Review: BeMoreKinky BDSM app for couples

Kate Sloan
idk why this one made me laugh so hard but it did, and now it’s the lead image in my review, lmao

What is the BeMoreKinky app?

Available for both iOS and Android, the BeMoreKinky app is designed by and for kinky couples. It’s meant to be a hub for sexual communication between you and your partner, via features like BDSM quizzes, scene planners, end-to-end encrypted chat, guided intimacy exercises, a habit tracker, and a punishment wheel.

You can use it solo to gain self-knowledge about your kinks and desires, but it works best when used with a partner. You can invite them via a special link or code, and you’ll be able to interact through the app, see each other’s list of kink activities you’re open to, and more.

Things I like about the BeMoreKinky app:

  • Conversation-starter: As someone who wrote an introductory book on kink that was meant to kickstart a dialogue between partners, I’ve heard from many readers about the value of an external kinky conversation-starter, especially early on in one’s sexual self-discovery. It can be hard to bring up the things you’re into, and playing with this app together is a low-stress way to raise these topics. You could narrate aloud while one of you does a quiz on your bondage preferences, for example, or discuss your favorite titles/honorifics as you fill out your profiles together – and then just see where the conversation takes you.
  • Lots of kink inspiration: Human sexuality is so vast that there’s always more to discover, and this app is crammed full of kinks, fetishes, and activities for you to peruse and discuss. If you feel like your sex life is in a rut, but you don’t know quite how to shake things up, this app could definitely inspire you in that regard. For instance, lately I’ve been pondering what femdom-y honorific I might like to be called by a new person I’m seeing, and it was interesting to scroll through BeMoreKinky’s list of suitable titles (mistress, goddess, empress, etc.) to see what struck me.
  • MojoUpgrade-style activity matching: Anyone else remember MojoUpgrade, the classic internet quiz that shows you only the activities that both you and your partner said you’d be up for? It’s a great communication tool, and one of the core features of BeMoreKinky is something similar – once you and your partner have both rated several kink activities (which admittedly can be a decent-sized time investment), the app shows you all the activities your partner rated highly, as well as the ones you both said you like. This is a helpful starting point for planning scenes together, particularly with newer partners whose sexuality you’re less familiar with and less comfortable directly asking about.
  • “In the mood” status indicator: In the app’s “profile” tab, there’s a slider where you can indicate to your partner whether you’re “in the mood” or not. This didn’t send me any kind of notification when my wife activated hers – I had to seek it out myself by looking at the “partner” tab – but still a potentially useful functionality for people who struggle with sexual communication.
  • Encrypted chat: The built-in chat feature is end-to-end encrypted, so you can rest assured that your kinky convos are safe and secure. Sure, the same may be true for whatever app(s) you currently use to text with your partner in everyday life, but some people may prefer having a separate digital space for sexy chats, especially if you’re doing some kind of roleplay that benefits from that type of digital compartmentalization. (Sexy tech-support agent roleplay, anyone?!)
  • Tracks habits & rewards: Lots of kinksters enjoy dynamics where one partner monitors the other’s progress in achieving certain goals, whether those are directly kinky (e.g. “shine Mistress’s leather boots once a month,” “edge yourself 3 times before coming”) or more quotidian in nature (e.g. “read a book per week,” “go for a walk every day”). BeMoreKinky has a feature that allows you to assign and track the completion of habitual tasks like these. There are other apps that can do this, sure, but how many of them are built right into the interface you’re already using for kink negotiation and sexy chat? It’s cool to be able to do it all in one place. This feature was admittedly somewhat buggy when I tested it out, but hopefully it’ll get ironed out in future releases.
  • Polyamory features (in beta): There’s a huge degree of overlap between the kink community and the consensual non-monogamy community, so I was glad to see that BeMoreKinky has a “multi-partner mode” in beta currently. You can switch between multiple partners (up to 5!) without any of them being able to see each other’s quiz answers. While this doesn’t cover every possible non-monogamy configuration, it nonetheless makes this app much more polyamory-friendly than most of the comparable apps/sites I’ve seen.
  • Sleek design: It’s a good-lookin’ app, I must say!

Things I don’t like about the BeMoreKinky app:

  • Buggy: I unfortunately encountered a lot of bugs while trying to use this app – chat messages would randomly vanish, new habits didn’t appear until I’d closed/restarted the app, sometimes the app would randomly switch to a different tab without me selecting that, etc. My wife is a software developer so I sympathize with the struggles involved in making an app like this, but these types of issues are particularly frustrating when you’re trying to get into a sexy/kinky mood and would rather focus on flirting than troubleshooting!
  • A.I. integration: There is A.I.-generated stuff all over this app – some of it disclosed, some seemingly not – and it’s characteristically mediocre. Granted, I’m biased ‘n’ bitter, as a human being who writes about kink professionally and has been (shoddily) replaced with A.I. by some of my past clients – but I still find it sad to see A.I. being used for things like kink scene planning. Half the fun of kink is communicating about it – the negotiation, the flirtation, the mutual discovery – and if you use an A.I. tool to do that stuff, you’re denying yourself and your partner the opportunity to get to know yourselves and each other better, and all the delicious intimacy and vulnerability involved in that process. Naturally, I’m also against the usage of A.I. for art/writing/etc. because it takes away work/pay from skilled human creators who could’ve done a better job.
  • Poorly written quizzes: Probably related to the above point, I found many of the quizzes in this app to be confusingly written, repetitive, at least partially inaccurate, and ultimately not all that illuminating. For example, a quiz titled “Are you a giver or receiver?” mostly asked about dominance and submission – a separate concept from giving vs. receiving, as most kink educators could tell you – while a different quiz on impact play essentially just told me that I’m into impact play, which I already knew, rather than offering any insight on how I might explore that further or what specifically draws me to impact.
  • Overwhelming/excessive at times: This app is packed full of so many features that I think it could easily scare off some nervous newbies. I know from working in sex shops that BDSM beginners often feel overwhelmed as-is, because they’ve already battled through layers of shame and stigma just to be able to admit they might be kinky. The sheer number of features in this app could make them feel out of their depth, instead of encouraging them to dip a toe into kinky waters. It also annoyed me that the app only saves the activities you rate if you rate an entire category of activities (e.g. the “strict femdom” category contains 40 activities), so if you have to stop midway through, none of the activities you’ve rated to that point will be saved. This makes the app even more intimidating, because you can’t “microdose” it by just rating a few activities here and there when you have time – you have to commit to going through a long list of them before they’ll save.
  • Not good for trans people: Upon downloading the app, my wife filled out her basic profile, including indicating that she only wanted to be referred to with feminine terms. Shortly thereafter, we tested out the A.I. scene planning feature, and it immediately misgendered her(!!) and made erroneous assumptions about our sexual anatomy. As-is, I would recommend that trans and nonbinary people avoid this app for the time being. I hope better guardrails are put into place in the future, because (needless to say) this type of unnecessary technological misstep could ruin someone’s scene/night.

Final thoughts

I think the BeMoreKinky app is an admirable effort to make kink more accessible to the masses – not everyone is as comfortable yapping about their deepest sexual desires as I am(!), and sometimes an external resource, like an app or a book, can be immensely useful in jumpstarting these conversations.

That being said, I worry about the perils of bringing A.I. into the bedroom with us. Even setting aside more extreme or existential concerns like A.I.-induced psychosis and environmental impact, outsourcing your scene-planning to a robot robs you of the opportunity to practice thinking (and kinking) for yourself. It distances you from your partner in an intimate arena that can otherwise feel soul-affirmingly connective. It introduces the possibility of boner-killing awkward errors, like misgendering your sweetheart or yourself due to a coding oversight. And in this case, it does all this without adding much value that couldn’t be equally gleaned by just having the guts to talk to your partner about sex.

I feel similarly about BeMoreKinky as I did about the Fifty Shades series, which is to say: I’m concerned about damage it may do and misconceptions it may propagate, but at the same time, I’m happy for the people it may help to discover themselves and their sexualities, and I deeply hope that the good ultimately outweighs the bad. Sometimes we have to make such trade-offs in our continuing efforts to, uh, be more kinky.

 

This post was sponsored, meaning I was paid to write a fair and honest review of the app. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Review: SoleHole foot fetish toy

Kate Sloan
It comes in a little plastic jar. What’s not to love?

Dear foot fetishists: It is so rare that I get to address you directly, because the sex toy industry so rarely acknowledges your existence. Sure, they’ll throw you a bone every once in a while, in the form of a foot-shaped dildo or stroker – but if you’re anything like the foot fetishists in my dating history, you prefer real human feet and all the beautiful complexity they bring to the table: smells, tastes, textures, the whole shebang. And who can blame you? (Not me, certainly! This is a fetish-positive blog!)

However, today I come to you with news worth rejoicing about: There is a new foot fetish toy on the market which could very well give your sex life the upgrade you’ve been craving. It’s called the SoleHole, and I screeched when I got the email offering me one to review, because I’ve genuinely never seen a toy like this before.

Helpful diagram via SoleHole

What is the SoleHole?

Picture, if you will, the humble footjob. Typically, if you wanna jerk off someone’s cock between the soles of your feet (as so many foot fetishists enjoy), you have to contort yourself into an uncomfortable position, legs butterflied apart. You have to possess the hip/leg flexibility to be able to stroke your feet up and down your partner’s shaft, for however long it may take them to feel satisfied. Or, if you have mobility limitations like me, you or your partner might prefer to manually hold your feet together and slide them up and down using your hands, which can be tiresome in its own ways.

The patent-pending SoleHole is designed to make footjobs dramatically easier, more comfortable, and more pleasurable. It’s a soft, stretchy silicone sling that goes around your feet, holding them together to create a fuckable orifice of sorts between your soles.

That would’ve been a cool enough design on its own, but the SoleHole’s creators also added some nubby texture on the inside of the sling, to make it even more stimulating. The product retails for $49.

Probably the only uncensored foot pic you’ll ever see on this blog! Click here if you’re thirsting for more of my feet…

My experience with the SoleHole

My wife and I have attempted footjobs a few times before, because she’s into feet and thinks mine are cute (🥰), but it hasn’t always gone great for me – my hips are so inflexible/painful due to my chronic illness that I usually end up sore and exhausted by the time we’re done. I’ve enjoyed these encounters on a psychological level, though, since it’s hot to see my partner experiencing so much pleasure from my body – so I was excited to try an assistive product that might make footjobs comfier for me.

Getting the SoleHole onto my feet took under a minute the first time, and will take even less time in subsequent sessions, because the process is easy once you’ve gotten the hang of it: you slip the sling onto your feet and then wrap the long silicone strap under, around, and over the top of your feet (SoleHole’s diagram, above, explains it better than I can!).

I got my partner’s cock hard by sucking it for a while, and then came time to lube up the SoleHole. I’d suggest a thick water-based lube for this – we used Sutil Rich, my all-time fave – because silicone-based lubes could damage the toy; however, something like coconut oil could also work, as long as you don’t plan to progress to vaginal sex and/or sex with a condom after your footjob adventure (oils break down latex and aren’t great for vaginas). I applied lube to the soles of my feet and to the textured internal parts of the SoleHole, while my partner applied some to her dick as well, for maximum glide.

After some debate about positions, we settled on her standing by the edge of the bed while I laid down on the bed, my legs stretched out toward her. She slid her cock into the toy, between my soles, and we both moaned: it really did look and feel like my feet had been temporarily turned into an orifice for her to fuck. From my angle, I could see the head of her dick pushing back and forth between my soles with each stroke; it turned me on much more than I was expecting, because it reminded me of videos I’ve jerked off to before wherein a cock is filmed head-on (so to speak) thrusting into an open-ended stroker. The view was super sexy, almost like getting an X-ray view of what dicks must look like when they’re thrusting inside my cunt – except it was my feet!

It actually kind of felt like it was my cunt in some ways, especially as my partner got more turned on and started thrusting more decisively. I felt the impact of each thrust throughout my body, and had to grip the sheets to keep myself anchored, just like when my pussy gets fucked. It got me thinking about how the SoleHole could be great for people who want to have penetrative sex but can’t for some reason, whether that be vaginismus, pregnancy concerns, or whatever else; using the SoleHole is a form of outercourse that can feel surprisingly like intercourse!

Relatedly, my wife pointed out that plenty of transfeminine bottoms would enjoy getting fucked this way, whether or not they also bottom for penetrative sex; it could be affirming to see/feel someone thrusting into a “hole” that’s located between your legs, in line with your genitals, even though your feet are a little further away than your junk. (On that front, I love that the company went with a relatively gender-neutral purple for this toy, although my partner said she would’ve preferred a sleek-looking all-black one.)

Because the SoleHole was holding my feet together for me, I didn’t have to concentrate so hard on keeping my legs spread properly, which freed up some mental space and muscle strength that I was able to expend on my feet instead, gripping and stroking a little as my wife continued fucking me there. The position still hurt my inflexible hips, but nowhere near as much as it usually does, and I probably could’ve sidestepped that difficulty entirely by doing a gentle warm-up beforehand. (What can I say; I get impatient to try innovative sex toys!)

I was surprised by how quickly my wife came – under five minutes, I think! – but I guess I shouldn’t have been: she does love feet, after all, and this was a highly novel experience for us both! The SoleHole allowed me to watch her orgasm happen – both her facial reaction and her clit twitching – which was wildly hot, and I say that as someone who normally isn’t even all that turned on by visuals.

As we lay there in the sweaty afterglow – my still-SoleHole-clad feet draped over her spent body – we discussed what the toy had felt like. My wife loves that the SoleHole‘s design allows her to feel my actual feet, and not just the silicone of the toy – for that reason, she said, it’s clear that this product was made by people who actually fetishize feet, not just people who are trying to fill a hole in the market (so to speak)! She observed that the texture on the inside of the toy increases pleasure/stimulation without obscuring the sensation of the feet themselves. The tightness was good for her, too – I imagine the toy might feel different depending on the wearer’s foot size, but I’m a women’s size 8 and, for both of us, the SoleHole felt comfortably secure: not too loose and not too tight.

At the end of the session, my wife gently removed the SoleHole from my feet and went to go wash it in the bathroom sink. I wiped the leftover lube off my soles and settled back into bed, sighing serenely at the pleasure of having been fucked in a (w)hole new way.

The SoleHole’s internal texture (photo by mb)

Final thoughts

Normally when reviewing a toy, I mention any drawbacks or concerns I might have about it – but I really can’t think of anything to complain about when it comes to the SoleHole! It has one job, and it does that job very well. Foot fetishists and their open-minded partners will adore this product; I foresee it gaining cult status quite quickly, because I’ve never seen anything like it, in all my 14+ years of reviewing sex toys!

I think $49 is a fair price for this toy, given that it’s made of body-safe silicone and probably took a decent amount of research & development to perfect. My partner loved it so much that she immediately ordered another one to use with one of her other partners, which almost never happens!

As far as I’m concerned, the SoleHole is up there with toys like the Balldo and blowjob mirror in terms of innovation. Foot fetishists have long been overlooked by the sex toy industry, but no longer: the SoleHole is here, and it’s amazing. That’s one small step for the sex toy industry, one giant leap for foot-lovers worldwide!

 

This post was not sponsored, though SoleHole did send me their product for free so I could try it out! As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

What Can (and Can’t) You Learn From Watching Porn?

Kate Sloan
Photo by mb. Just imagine I’m attending a porn screening in this picture, although it was actually an improv show…

There’s perpetually a firestorm of discourse about porn – whether it’s good or bad, realistic or unrealistic, helpful inspiration or misguided misinformation. Personally I think porn can teach us a lot, but people often take the wrong lessons from it. So what can you actually learn from porn, and what can’t you? Here are my thoughts on the matter; I’d love to hear yours in the comments…

 

Things you probably can’t learn from porn:

How to initiate sex

Porn scenes often dive right into the action, which is reasonable – if you’re surfing a porn website, you might very well have one hand down your pants already! But in real life, often you have to (or want to) ease into sex much more gradually, to ensure everyone’s ongoing comfort and consent. This is especially true if you and/or your partner have “responsive desire” (to borrow a term from sexologist Emily Nagoski), in which case initiation might involve slow-burn activities like flirting on a dinner date, making out on the couch, or cuddling naked in bed. If you’re not sure how your partner prefers sex to be initiated, talk it over with them!

Sexual techniques your partner(s) will like

While some porn purports to be educational (and some actually is!), often you’re just seeing techniques that are designed to be visually stimulating, which may or may not actually feel good to the people involved. For instance, when someone is going down on me, I prefer a suction-based technique where my clit is inside someone’s mouth for a lot of the time, but that doesn’t always translate well to porn because you can’t see exactly what they’re doing with their tongue in there! You can certainly look to porn for inspo, but it’s not an instruction manual – for details on how to please your specific partner, you’ll need to ask them yourself, and/or try things out and see what they respond to.

How to do aftercare

I’ve almost never seen aftercare represented in porn, which makes sense – for a lot of us, our post-porn-watching ‘aftercare’ is just closing our laptop and moving on with our day/night! But in real life, whether the sex you’re having is kinky or vanilla, most people appreciate a calming comedown of some sort. Cuddling is a common aftercare staple, for instance, as is pillow talk about the sex you just had. Don’t forget water and a little snack if you need one – sex can be quite a workout sometimes!

 

Things you actually can learn from porn:

Dirty talk skills

Porn stars are, quite literally, pro-level dirty-talkers. It’s a skill well worth learning, given that 91% of people are turned on by it! You don’t have to copy the exact phrases and cadence of your favorite porn stars, but you can use their style as inspiration when developing your own. Whether your roadblock to dirty talk is sexual shame, nervousness, or just not knowing what to say, it can help to listen to porn stars’ salacious parlance and maybe even practice repeating aloud the things they say, so you get used to the way filthy words feel in your mouth.

What high levels of arousal feel like for you

Not everyone struggles with this, but some people experience what’s called “arousal non-concordance”: a frustrating mismatch between your levels of physical and mental arousal. There are many reasons this can occur; for me, I know that I’m prone to dissociation from my body due to trauma, so I sometimes don’t even notice that I’ve gotten physically turned on – or, on the flipside, I might have a mental desire for sex while feeling frustratingly little physical arousal. Porn can be helpful in this regard, because it helps me reach high arousal levels both physically and mentally while alone in the privacy of my room – and the more familiar I become with how that arousal feels in my body and brain, the easier it is for me to recognize it and foster it with partners.

New stuff you might want to try

You can read about certain kinky proclivities all day long, but it may not give you a sense of whether you’d actually enjoy doing those things. Porn, on the other hand – especially the hyper-realism of VR porn (see all studios here for more on that) – can be more vivid and thus more illuminating. There are lots of kinky things I didn’t quite “get” until I saw them done in porn, at which point I wanted to try them out ASAP!

 

What have you learned from porn, dear readers? Feel free to let me know in the comments!

 

This post contains a sponsored link. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

What’s In My Mobile Songwriting Kit?

Kate Sloan

Now that I’ve written and recorded a new song every week for years at a time, I’ve gotten pretty good at making songs no matter where I am. While the vast majority of my songs over that time period have been created from start to finish at home, I’m something of a jetsetter these days (at least between New York and Toronto!), so I’ve sometimes written and/or recorded songs at my parents’ house in East York, in hotel rooms, and even outside in nature.

A common truism among creatives is that, as much as we love our fancy tools, true creativity comes from within, and can be achieved with rudimentary tools or sometimes no tools at all. When I’m at home, I have access to my full collection of instruments, my fancy audio interface and mic, and every notebook and songwriting text I’ve ever owned – but when I’m traveling, I have to pare down significantly. Here are the current contents of my “mobile songwriting kit,” as it were…

A notebook and pen/pencil

It all starts here! Truth be told, if push came to shove, I could write a song using just my notebook and pen, no instruments or other equipment required – it’s that vital! I typically take my journal with me when I travel, which is always a large hardcover ruled Moleskine, and will scribble lyrics in there, in between pages of melodramatic prose about my dating life, etc.

For the last year or so, I’ve also taken to carrying a Field Notes pocket notebook in my bag everywhere I go. It takes up practically no space, and is ideal for drafting lyrics on buses and subway trains, in waiting rooms, at cafés and bars, etc.

Choice of writing instrument is very personal to each writer; I’m partial to the two that I’ve got tattooed on me, Retro 51 Tornado pens and Blackwing pencils. Also love my rollerball Lamy Safari and Pilot Precise v5s. I switch back and forth between pen and pencil according to my mood – it’s always cool to see which lyric lines have been crossed out and rewritten (sometimes several times), but a pencil’s erasability can sometimes trick my brain into being less self-critical and perfectionistic, which is especially important in the early stages of drafting a song.

A ukulele

One of the best things about the ukulele is its portability. It’s not the best instrument if you want a solemn and/or full sound, but as Amanda Palmer says, “Chords are just chords. Give me any instrument that can make a couple of chords and I’ll give you a song in a few minutes.” Really, as long as I have access to a ukulele and something to write with/on, I can come up with a fully fleshed-out song literally anywhere.

I have way too many ukuleles, but my best option for travel and on-the-go usage is the Enya Nova soprano uke, which I bought specifically because it’s made of carbon fiber and is thus much more durable than my other ones. I have no qualms tossing it in a purse or suitcase, where it takes up minimal room because of how slim it is, and it sounds pretty good for its price point. (I wish I’d brought it with me on the Toronto trip I’m on currently, because the cheap uke I have here sounds like a tin can and barely holds a tune. I’ve still written many a song on it, though, which speaks to the ukulele’s utility!)

Novation Launchkey Mini

This has been one of my best songwriting purchases. It’s a tiny midi keyboard that I can plug into my computer, iPad, or phone. For songwriting purposes, I usually just open GarageBand and set the keyboard to sound like a normal piano. But when recording, I can make it sound like any instrument I want, from drums to bass to guitar to strings to woodwinds.

I have occasionally written songs using a piano app on my phone or iPad when I had no other instruments available to me, but I’d much rather play an actual keyboard with actual keys. This one takes up minimal room in a suitcase and I love it. I’ll typically pack this for short-term travel rather than bring a ukulele, because the keyboard is less likely to get damaged in transit and also forces me to break out of the ruts/habits I tend to get into when I’ve been writing on the uke a lot.

My iPhone

There are about a zillion ways a smartphone can help you with songwriting, but mainly I use just three apps in my process: Notes, for drafting/editing lyrics and storing song ideas; Voice Record Pro, where I capture little song fragments as they come to me and make demo recordings of songs as I’m writing them; and Rhymezone, which helps you find not only rhymes but also near-rhymes, synonyms, and antonyms. I’m usually flipping back and forth between these three apps the entire time I’m writing a song, with occasional diversions to google things when needed (chord shapes, music theory nuances, facts related to the topic of the song I’m writing, etc.).

My laptop

While it’s not crucial (especially since I can record on my phone or iPad mini if I need to), I prefer to use my computer to record finished songs. I’ll open up GarageBand, connect any mics or instruments I want to use, and build arrangements as needed in there. Currently I have a 2022 MacBook Air; I love it a lot.

Zoom H2n + tripod

It’s great to have a portable mic when recording music, even though the mic on my iPhone is serviceable if I’ve got nothing else. I’ve mostly used this recorder for vocals and ukulele parts.

One thing I really like about it is that you can plug it in and record with it directly into something like GarageBand, or you can just make recordings with it and then move them from the device’s SD card to wherever you’ll be processing/mixing/using them. This makes it a versatile part of my kit. I also use it as a podcast mic when I’m traveling.

Headphones

Useful while producing/mixing a song, obviously, but also during the songwriting process – if I have time, I’ll often listen to a song demo on loop while out on a walk, and it helps me notice any parts of the song that feel awkward or not-quite-right so I can edit them.

I’ll also sometimes listen to white noise in my noise-canceling AirPods while trying to write in public, because it blocks out any speech/music/etc. around me that might be distracting. (I’m not like Stephin Merritt; I could never write a song in a bar that was blasting bad music like he does!)

…and that’s pretty much it: everything I use to write songs when I’m away from home! Fellow songwriters, feel free to let me know in the comments what your mobile songwriting kit would consist of.

Date Diaries: Valentine’s Madness & Bushwick Moonwater

Kate Sloan

Call me a starry-eyed basic bitch if you must, but Valentine’s Day is one of my favorite holidays. I mean, you get to dress up in lovecore colors and celebrate the love in your life – and for a romantic femme like me, what could be better than that?!

I know it’s been almost a month since Valentine’s at this point, but I’m still thinking about the lovely date I had with my wife mb that night, and I wanted to tell you about it!

To begin our evening, mb – who is very into photography – wanted to shoot some photos of me on our rooftop at magic hour (a.k.a. sunset). It was still bitterly cold, but I slipped out of my coat and jacket and stood bare-shouldered on the roof, staring off into Brooklyn, while she snapped away. It was a sweet and peaceful start to our evening, and reminded me of when my friends and I used to do photoshoots for no reason all the time in high school – sometimes creativity and connection are justifications in and of themselves!

We’d sent each other some gorgeous flowers to celebrate the day, and also exchanged gifts, as is tradition. mb gave me this iconic-looking box of chocolates from La Maison du Chocolat and a limited-edition Valentine’s Day Field Notes notebook.

Then she told me that we had to make a mysterious stop somewhere on our way to dinner. It turned out we needed to hit up the Apple store, because her most generous gift to me was a pair of AirPods Pro 3 – both of our old AirPods had been acting up, and we both use them a lot, so she got us each some new ones. I’ve been loving them – the noise-canceling is much better than my old ones (the original AirPods Pro, which I bought 5 years ago). There’s something so romantic to me about a partner giving me a gift that they know I will use constantly, which will improve my life on the daily! The gaming-inspired case I subsequently bought for mine is super cute, too.

I had been craving a Penicillin so mb tried to take me to the cocktail bar Fresh Kills before our dinner plans, but it was so packed that we couldn’t get in within a reasonable timeframe – so we went across the street to Hole in the Wall instead. Both of us got coffee-based cocktails, to ensure we’d be energetic enough for the rest of our evening’s plans: mb got an espresso martini, and I got a “Hole’d Fashioned,” a caffeinated take on the classic old fashioned.

I can’t remember the exact details of our conversation, but I’m certain we must have discussed a lot of romantic drama over these drinks. At the time, I was still recovering emotionally from being ghosted by someone I’d dated for 3 months(!!) and also from being rejected by a crush back home in Toronto. Shout-out to my wife for very empathetically letting me rant about these two situations on numerous occasions lately. Truly one of the key benefits of polyamory is having somebody there to support you emotionally when shit hits the fan, someone who knows you even better than most of your friends do and can remind you that you’re hella desirable even when you feel like an unloveable troll.

Next we went to Diner for dinner. It’s a fancy restaurant made from a 90-year-old traincar. They write the menu out for you on the paper tablecloth adorning your table. Gotta love quirky New York restaurants. We had a prix-fixe meal consisting of delicious martinis, oysters, chicory salad, crudo, lobster, duck, and chocolate tart. I am spoiled as fuck!!

This whole dinner was actually paid for by the sex toy brand Dame, who wanted to sponsor our night out. Dame’s always doing cool stuff, from suing the New York subway system for discriminating against female-founded sex-positive advertisers, to hosting erotica-writing workshops at romance bookstores, and I was honored that they’d want to treat me to Valentine’s dinner with my partner, too!

We talked about a lot of stuff over the course of the meal, including how far we’ve both come in our DD/lg dynamic. I definitely feel more sure of myself than I was when we first met, so I don’t rely on my wife to make as many decisions for me these days, which feels like a win for both of us – our D/s adventures have made me a stronger, smarter, more self-assured person, and have helped my wife get more deeply in touch with who she is and who she wants to be, as well.

After dinner, we meandered back home for some intense sadomasochistic sex. (Remember, “romance” is just whatever you and your partner find romantic! It doesn’t have to look like flowers and chocolates and unswerving egalitarianism… although it certainly can.)

Dame had sent me their mini wand, the Min, so we tried that out briefly – but mostly I was in the mood for pain, so my wife gave me a heavy beating with her hands + the custom Weal & Breech mallet that she commissioned for me as a gift several years ago. She took me right up to my pain limit, skilfully and sensitively, until I burst into cathartic tears about how lucky I felt to be loved in ways I’d always dreamed of. At my request, she brought me my stuffed wolf pup (whose name is Lincoln, a.k.a. Linko, because I acquired him on a trip to Lincoln City in 2015) – I cried into his fur for the latter half of the beating, which was comforting and nice.

In preparation for the sex that followed, my wife had had me heat up my Njoy Pure Wand in a bowl of warm water. Into the water, at her request, I’d mixed a few drops of “Bushwick moonwater” – water magically imbued with Brooklyn moonlight; it’s a long story – so there was some woo-woo witchiness afoot. She went down on me for a while and then fucked me with the pre-warmed Pure Wand until I squirted all over everything. That’s romance, baybee!

Overall, it was a pretty much perfect Valentine’s Day – my first one since moving to the States/living with my wife, which was special in and of itself. In a world that’s currently so chaotic and scary, it feels more important than ever to celebrate love, connection, and being there for each other. Thanks to my wife (and also to Dame) for making it such a wonderful night! 💖