Dear Hopeless Sub,
The good news is you can have your cake and get beaten too. Being a husband and a parent doesn’t mean giving up your sexual interests, as unrelated to fatherhood as they may seem. It simply means that one of the playrooms in the house has a good firm lock on it, and that when Mommy and Daddy go out for a night on the town they carry their real party clothes in bags. It means finding a wife who is also into the BDSM scene, rather than presuming that your wife and your domme need to be two separate people. I know it’s hard getting over the unbearable shame of one’s sexual persona, and by extension not wanting to be intimately involved with someone who would happily facilitate it. It’s hard to imagine the same person who beats your ass raising your children, but if you don’t respect the desires of your partner, how are you ever going to respect your own?
Dossie Easton is the author of many books on BDSM and alternative relationships, most famously The Ethical Slut, The New Topping Book and The New Bottoming Book (all recommended). She is also a psychotherapist in San Francisco who works with couples, triads and other forms of alternative families. She offered some personal advice: “Most communities these days have some form of support group for people into BDSM, and most of them are lots of fun—a little Googling might turn up all kinds of interesting things you could attend. What I’m really suggesting is that you go out and find the community, in person. Go to where you will meet people like yourself, make friends, create an extended family, and you will start making the kinds of connections that can lead to long-term relationships, children, mortgages, whatever you like.” Easton ain’t just whistling Dixie either; she’s been involved in this community as an active and family-minded member for several decades.
“My strongest recommendation is that you attend these kinds of functions with the goal of making friends and meeting,” she continues, “not the creature of your fantasy, but someone like yourself. Create a good circle of friends and the lover/partner of your dreams will find you.”
Speaking to your self-described addiction, if people can quit smoking, drag their fat asses to the gym (hell on earth, if you ask me) and do all the other unpleasant things that are involved in self-discipline, then you can moderate your behaviour—along with having an SM relationship that is caring and longterm. I believe one of the reasons that people get caught up in behavioural quagmires is because they feel loathsome and alone in their desires and they just want to sink into them with that most ignoble yet intoxicating of emotions, self-pity. SM with a loving partner can be intensely romantic, and you may find if you share this connection, those feelings will spill over into different forms of sexual expression.
