Yeah, I'm glad that this thread got re-activated - I never noticed it before.

I have to admit that getting into this on-line discussion group has been a bit of an eye-opener for Sylvie and me (?) I (?) US.

Our relationship started vanilla, until Sylvie had the courage to ask me to hurt her. I had a problem with it at first, but quickly saw how much it meant to her, and how much she enjoyed it. Because we were our own closed little community, we had no contact with other people in the BDSM world, so we improvised like hell for the first couple of years, trying anything that came to mind.

We gradually moved out of our own environment; because we travel so much, we were able to try things in different locations, and we became a little more daring about showing ourselves in public. Since we would never see these people again, I was able to push Sylvie out into the world a bit more.

We settled into our roles quite nicely, exploring anything we wanted to. We shared our thoughts and desires equally most of the time; it was only when we were actually 'playing' that I became the dominant one. At those times, Sylvie obeys me completely, there is no question about who is in charge, or whether she has to do as told. It often happens that I decide that we are going to play right NOW, and she has no say in the timing. It's hard to explain this. If I tell her to do something when we are not playing, she still obeys me, but not always silently!

When we came on-line, it was obvious immediately that this is not the way it works for a lot of people. We got lost for a while in the 'I'm the Domme, you're the sub' mindset, but we found that we both missed our friendship by pushing the other roles on ourselves full time.

Anyhow, what I'm trying to say is that every couple (or more have to find their own place, whether it fits into the on-line scene or not. Who really cares what a bunch of strangers think is 'right'? We live our livestyle as close to 100% of the time as we can, and it certainly works for us.

Amanda