship material. Or maybe long-term, this relationship will not succeed if monogam-ish, stifled by too much closeness and dependence on each other, which was not aligned with my true nature after all?

I don’t know. What I do know is that I am currently questioning many of my past life choices and wondering how to reconcile my values with my needs, feelings, and kinks. You can’t have it all, they say. Which part of ‘all’ am I the most willing to forsake? And can’t I really?

Savouring jealousy

It's such a complex feeling and such a delicious one to unpack. Jealousy is something that I have been intrigued by from the moment that I realized that it is possible to incorporate it into play. It plays on human most basic fears of loneliness, abandonment and not being enough. And that offers tremendous possibilities for emotional suffering.

I am not a jealous type of person in general. I am usually rather secure in most of my relationships and I am not easily fearful about losing a partner. Also because I think that it is something out of my control either way so I rather try to focus on what they are giving me instead of thinking how I might lose it. There is one type of situation that does ignite jealousy in me very strongly, though. And that is when it is mixed with envy.

Because of my high level of ambition and a constant hunger for more, I tend to want a lot of things and there have always been people around me who had more of something that I wanted than me. Sometimes it's not so much about them having more, but simply about having something that I don’t have, not at all or not at that moment. Those are the people who I am envious of. I can even be envious of my Dominant for being dominant even though I don't have a drop of dominance in me. It's not about wanting it for myself as a person who I am right now but about not being able to have it. Ever. And at the same time finding it something admirable or desirable. 

And because my envy is so often about the absolutes, things that I can't change, mixed with jealousy it can be formidable to play with. Especially, because being jealous ignites my deepest anxieties. And what can cause one more pain than having their anxieties dragged out in the open and prodded?

I learned recently to savour my jealousy. It usually appears in relation to other partners of my partners when they are female and fundamentally different from me. Not just any different, but they need to be a kind of woman that I am uselessly attracted to because of her alluring femininity. That kind of woman that is very beautiful but in a cold and distant way, aware of her beauty and knowing how to use it as a powerful tool to get what she wants. In general, she usually gets what she wants in her life without much struggle. Often because of an aura of slight helplessness that surrounds her, which makes you feel like she needs you in some way, but at the same time, constantly keeping you at a distance, making you want to provide for her, making you feel like you might have something that she needs and if you give it to her, she might, for a moment, become yours. 

This is the type of woman that I am very envious of. Of course, the above image is a huge generalization and a big part of it is my own imagination about these women and not the reality. It doesn’t matter, though. What matters is how they make me feel.

They come in many different flavours but there is one thing that unites them, my reaction to them. It's my reaction that tells me that she, as well, belongs to their breed. It's my inability to turn my eyes from her, the moment she appeared in my sight. My strong desire to talk to her and make her laugh, to entertain her. I want her to be mine, even though I know that it's impossible and, also, I wouldn't know what to do with her once she is. Because I want to have her, but at the same time all I really want is for someone else to have me. 

And if this is the way she makes me feel, I can only imagine how my partner feels about her. How is it even possible that they still want to have anything to do with me if they can have her? She is so superior to me that there is no point of even trying to compare myself to her. 

But I do. I find a perverse pleasure in observing her (or them together) and finding all the ways in which she is better. All the ways in which I don't measure up. All the desirable ways in which they treat her and they don't treat me. It's very cruel to do it to myself, but it's my personal gift, self-inflicted suffering. 

When I think about it, I feel ashamed of doing it. I feel like I shouldn't feed on my jealousy like that. I shouldn't torture myself using those two people who are not even aware of what I am doing. It's a very twisted kind of voyeurism and mental masturbation. But it's so delightfully painful that it's hard to stop. 

I would like to believe that I am able to control it. That I am not going to make any permanent damage to my relationships because of that. That if I keep it to myself, nobody will get hurt. I don't know if it's true. What I do know is that I love observing myself around those women and can't really help it. I love how small and pathetic they make me feel. How their presence makes me retreat and accept that my partner will probably not want to touch me ever again. And understand it. I love how low and hopeless it makes me. How desperate and undeserving. How acutely aware of all the things that I will never be able to provide to them and she is. How resignation and acceptance of the inevitability of being rejected creeps up on me when I see them together. 

Of course, I know, rationally speaking, that it doesn't work like that. I know that people are different and they like each other for different reasons and there is no notion of someone being objectively better than me. I also know that I have many qualities that people might find attractive. That it's not so black and white. That if they say that they like and value me then I should trust they do. And usually, I do. Just not at that moment. Because at that moment I'm busy drowning myself in self-deprecation, humiliation and loneliness. 

At that moment, I know only one thing that I have that she doesn't that might be the reason why my partners haven’t abandoned me yet. I know that she will never go as low as I do for them. She will never lose her dignity for them, as I do so easily. They will never feel as justified in their cruelty towards her as they are in their cruelty towards me. They will never turn her into something that is as far from a human as I can be sometimes. She won't entertain them with her misery and pitifulness. 

I know that that is the reason why they keep me with them. So that they can be at their worst with me and at their best with her. They need to degrade me so that they can cherish her. And knowing that only makes me wish to be someone else even more. Someone beautiful and respected. Someone feared and admired. Someone valued and taken into account and not just used. 

I will never be that person, though, because, in reality, it's not who I want to be. I could be her only if I wasn't myself. But I want misery and suffering too much. I long to feel degraded. I long to feel rejected. I long to be hurt. And if my partner is not there to provide it to me, if they are busy with someone who actually is worthy of their attention, then I'm always there for myself. I’m always there to rub some salt into my wounds and then sit back and enjoy the pain, sipping slowly from the bitter-sweet cup that they passed on to me.

This time of the year when you are reminded once again very acutely how far from ordinary your life is

So it came again. This time of the year, when you meet with your colleagues and their partners for a Christmas dinner and you realize that you are never going to achieve their level of normalcy (which you usually don’t aspire to, but being so acutely aware of your distance from it makes you slightly uncomfortable and feeling out if place).

This time when people ask you to summarize your year and tell them what the highlights were and all you can think of is how your dominant made you believe that he is a psychopath and you feared for your life or how you were hypnotized into a rag doll and fucked mercilessly while being half-conscious and helpless. Or how you were tortured and humiliated in rope in front of forty people and how afterwards everyone was telling you that it is was beautiful.

It is this time of the year when the frequency of biting your tongue, awkward silences and coming up with the worst possible lies is at its year-high.

Will there ever be a time when I can stop hiding my personality from the world?

Both kink and polyamory have grown to shape a big part of who I am. It happened organically and it has changed me on many levels. I really love how I've developed in the past two years and I would love to be able to share it with others. Unfortunately, sometimes it is not the best idea.

In general, people talk about relationships frequently, which makes hiding polyamory quite complicated. Because if I want to talk about my relationships, I either have to lie or I need to explain myself. Becoming polyamorous changed the way that I look at relationships and love in general. It made me both more connected and more self-sufficient at the same time. It made me question the status quo in many other aspects of life, also outside of romantic relationships. On the one hand, I would like to share it with other people, because I feel like otherwise, I am not myself with them. I am putting on a facade that is socially accepted, but it is not who I am. I am also not able to talk about all the important people in my life without lying who they are to me. But on the other hand, I know that my choices are not standard and if I share them, I will have to go through a process of explaining them as well. And not everyone that I interact with is worth going through it. Also, not everyone that I share it with will approve of it. I might turn some people against me. In terms of friendships, it is perfectly fine for me to lose people in my life if they can’t accept my choices. But when it comes to career or family, things get more complicated.

As for kink, one could say that not talking about it shouldn't be such a problem, as people usually don't share with others what they do in their bedrooms. That’s true, they don’t, but kink and D/s are way more than just sex for me. It's a way of life. It's a certain attitude and it permeates all aspects of my life. Accepting the fact that I am submissive, learning about my reactions to dominant people and playing with people, in general, taught me so much that I feel like I am putting on a very thick mask when I decide not to share those experiences. The play that I do requires constant self-analysis and work on myself, which often leads to enlightening discoveries. When I am around vanilla people, I need to police myself a lot not to share certain thoughts and insights, because I don’t want to be asked where I got them from. I need to shut off a big part of my life, lie about my free time activities and where I’ve met many of my friends and partners.

The alternative is even more complicated though because kink is so misunderstood in the society that sharing about it can potentially be dangerous, even leading to losing my career or the people that I love.
For me being open and true to myself is one of the most important values. But by being honest about kink and polyamory, I put myself in the spotlight. I give myself a label. Because once I share it, it is going to be one of the main things that people will remember me from. And they are going to ask me about it and I will have to explain it to them in the best way possible because it might be the only insight that they get into polyamory or kink and I don’t want to create a wrong image. The sheer fact that I’ve made many non-standard choices in my life creates a dilemma where I either have to be dishonest or serve as an example and an advocate of the choices that I’ve made. And sometimes I feel like I just want to live my life.

Will there ever be a time when I can proudly talk about how I express myself creatively?

I am a data scientist and I have an analytical mind, but I’ve always loved art. And I’ve been looking for ways to express myself artistically since I remember. I’ve tried playing the piano, singing, cooking, dancing and writing. Without greater success. Argentine tango was giving me some sort of satisfaction, but it was far from fulfilment.

Last year I finally found an activity that does make me feel like I am really creating some sort of art. It is rope bondage. And maybe writing about kink a little bit, but I don’t feel good enough in it to really be proud of it. In any case, I would love to be able to talk about these subjects. I used to feel kind of inferior towards people who I thought were creative, because I felt like they have something that I don’t. But at the same time, I’ve always found them fascinating and I was looking for their company. Thanks to rope and kink I feel like I also have something to say in terms of creativity and I would love to be able to share it with people whom I admire. Unfortunately, it is not always a good idea.

Last week during a Christmas dinner I’ve been talking to the husband of my manager (whom I find extremely interesting, very intelligent and well educated with a successful career in business, who happens to also be a recognized photographer with a number of exhibitions in galleries and so on). Before dinner we visited a photography exhibition and we had a talk about it afterwards. Then he asked me if I do anything to express myself artistically. That was a difficult moment for me. I really value his opinion and I wanted to impress him. I was so tempted to tell him that I am a Japanese rope bondage model and that I love it. That I feel like rope exposes some aspects of myself that are really at the core of who I am. That I think that I can really touch people with what I do. And that I really am starting to feel like I have something to say in it. That I understand what it means to create. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t because then I would have to explain to him what it is and where it comes from. And I would probably have to admit that I am kinky.
For me, rope is so much more than kink. It really allows me to express myself in ways that I didn’t know were possible. It is a beautiful art that I find utterly fascinating. Practising it is a big part of my life and I love to talk about it. Unfortunately, the only people that I can freely talk about it with are kinky people. With all the other people I need to remember that sharing about it equals coming out. And there are some people with whom coming out might be a really big deal and not in a good way.

Is staying in hiding really a good idea if I want something to change?

I keep asking myself this question. If I and fellow kinksters and polyamorous people keep staying in hiding, will anything ever change? Will public opinion about what we do ever change, if we don’t share about what we do? I hate the fact that I need to hide a big part of myself in most of my everyday interactions. That I always need to weigh my options carefully before I decide whether I can be completely transparent with someone. I hate putting on masks.

I feel like if I want something to change and if I want people to understand polyamory and kink, I should talk about it. By keeping it in hiding, I keep behaving like there is something wrong with what I am doing. And I definitely don’t think there is.

But… Sharing about it is an act of courage that is hard sometimes. People often feel threatened when they hear about other people being different than them. They don’t like them. And we are dependent on other people in our lives. We live in a society. We work for other people. We manage and are managed by other people. And if we want to be successful in a society, we need to make other people feel comfortable around us. We need them to like and respect us. And if we seem too different, they won’t.

So I am still doubting whether I want to be open about my choices or not. On the one hand, I feel like I should, not only because it makes me uncomfortable to pretend someone that I am not, but more because I feel like being open is the right thing to do if I want anything to change in the way that society views kink and polyamory. On the other hand, though, I don’t want to risk being pushed to the margins of the society and losing a chance for a successful life, because I’ve been too honest with the wrong people. Honesty makes you vulnerable and your vulnerability might be abused by some.

I am not sure if I am ready to pick up this fight. I am not sure if my position is strong enough to hold the weight of judgement that will come with coming out. I try to be honest about it with the people whom I trust, but I feel like that it is not enough. It’s easy, to be honest with people who you know will support and understand you. Or at least will try to understand. But I feel like I am not ready to be fully transparent yet. Especially not about kink. I feel like I am not ready to make most of my social interactions about defending my choices.

So I guess that I will have to still suffer through that period of lying and wearing thick masks to pretend that I am just like everybody else. It is saddening that it feels like I need to shield other people from who I am. It is saddening that I feel like I am not strong enough to be fully open about who I am. I hope that one day I will. I feel like I owe it to myself. But this time has not come yet.