This is a sponsored post from J&L@BeMoreKinky. BeMoreKinky is the leading intimacy, kink, and BDSM app for couples. BeMoreKinky helps thousands of couples every month to explore new kinks and organize play in a consent-forward way.
For most of my life, I was the one who handled it. The room would go flat, and I’d speak. The conflict would heat up, and I’d cool it. If there was an awkward email nobody else wanted to send, I sent it. Power, in that kind of role, is stamina. It’s the ability to look composed while your nervous system is quietly begging you to find somewhere softer to land.
What I couldn’t say out loud, for years, was that I also wanted to submit.
I don’t mean the cartoon version of it. I wasn’t trying to become smaller or stupider or any less myself. I wanted, with a kind of private intensity that frightened me, to stop driving every single moment. I wanted to be held inside clear limits. I wanted someone I trusted to notice me so precisely that I could finally stop scanning the room. The fantasy had nothing to do with humiliation. It was relief I was after. The relief of not being the one in charge for once.
That desire embarrassed me. It didn’t fit the version of myself I’d worked to build, the competent one, the one people didn’t try to talk down to twice. I’d learned how expensive softness can be in rooms that reward armor. So when submission turned up in me, I treated it like a betrayal, as if wanting to kneel somehow canceled out everything I’d done standing up.
It doesn’t. None of it. And it took me an embarrassingly long time to work that out.
So I started reading. Late, on a laptop I was careful about. Old essays. Forum threads I had to close every time someone walked past. The people writing them were nothing like the stereotype. Lawyers. Founders. Managers. Carers. Community pillars. All of them, in their own different words, sounded the way I’d been feeling for ages.
There’s one sentence I wish someone had handed me much sooner than they did. Submission and abuse are not the same thing. Abuse ignores your boundaries. Consensual submission depends on them. Once I understood that, my desire stopped feeling morally suspicious and started feeling honest.
The second thing is that submission isn’t only about sex. Pop culture pretends it is, because that’s what sells. But a lot of what pulls people toward D/s lives entirely outside the bedroom. It shows up on a Tuesday afternoon. It shows up in small rules you build with someone, and in the way those rules quietly hold you when nothing else is. A phrase. A piece of jewelry that only you and one other person understands. A check-in at the same time each evening. I didn’t only want intensity. I wanted orientation. I wanted to stop confusing control with safety.
What came next was fantasy. A lot of fantasy. I read kink fiction in bed, late, more of it than I’d like to admit to anyone who hasn’t done the same. I had types. There were particular tropes I went back to often enough that I started knowing certain writers by name and certain scenes nearly by heart. After doing that long enough, the question underneath the reading got too loud to keep ignoring.
The first thing I did wasn’t kneel for anybody. I opened a Word document. I wrote down what I wanted. Then I wrote down what I didn’t, which turned out to be the harder list. I worked out which of my limits were genuinely fixed and which were ones I might want to soften later, with the right person, on a good day. I picked a safeword. I also picked a smaller, quieter signal for the moments where nothing was wrong, just a bit too much, too fast. I learned that aftercare isn’t a polite optional extra. It’s how you handle the comedown that can land on you afterward, the thing kink people call subdrop, and it’s part of how any of this stays safe. And I learned to watch how someone handled small boundaries before I let them anywhere near a big one.
To learn more about aftercare, check out BemoreKinky’s guide to aftercare.
I want to be honest about something else, because the kink world doesn’t always say it loudly enough. A lot of harm in this scene happens to people who skip that part. Plenty of newcomers have had limits crossed, safewords ignored, and dynamics weaponized against them. I take that seriously. I take it so seriously that I’d rather someone took 12 months to learn the language before they played, than rushed in because a partner was charming and impatient. Charming and impatient is not the same as safe. If anyone tells you it is, walk.
Therapy was its own chapter, and I’ll keep it brief. A lot of kinky people don’t tell their therapists they’re kinky, because the risk of being pathologized is real, and the cost of explaining yourself for fifty minutes is exhausting. What helped me was finding kink-aware language first, and kink-aware support where I could. What also helped was peer honesty, because sometimes the most healing sentence in the world isn’t a clever interpretation. Sometimes it’s just: you are not the only one.
Once I stopped fighting the desire, my mental health around it changed completely. Kink itself didn’t fix anything; it doesn’t, and I’m wary of anyone who insists it does. What changed was that the secrecy had been costing me far more than the desire ever did, and I finally stopped paying that price. The research, for what it’s worth, has never supported the lazy assumption that kinky people are broken. But more importantly, my own life didn’t support it either. Once I approached my submission through consent, reflection, and care, it stopped feeling like evidence against my sanity and started feeling like evidence that my inner life was telling the truth.
Here’s the thing: it took me years to work out. There is real power in submission. Just not the kind most people picture when they spot it. To do this properly, you have to have done a lot of honest homework on yourself first. Most people haven’t. They want to play without ever having sat down with their own limits and worked out which ones aren’t going to move for anybody. That kind of self-knowledge is harder won than dominance ever was. Call it weakness if you like. I’d like to see you try it.
The strangest part, the part I genuinely didn’t see coming, is how this private truth reshaped my public life. Submitting didn’t make me less capable. It didn’t make me less respected. If anything, it made me less armored. I started asking for what I needed instead of performing, not needing anything. I stopped being impressed by domination dressed up as leadership. I stopped calling exhaustion “strength.” I got gentler with people who looked composed but were obviously carrying too much, because I knew exactly what that composure costs. My public power became less theatrical the moment I stopped pretending I wanted it every minute of every day.
I still don’t tell everyone. Stigma is real, and I’m not naïve about it. Plenty of people manage this part of themselves quietly, and that is a perfectly reasonable response to a world that still treats kink like a character flaw. I don’t need everyone to know in order for it to be true. What I needed was to stop lying to myself.
So here is where I’ve landed, and I’ll say it as plainly as I can. I am powerful in public. I am also submissive in private. Those two sentences do not cancel each other out. They correct each other. One tells the truth about what I can carry. The other tells the truth about what I shouldn’t have to carry alone.
If any part of this sounds like you, if you’ve been quietly running everything for everyone and wondering why the fantasy of being held inside someone else’s clear, careful limits keeps showing up, I’d gently suggest it isn’t a flaw in your character. It’s information. It’s your inner life trying to tell you the truth. The work is to listen to it on your own terms, slowly, with consent and care and good people around you. There’s no obligation to perform anyone else’s version of submission, and no one is owed an apology for the fact that you’re capable. The work, if there is any, is just to stop pretending the two halves of you are enemies.
They don’t. They never did.
