Of late, I have found myself in the unenviable position of becoming an expert on long-distance D/s relationships. This isn’t by choice – if I could choose the people who I fall for, I certainly wouldn’t have picked one who lives 6,000 miles away and another who, a couple of months after our first date, decided to quit his job to travel the world. All LDRs are challenging, but perhaps the most challenging aspect for me is maintaining the power exchange dynamic that I need in order for any relationship to survive. Although kink is far more to me than just sex (I refer users of Fetlife to this eloquent comment about kink as a sexuality and identity), there is no denying that a lot of the traditional ways of expressing these needs are primarily physical. Being in LDRs has forced me and my partners to come up with new ways of fulfilling our dominant and submissive roles, but it isn’t always easy.
In LDRs, I have noticed that I have to make much more of an effort to set aside time to spend with my partners. When your partner is close to home, it is easy to arrange date nights, or to go around to each other’s homes, or, if you are co-habiting, just to curl up and watch a film together on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Technology is a wonderful thing, and phone calls, texts and FaceTime/Skype sessions are key to my relationships, but it is one thing to have them at your disposal and quite another to actually use them. However besotted you are, when you have to get up, do the laundry, go for a run, go to work, come home, cook dinner and then go out to meet a friend, it can be very easy to run out of time for a long phone call, and instead rely on quick text messages snatched in quiet moments throughout the day. I have had to change my daily routine to make sure that my relationships get the attention that they need and deserve. The first thing that I do in the morning is FaceTime Daddy, and the last thing that I do at night is call him. At weekends, we try to make sure that we have a longer FaceTime call. As appealing as phone sex can be for many people, the contents of most of our phonecalls are surprisingly dull. For any relationship to work, there needs to be some kind of connection outside of kink. Contrary to what is presented in the world of “online only D/s”, I think that this is even more important in a LDR. 90% of the time, relationships are not glamorous or sexy. In reality, stable, long-term couples spend far more time talking about what they are going to eat for dinner or who is going to do the washing up than they do jumping on top of each other. The foundation of strong relationships is the ability to work together through daily banalities. In an LDR, it is all too easy to skip over this part of a relationship. Because of the distance, neither of my partners need to know that I have to make time to go to the post office today, or that my odd sock collection is getting a little out of hand. They are not forcibly confronted with my daily life on a regular basis because they just don’t see me that often. However, I make a real effort to share the most boring aspects of my life with my partners. I would even go so far as to say that I prioritise the boring stuff during phone calls, texts and FaceTime chats. Why? Because it reminds me that we are all real people, and, more than anything else, we need support and emotional intimacy in our daily lives in order to survive and thrive.
When you do plan to “spend time together” via phone, text or video, and you spend so much of it catching up with the dull-but-important daily grind, it can often feel like you don’t get enough time to work on the sexy stuff and the D/s dynamic. For this, I have found that small daily rituals outside of contact time work incredibly well. Every time I have an orgasm, I send Farmer a “thank you” message. Every morning, I put a finger inside myself, take it out, smell it and taste it, because that is what Daddy would do if he were with me. Every month, I write an essay for Farmer on a topic of his choosing. These gestures may seem silly, but they act to remind me of my partner, the things that I love doing with them when we are together, and, of course, the fact that I am their submissive. These little things are grounding, and help to carry a thread of power exchange through our daily lives. This means that, when we do meet up, the dynamic is already in place and we don’t feel like we are starting from scratch every time.
One major downside with long-distance D/s is how easy it is to get away with not fulfilling the D/s requirements of the relationship. I think that this is a key reason why so many LDRs within the kink community fizzle out after an initial period of success. Whether you are dominant or submissive, maintaining the dynamic at distance takes a lot of effort. From a submissive point of view, I need to be told what to do every so often. I need someone who will set time aside to give me instructions. And I need someone who is going to hold me to completing those instructions. Punishment for non-compliance is a thorny issue, and, as such, I am not going to address it here, but have devoted a separate blogpost to it. The bigger challenge is that there is no way to check that I have followed the instructions. It would be all too easy to be told, for example, to edge five times, and for me to then think, “I really can’t be bothered with this today so I am just going to say that I have done it, even though I haven’t.” The problem with this is that it paints a picture to the dominant of a happy relationship where everything is always sunshine and roses, where he understands the subs needs so well that she never has any problems, and where he can read her perfectly every single time. As a sub, receiving tasks from my dominant is a sacred thing, and in an LDR even more so because it is often the only form of D/s that we get. The dynamic is so precious – and, with the distance, so precarious – that I don’t want anything to challenge it. Responding to, “please edge three times” with, “I really don’t want to because I have a headache and not enough time to do this” can seem at the time like it is undermining the dynamic. In fact, by being open and honest, you are helping your dominant to learn how you work, giving him/her the opportunity to create better long-distance tasks in the future. And, when you do finally get together in person, it won’t come as such a shock when being human gets in the way of being the “perfect” submissive. In an LDR, openness and honesty in communication is EVERYTHING.
Having got through months of separation, using rituals, tasks and daily phone calls to combat the inevitable loneliness and cravings for a good spanking/fucking/whatever-your-thing-is, the excitement when you do finally get some time together is huge. The expectation is that all of the sexual fantasies that have been building up for months are going to come to a head in a technicolour explosion of fireworks. The reality is that, given the extent of my fantasies and desires, this is just not humanly possible. Because I see so little of my partner, I want to make the most of the time that we do have together, and try to squeeze as much into it as I can. This never works. There are just not enough hours in the day. Add that to jet lag, the physical limits of the human body, and the fact that it is just not normal to be functioning at 120% 24-7, and you are in danger of setting yourself up for disappointment. The idea that not all visits are going to be perfect in every way – and that that is more than okay – has been a hard lesson to learn. We do the best we can, and, given that it is incendiary enough to sustain us through the periods of separation, we must be doing okay.
In conclusion, D/s LDRs are not all late-night phone sex, dirty sexting and having your submissive sending you filthy images whenever you want a wank (although I will write another post in the near future containing some fun ideas on that topic). They are bloody hard work!
SparklePig's Pen 