THE ABOUT ME PAGE – a new perspective

Eight years ago, when I started this blog, the first thing I wrote was an introductory page called “ABOUT ME – a kinky journey”,  introducing myself and saying something about how I came to be launching a blog about kinky sex in my late fifties. It described a series of events: “I started hurting myself;” “I went to see a Dominatrix,” and so on. What it is short on, and I can see this as I look at it today, is any understanding of WHY these things happened.

I was still, after five and a half decades, a mystery to myself.

How does that same story look from today’s perspective, the other side of four years of regularly seeing dominant and submissive sex workers, five years of seeing a therapist and two relationships within which my kinky side has finally been fully present? This post, in answering that question, will be, I suspect, part life story and part confessional.

I was born abroad, my father on one of his several overseas postings. While I have always had happy memories of my childhood, digging deeper into those memories reveals an absence of physical affection from either parent. My father was a farmer’s son brought up to regard open displays of emotion with suspicion, and it took my mother’s debilitating Alzheimer’s to make him cry in my presence for the first time.

My mother had effectively lost both her parents at 6/7 years old, her father dying in the latter days of the war, her mother immediately taking her grief away to Africa. She and her sister were brought up in a country vicarage, by a 60 year old clergyman and his housekeeper. I now know she was abused there and then bullied at boarding school, learning to live a life of emotional restraint, locking up her demons deep inside her.

Much later she acknowledged the lack of physical affection in the upbringing she gave me and my brothers, saying she’d wanted to make it easier for us when we went to boarding school. The truth is she hadn’t known how to give that affection. Moreover, having lost an earlier child three weeks after his birth, she was trying to protect herself from further grief by not getting too close to her living children.

How gut wrenchingly sad it is to write those words.

Being held close to her while she spanked me, and watching my father do the same with my brother, are some of my very earliest memories and perhaps caused me to link pain and punishment with the missing intimacy and connection, leading to early spanking fantasies and experimentation.

I grew up a “very good boy” constantly seeking my parents’ approval, perhaps craving the hug that never came. I went through much of my life just trying to do what people expected of me; head boy at school (twice), decent exam results, army officer, relatively early marriage to the right sort of girl. But underneath this compliant exterior ran dark fantasies of punishment and pain, brought to life in largely frustrating and unfulfilling sessions of self harm. A hairbrush, a riding crop, lengths of rope or electric flex. I tried them all.

My first marriage, and the one that too quickly followed it, both failed. I realise now that I gave neither of these women what they wanted. I offered them little intimacy and no connection. Boarding school had trained me to lock my emotions away so deep that I didn’t really know how to love or be loved. Sex quickly became perfunctory and infrequent, as I put one foot in front of another with a growing sense of unhappy resentment. Neither of these women deserved that. Both were, indeed are, wonderful, caring individuals and would have loved me deeply if only I had been able to let them. I felt some small catharsis from telling my second wife, as our divorce completed, that I now had some understanding what life with me might have lacked, and that I really regretted having put her through that.

The dark fantasies solidified when I saw my first Dominatrix just after the end of my first marriage, and she hurt me so much and for so long that the knowledge that I wanted to see her again made me want to push my demons back down again. I’ve told myself that I only let them back up and started seeing Dominatrix’s regularly after my second marriage had irretrievably broken down, but the truth is that I had started dialling the numbers on the cards in London telephone boxes long before then. There was less guilt in it after my wife had an affair with a work colleague.

What was I looking for in these encounters? My early life had made physical punishment an intimate act, school had made it glamorous and validating, and I believe I sought those things.

With Mistress Elita, it went beyond that. Our sessions were quite extreme, extreme to the point where she forced me to feel tumultuous emotions of fear, anguish, lust, connection and  pride. When someone is hurting you that much while looking directly into your eyes, you have no choice but to connect with them. I was drawn out from behind the thick skin I had built around myself and, as I wrote once: “electricity would crackle between the opposite poles of her dominance and my submission.” That electricity had not crackled in either of my marriages and that’s down to me not my partners.

With my second marriage now in terminal decline, my new found delight in intimacy and connection drove me to pay for kinky sex with submissive escorts and, with Lilly in particular, I learned how to give pleasure, how to be a lover in ways that my wives had never experienced from me.

I found I could capture these emotions and make them real by writing about them and publishing that writing. Whereas I had been brought up to bury my emotions, I was suddenly being praised for my new-found ability to share them. Now my kinks were not a dirty secret but an access into a community of like minded people who wanted to hear about me, about the things I did and about how they made me feel. It was quite a change.

This period of my life found its ultimate expression in when Elita performed a full BDSM session with me in front of a room full of sex blogging folk at the Eroticon conference. This and the wonderful reactions to it, captured in the blog posts of half a dozen attendees, gave me my final validation.

Final proof that it was OK to be kinky and to crave the things I craved.

Final proof that it was OK to be me.

Finally comfortable with being me, I was able to form fully engaged, open relationships where all of me, including my kinks, was present and valued. Finally, I was able to allow someone to love me, and to fall in love in return. These relationships have been the most fulfilling of my life.

Despite these advances,  I was still frequently unhappy, stressed, drinking too much, eating the wrong things and seemingly resistant to my therapist’s attempts to diagnose the cause of my negativity. Only recently have I been able to connect with child me, still part of me after all these years, and understand his hurt, his  pain from constantly seeking the affection that his parents couldn’t express, his sense of abandonment at being left alone in that forbidding boarding school. Only recently have I been able to penetrate his protective shell and bring him back to me. In return child me no longer stands in the way of happiness and fulfilment. He’s allowed me to start looking after myself.

So here I am. My state pension starts soon but I don’t feel that marks the beginning of the end of my life. I’m hoping it will be the beginning of new things. I’ve had two wonderful kink-infused relationships but now find myself unattached. However, I get to play elaborate sessions of dominance and submission in London rental dungeons with my kinky friends and, when my  masochistic itch needs scratching, will occasionally have a session with a professional Dominatrix.

I still have a decent poker game and that’s something that could take me round the world if I wanted it to. I’d like to ski in the winter again and sail small catamarans in too much wind in the summer, and these things become more practical as I lose weight and get fitter, as I am now determined to do. Life feels full of possibilities.

I still carry regret for the long, long time I spent not being this person, and for the people who felt unfulfilled while they shared that time with me. I can’t change that now, and I owe it to my new self to look forwards. So that’s what I’m doing.