coming out

4 Ways to Tell Your Partner About Your Kink

Kate Sloan

I’ve answered hundreds, if not thousands, of questions about kink in my career as a sex writer and educator – and one of the most common ones, without a doubt, is: “How do I tell my partner about my kinks?”

It’s an understandable thing to wonder. The seemingly obvious answer is “Just tell them,” but if it were that easy, people wouldn’t be asking the question in the first place. What they really mean when they ask this is: How do I conjure the courage to tell my partner about my kinks, given that I know they might react badly?

My best friend, sex educator Bex Caputo, would say: Don’t make it a big deal. If you tell them about your fetish with the same foreboding tone you’d use to tell them you got cancer, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Humans take a lot of cues from each other socially and psychologically, on both conscious and unconscious levels, and so if you disclose your kink in a way that’s fun and flirty instead of scary or self-flagellating, you’re much likelier to get a good response.

But there are a lot of different ways to do that. Let’s talk about some of them. (And please keep in mind that all of these suggestions are just ways to ease a disclosure and start a conversation – not finish it. You should always do some sort of negotiation before trying a kink that’s new to either of you, to make sure you’re on the same page about basic stuff like what’s going to happen, who’s going to do what, what your safeword[s] or safe-signal[s] will be, and what kind of aftercare you’ll each need.)

 

Fill out a Yes/No/Maybe list. This is a classic kink negotiation tool that’s especially useful at the beginnings of relationships when you don’t know each other’s tastes yet, or in established relationships when you’re in search of a sexual shake-up. Basically it’s a list where you both categorize a bunch of different kinks into 4 categories:

  1. Yes, Into = Yes, I enthusiastically want to try this thing
  2. Yes, Willing = Yes, I would be happy to try this thing if you wanted to try it, though I’m not 100% enthusiastic about it myself
  3. Maybe = I might be willing to try this thing under some circumstances; let’s discuss further
  4. No = I absolutely do not want to try this thing

Once you each complete your list, you can compare notes and see where there’s overlap and where there decidedly isn’t, and then go from there.

There are digital tools that make this process easy, like Old.MojoUpgrade.com, or you could pick up a copy of my book and go through it together, adding each kink to your list as you go.

 

“So I had this dream…” If you’re prepared to tell a little white lie to kick off a kink chat with your partner, you could always just say you had a sexy dream about [insert kink here] and then ask a question like:

  • Doesn’t that sound hot?
  • Have you ever tried that?
  • What do you think about that?
  • Would you ever want to try that?
  • Ever wondered what that would be like?
  • Does that seem like something we’d do?

This gives you a bit of plausible deniability, so that if (god forbid) they get judgey or freak out, you can say, “Well, it was just a dream.” (And then maybe decide whether you want to end the relationship and move on, ’cause… yikes.)

 

Porn, erotica, or live cam shows. If you have the type of relationship where the two of you consume sexual media together – whether as a prelude to sex or just for entertainment purposes – then this can be a good way to guide a conversation toward your particular interests.

You could, for example, suggest that the two of you each curate a playlist of 2-3 porn clips that you’ll watch together, or 1-2 erotica stories you’ll read together, alternating back and forth between theirs and yours. Maybe you set a theme, like “things we want to try,” or maybe you both just pick things you like to jerk off to when you’re alone. This is especially great because, when both partners are committed to the exercise, each of you ends up being bravely vulnerable in a way that makes it easier for the other person to do the same.

Sites featuring live webcam models, like FetishCamSites.com, can also provide a media-based jumping-off point for kink discussions. Maybe seeing a cute camgirl spank herself on-screen with a paddle could get your partner curious about paddles, for instance…

 

Sex shop visit. Now, don’t get me wrong: I would not recommend buying a flogger/enema/Neon Wand/whatever for a partner who has never expressed any interest in owning or using one. It’s presumptuous, financially risky (depending on how pricey the item is and whether its retailer has a good returns policy), and can make your sweetie feel pressured to say yes even if they don’t want to.

But, visiting a sex shop together can prompt some productive conversations about sex and kink. It’s easy to make up an excuse to do this, like needing to pick up some condoms or lube, or just walking past a sex shop and saying, “Hey, wanna check this place out?”

If your fetish is equipment-based – e.g. chastity, whipping, pegging – then you can locate that equipment in the store (you may need to check their stock ahead of time if it’s a specialty piece) and then ask your partner one of the questions I recommended in the “So I had this dream…” suggestion above. If your fetish isn’t related to any particular paraphernalia, you could instead pick up a kink book that you know mentions it (perhaps mine!), flip to that page, and ask the same sorts of questions.

 

Of course, there are more ways to communicate a fetish to a partner than just the ones listed here. What methods have worked best for you? How would you want a partner to tell you about their fetish?

 

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

Intimate Intercourse: Dating a Sex Writer (Part 2)

Kate Sloan

Hi again! Welcome back to Intimate Intercourse, a series where I interview my boyfriend/Sir/daddy, who goes by Super Sleepy Dude, about various topics related to sex and kink. This week we’re discussing what it’s like to date a sex writer! This is part 2 of a 3-part interview; you can read part 1 here. In this instalment, we discuss his decision to “come out” as my partner last October, why he made that decision, how he did it, and what’s happened since.

KS: So you were anonymous to my readers and followers for the first several months that we were dating…

SS: Yeah.

KS: How did you start to feel that you didn’t want to be anonymous anymore?

SS: I started to feel like I didn’t want to be anonymous anymore over a period of a few months. It was like, mostly me thinking about how it would feel if we were in the reversed positions – if I was a sex writer and the long-distance partner of somebody who couldn’t be out about dating me. I think that that would hurt me, and even though you said that it was okay, and that it wouldn’t necessarily hurt you, I felt like it might start to. And it was starting to. So, even before I had made the decision to definitely do it, I was talking to people about it from a risk-assessment perspective, of like: “I’m feeling [like I want to come out], I don’t know if this feeling will grow or shrink or what, or if it’s New Relationship Energy, or what direction it’s gonna go, but if I did this, how would you feel about it? Would you support me doing this? Does this seem like a dumb idea to you?” And people were really supportive of it.

KS: Yeah. I had thought I was okay with it for several months, and I think it was just that New Relationship Energy thing where everything seems perfect and great – and then when that starts to dissipate a little bit, you have to start thinking about real-world, real-life things. And I was noticing that there were a number of different ways that I was feeling like a secondary partner, one of which is the distance, one of which is being a fairly new relationship, and a major one was being a secret. Or feeling like I was being kept a secret, in that you weren’t talking about me publicly anywhere.

SS: And we’re both people that talk about a lot of things publicly. Maybe if I didn’t use social media at all, or that wasn’t as important a thing to both of us as it is, it might’ve felt different, but me being able to talk about other things, and wanting to talk about other things, and [being unable to] talk about you publicly, or even post a photo of you, or anything, was really bizarre, in terms of my life. That’s not a thing that I’m used to having.

KS: Yeah, and I would try to CBT myself out of feeling that way. I would go, well, look at all this evidence, privately, of you loving me and valuing our relationship. But it was this cognitive dissonance that I found really difficult to overcome, because I’ve been in so many relationships where people would say, “Yeah, I love you, I value you, you’re very important to me,” and then their behavior was just very different from that, because I think it wasn’t actually true.

SS: Yeah.

KS: And so I started to react with this sort of anxiety and fear that you were lying about it, in some sense, because you hadn’t made yourself vulnerable enough to go public with it. Some part of me felt like, if you really, truly loved me and cared about me, you would do that – which I recognize is shitty if it were an ultimatum, because not everybody is able to do that.

SS: Yes. Right.

KS: But I did get to a point where… I don’t think I would’ve broken up with you over it, at least not right away, but I was kind of like… This is important to me. I need you to at least start thinking about this.

SS: Yeah. What strikes me is that we were both kind of wrestling with that question in our own ways, and it only got better and easier when we started talking about it more, instead of just trying to deal with this in our own brains. That’s how we were able to solve it.

KS: Yeah. It was weird because it hit me kind of all at once, very quickly. I remember someone asked me on Instagram, I think a month or two before we started talking about this, “Will we ever see your boyfriend? I’m so curious about him!” and I wrote, at the time, what I honestly felt, which was: “No. He’s anonymous and I choose to respect that, and I hope that you all will too.” At the time, I remember feeling really confident, like I really believed what I was writing – and then, only a month or two later, I started to feel like, “Actually, this is like, ‘emergency’ levels of distress. I don’t actually think I can do this.” Because I also had the realization, around the same time, that this had been a recurring pattern in my relationships, and that it was just sort of slowly eroding my sense of self-worth, and my sense of deserving to have a partner who was proud of me.

SS: Yeah. It also makes me think back on some of the other sex bloggers that I’ve read for a long time, or read a long time ago, where they had many many many anonymous partners in a row – you know, ten, twenty anonymous partners that their audience never really got to know – and how they must have felt, or how they could’ve felt about that. I haven’t really read a lot of writing about that, about the feeling of not being able to talk about who your partners are.

KS: Yeah, because I think the assumption is that that’s just how you do it, that that’s just how sex writing works.

SS: Right, it’s a convention of the genre.

KS: And a lot of sex writers themselves are anonymous, so maybe they have less of a problem with it, because they understand it directly. But I have been not-anonymous for… almost 4 years now? So I’m just not in that world anymore, and I’m kind of past wanting my partners to be in that world too.

SS: Mhm.

KS: I remember being in the NoMad with you and we were waiting for an Uber that was gonna take us wherever we were going next… Oh, we were going to the Hippo Campus concert. And you were like, “Should I just do this now?” and you took out your phone and you had written this tweet draft where you called me your girlfriend. And we chose a photo to go with the tweet, and you sent it out, and then I had this intense sense of exhilaration, like: we just did this really important thing together.

SS: Yeah. Yeah, I remember that moment too, and I remember pulling to refresh a lot of times.

KS: [laughing]

SS: …Because, even after talking to my other partner, and my friends, and my business partners, and random people in my industry, and my family, I still had this sense that at least one person was gonna be really mean.

KS: Yeah.

SS: I didn’t think it was gonna be the primary reaction; I didn’t think it was gonna be a big deal, and I knew how I wanted to handle it. But I was like, “Okay, where is the mean person? Where is the troll?” And they just never showed up.

KS: Yeah, that was kind of how it was for me too, when I came out and started showing my face and using my name. For a short period of time, I lived in terror. I was like, “When’s the other shoe gonna drop? What’s gonna happen?”

SS: Exactly.

KS: And nothing happened. Everybody was perfectly lovely. It was more surprising than it would’ve been if people were awful.

SS: It’s super surprising, because we see so much negativity online and sex-negativity in culture, and it’s just expected that if you’re admitting to being a sexual person, having a bunch of stuff about your sex life online, that something bad is going to happen, but it doesn’t necessarily happen.

KS: Yeah. So you’ve been out now as my partner for five-ish months. What has the reaction been like?

SS: Let’s see. We went to a party together with a bunch of my friends, and apparently, before we arrived, people had been reading and discussing a bunch of your posts about me, and saying stuff like, “Oh, I could never do that sex act,” or whatever, and then when we got there, it kind of just vanished. I only heard about it later. [laughing] So I think there’s probably a decent amount of that going on – people just reading stuff quietly, not saying anything to me about it. Or waiting for me to bring things up, instead of bringing them up, which I think is a really respectful way to approach that.

KS: Yeah.

SS: There’s no way to prevent people from reading this stuff. You can say, “Hey, I’d prefer if you don’t read it,” or you can say, “I’ll send you the stuff that I want you to read,” but that’s really not workable. People are curious, especially about the sex lives of people they know, even if they don’t admit it publicly, and so I’ve kind of just said, “Hey, if you want to read it, read it. If you want to talk about it, talk about it.” But people have been pretty reluctant to do that, I think. What else? People were really excited to meet you. My sister, when I told her about it, I was like, “[Kate’s] a writer, she writes about sex,” and she asked, “Where does she write? What’s her site?” and I was like, “Well, I could tell you that, but I don’t know that you necessarily want to read it.” And she was like, “Oh, yeah, I just realized after I said that that I probably don’t wanna read it.”

KS: [laughing] My brother doesn’t follow me on Snapchat, for the same reason.

SS: Yeah. What else? I have gotten, lately, one or two kind of “off” comments about it. Just things that struck me. Not from friends, but… I’m thinking of one comment from somebody who said, “On Twitter, it seems like your life is pretty complicated.” And like, that just strikes me as either someone who’s uncomfortable with polyamory or someone who’s uncomfortable with being public about sex, or whatever, but who doesn’t want to go so far as to say what makes them uncomfortable – and that’s kinda sad.

KS: Yeah, that sounds like it’s probably a poly thing.

SS: It could be, yeah.

KS: What about your own feelings on it? How has it felt to be out as my partner?

SS: Great! It feels great. It’s just a thing that I don’t have to worry about it anymore. I was talking about it in therapy most weeks, and it was causing me a decent amount of consternation internally, of like, “Can I like this Instagram photo? Will someone look at all the likes and figure out the New York app developer that is in there?” It was causing me to behave in ways that I don’t want to have to think about. I want to be able to just talk to my girlfriend online and post about my girlfriend if it’s our anniversary or whatever. So, it’s great!

KS: Did it feel different from how you were expecting?

SS: The major difference was just that people weren’t mean. The positives were as positive as I was expecting. It’s great. How did it feel for you? Not just the moment of it, but how has it felt since?

KS: It has made me feel like our relationship is a lot more real and important to you, and also to me, which is something that I was struggling with. It has made me really happy to be able to show you off, not only to people in person but also online. It raised a lot of questions for me about, is it shallow or shitty or wrong somehow to glean enjoyment from this sort of exhibitionistic mode of expressing my love externally? But I think the conclusion I’ve come to on that, ultimately, is that that’s the age we’re living in, and that is a way that people express their love now, and that is valid even if it maybe seems kind of weird or unnecessary to some folks.

SS: Yeah, I feel that way too. It’s just another one of the consequences of living in a super connected, very online world, is that ways you might’ve been seen with your partner before are augmented by seeing people with their partners online. And it generally makes me really happy to see people in love and enjoying each other online. The times that it doesn’t are when I’m going through really hard romantic stuff myself, and then I think it’s kind of on me to moderate that.

KS: Yeah. I also have found it really satisfying and uplifting to watch how you have become more confident and relaxed about your kinks and your kink orientations since coming out – which I didn’t anticipate because I already think of you as a very confident person and someone who is very relaxed about your own kinks. But I did notice a marked difference in your willingness to accept identities like “dominant” or “sadist” or “hypnokinkster” very casually, and in some cases publicly, and that’s been really nice to see.

Check back on Friday for the last instalment of this interview, in which we’ll be talking about the upsides and downsides of dating a sex writer, and his advice for anyone considering it.

When Your Partner Comes Out As Your Partner

Kate Sloan

It all started when a friend kept referring to my boyfriend’s other partner as his “primary partner.”

Granted, this friend isn’t super schooled in the technicalities of non-hierarchical polyamory. He didn’t fully grasp, I think, that it’s possible to be equally romantically devoted to more than one person at once – or that it would be hurtful for me to hear myself implicitly referred to as the secondary partner. The less-important one. The sidepiece.

See, this type of language just fanned the flames of fears I already harbored. Despite my boyfriend always treating me as a priority, and making it clear that I wasn’t less-than in any way, I still felt like the “side” girlfriend moreso than the “main” one. As we discussed this in a tearful phone call, it became clear that there were three factors contributing to this impression: I felt inconsequential next to my partner’s other relationship’s longer history and future plans; they live together, while he and I live 500 miles apart; and they each publicly acknowledge their partnership, on social media and elsewhere, while he and I do not – because I am a sex writer.

“Well, the last one’s the easiest one to fix,” my boyfriend said, “so let’s fix it.”

I was floored, though I shouldn’t have been. He had been telling me for a few months that he eventually wanted to be “out” as my partner – which meant, in turn, being “out” as kinky. He’d already come out to friends, family, and colleagues as bisexual and polyamorous over the years – so why not this, too?

As we talked, it suddenly occurred to me – like the lid being ripped off a paint can and spilling bright pigment every which way – that I’ve never really had a partner publicly acknowledge being my partner for the whole time I’ve been a sex writer, except for those who also already worked in the sex industry. A couple of short-term boyfriends didn’t mind being associated with me on Twitter and such, but usually they had nothing in particular to lose, and sometimes they even had something to gain: they were porn or camming hopefuls, and I felt that they wanted to use my following to help launch those ambitions.

Needless to say, it provokes a pretty creepy-crawly feeling when the people who will happily admit to dating you are mostly people for whom doing so would be a tactical advantage more than an intimate celebration. All these feelings spilled out of me during that conversation with my boyfriend: I’d realized, in one fell swoop, just how much damage had been done to my psyche over the years by partners wanting to hide in the shadows, deny our connection in public, and treat me essentially as the “secret” girlfriend. Of course I always felt like the least important one when my beaux had multiple partners; I was usually the only one conspicuously missing from their Facebook posts, their Instagram selfies, their smitten tweets.

The thing is, I completely understand why someone wouldn’t want to associate themselves with me publicly, even if they love me. Being as loudly pervy as I am is a risk not everyone can afford to take, and I’m immensely privileged to be in a position where my absurd kinks and sexcapades don’t (usually) harm me or limit me. This is my career, this is the life I have chosen, and not everyone who dates me or fucks me has made that same choice, nor should they necessarily have to. My boyfriend owns a company, so in managing his own public image, he’s making decisions not only for himself but potentially also for his business partners and his employees, not to mention the other people in his life who might be affected by this disclosure. We all deserve privacy, and no one should have to give that up just because of who they’re dating.

But I also know now, after much reflection, that I don’t think a serious relationship is sustainable for me if I’m made to feel like my partner is ashamed of who I am and what I do. It may be kinder to them to downplay my own needs and insist they can hide behind a veil of anonymity, but it is, in the long-term, gravely unkind to myself. It digs me deeper into a preexisting negative self-image, and furthers my feeling that my relationships are somehow illegitimate or unimportant to the other people in them, no matter how big and beautiful they may feel to me.

It was difficult to phrase this to my partner in a way that didn’t make it sound like an ultimatum – which it isn’t really; I could keep dating him if he wanted to stay anonymous, albeit not altogether happily – but fortunately he didn’t take it as such. He understood immediately why it would be painful for me to publicly pretend my partner is a Man of Mystery, instead of acknowledging the marvelous man he is in reality. Like me, he grew up on the internet, so he grasped that if something doesn’t exist online, in some ways it doesn’t fully exist at all. It has always been hard for me to see my non-sex-industry friends posting cute selfies with their partners, or tagging their sweethearts in tweets about date nights and romantic adventures, believing I would never be able to do that. I am so grateful that my boyfriend understood that particular pain and decided it wasn’t worth putting me through.

He is careful and thoughtful in everything he does, and this endeavor was no exception. He spoke to his therapist, his business partners, his other girlfriend, his friends, and even some casual business acquaintances, trying to get a read on whether coming out as a kinky sex blogger’s boyfriend and dom would be a disastrous error. Most of them knew he’d wanted this for a while and seemed surprised he hadn’t done it sooner. Few of them expressed any reservations, and the few they brought up were risks he had already considered and decided he could accept.

I kept telling him, whenever we discussed this, “You know you don’t have to do this, right?” – to which he would always say, “I know. I’m not doing it because I have to. I’m doing it because I want to.” Invariably I would start crying so hard as to become unintelligible. Being a loud-and-proud sex writer, I’d sort of just accepted that no one would ever want to be linked to me by anything more solid than a false name or a censored selfie. I’d assumed that no one would ever love me enough to be visibly mine, and that belief was slowly poisoning my self-worth from the inside out. And here was this man, telling me that not only did he love me, but he wanted to shout it from the proverbial rooftops.

Though he got all his ducks in a row a few weeks ago, we agreed we should wait until we were together in person to actually pull the trigger. “I’m going to want to touch you after that,” he told me, which is the same thing he said when we discussed whether we were ready to say “I love you” for the first time. In a way, it feels like the same act, just shifted and magnified: this is him showing me he loves me in a way that feels even more impactful than the words themselves. He’ll dash off a tweet, casually-but-not-casually mentioning that I’m his girlfriend, and it’ll change our relationship and our lives. I can’t think of anything more romantic.

All this to say: my Sir’s name is Matt. He wanted me to let you know.