It’s easy to talk like a Dom when there’s already a script.
It’s a lot harder when all you’ve got is your judgment, your restraint, and the way a person responds to you.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand myself a bit more clearly (see my entire blog). Not in a dramatic way… just paying attention to patterns. What works, what doesn’t, and what keeps coming up.
A big part of that has been looking at the kind of relationships I’m drawn to. Not just that I am… but why they seem to fit so well. What I keep coming back to isn’t really kink. It’s something simpler than that. A pull toward taking responsibility. Making decisions. Being someone another person can lean on without having to second guess everything. That shows up in a lot of places in my life… and very clearly in relationships.
I have always stayed mostly within the scene when it came to dating. And to be fair, it does what it’s supposed to do and it works. You can be direct. You can openly say what you’re into, what you expect, how you think a dynamic should look. The language is already there. You don’t have to translate anything. You can get surprisingly far, very quickly.
Recently I’ve felt myself struggling to find the perfect fit. With such a clear vocabulary around relationship dynamics, it is not difficult to find that side of the relationship… but finding the right person behind it was harder. And at some point, I got tired of ignoring that gap and decided to try to step outside the scene.
Relationship dynamics doesn’t just disappear off the scene. It just stops being named. You still meet women who want someone to take the lead. Who relax when they don’t have to carry everything themselves. Who respond to someone being steady and decisive. None of that is unique to the scene at all. It just doesn’t come with a label.
This means you have to change your approach. You can’t just provide a laundry list of initialisms and references. You don’t get to declare who you are and have it understood. You sit across from someone, and all she has is what she can pick up from you in real time.
How you speak.
How you handle things when they don’t go perfectly.
Whether you hesitate.
Whether you overcorrect.
She’s not listening for a title. She’s watching for something she can either trust… or not.
I’ve found that harder than I expected. But also more honest. If I’m being fair… the scene makes it easier to get away with pretending. It’s not hard to learn the words. To present yourself a certain way. To sound like you know what you’re doing. Most people who’ve spent time here have run into that at some point. Men who say all the right things, but something doesn’t quite hold together when you spend real time with them. There’s a gap.
Stepping outside of the scene removes the cover. There’s nothing to lean on. No framing or vocabulary to hide behind. If something is there, it shows. If it isn’t, that shows too.
That’s the thing I’ve been thinking about recently. If I want to find someone who needs me to lead then I have to show that side of me genuinely along with everything else that is me. I can’t simply announce it.
So that’s where I’ve landed, at least for now. The scene gave me a language. Stepping outside of it is forcing me to see whether I can stand without it.
… I think that’s probably a good thing.