St. Kink

I credit much of my current self confidence and my current attitude to one man. Before him, I was a wallflower slowly peeling from the brickwork and beginning to lean into the open air. After a few mere months of him (in real terms, ten days or so in his company) I had blossomed into... well, a raving pervert. Not so sure blossomed was the word I was looking for, now!

I’m not for a second saying he corrupted me. More that he, in gently revealing his own...tendencies, gave me a forum to reveal my darkest desires and showed me that it was alright to want things. Alright to experiment. Alright for things to go horribly wrong and if you ended up having to cringe/laugh hysterically/burn the evidence/call the paramedics you chalked it up to experience. As such, I tried more things for the first time with him than I can possibly put number to (although one day I might try)and know I won’t hold back on things I want to do in the future.

And my my, he was into some weird stuff. I say was, I presume I haven’t put him off any of it. And when I say weird, I mean... there are fetishes, and there are the fetishes that are taboo even amongst the fairly open minded, and he is off the end of that scale. And slightly to the side: there were things he came out with which were just baffling. Not even disgusting, just plain obscure, like he was making them up to find out if I’d say yes to everything.

I did.

And I did because I trusted him. Not to look after my heart, not to turn down hot local girls determined to sleep their way up the scene, but to be honest about it and not put me at risk. To stop when I said stop, to be open to my own little quirks and fantasies, to be patient whilst I learned and to laugh when it went horrendously wrong.

It was like a great big BDSM/Fetish checklist. We did pretty much everything I’ve every heard of, and a few things I’m convinced he made up. One or two maybe I did. At one point he genuinely had an Excel spreadsheet written up, because we knew our time was limited and you have to be organised to fit all this nonsense into a couple of hotel weekends a month. Sadly we left it with a few boxes yet to tick, although the rate we added to it, I don’t think we’d have run out of ideas in a lifetime of room service and individual Molton Brown hair and bodywash bottles.

This was how I went from having done virtually nothing to virtually everything in half a year. And I must say, I enjoyed all of it. The sex was fantastic, both in terms of technique/results and the balance of tenderness and humour with which it was conducted making it completely okay that I wasn’t loved, committed, or a ‘girlfriend’... it was fun, I was having a fantastic time and accepted that there was nothing to be ashamed of.

That’s not to say he was perfect: he was, after all, doing all this in spite of being in love with another woman; he was consumingly pretentious, vain to the point of parody; once we genuinely thought he’d given me herpes and on more than one occasion we had blazing rows that lasted days. But rare to find a man who could flatter me without being smarmy, teach without being patronising, idolise me without being lecherous... Given the volatile nature of the concepts we played with it could have gone so horribly wrong, but he took my fragile self esteem and handled it with such care that our twisted pastiche of a love life became the most enjoyable and fulfilling thing I had ever had.

I thanked him a while ago, sincerely, for giving me the safe learning environment which has opened my mind and, dare I say it, enriched my life. And for doing so without once letting me feel used, dirty, hurt or anything on that spectrum. What he considers common decency has been above many of the people I’ve encountered, and I truly appreciate it.

“I’ll be alright when you go to write your autobiography then? Like a madman, obviously, but a decent one?”

“Oh yeah,” I replied. “When I write my biography, you’re going to come across as the Patron Saint of Perverts.”