Consent and Negotiation

Posted on May 07, 2024
Word Count: 326

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Some of the biggest mistakes I’ve made when I was new to the scene were regarding negotiation and consent. First, I didn’t understand consent well enough. I do try to not dwell on that too much since I didn’t have the greatest education on it.

But what stands out to me is how I didn’t really understand how negotiations and limits were supposed to actually work.

Like. Set out the limits and anything not off the table is on the table, right? Not really….. But that’s a common misconception.

This was 25 years ago – the internet was a very different place and the information was spotty and scattered. There were very few guides out there on how this all worked and a lot of them were lacking. And most of them were hard to find.

I was with this dominant for a little while and I was nervous all the time. Fun nervous, for the most part, but like. He introduced me to Munchkin (a card game, really fun, tbh), and I was genuinely worried about how well I should play because he might hurt me later for it.

Realistically, he would hurt me later regardless, lol. And we didn’t have that sort of dynamic that that would matter. But we never really established that. It was all very… felt out. He was older and more experience than I was and looking back… he actually wasn’t that much more experienced. I had expected more out of him than he knew how to do. Because neither of us were particularly good at negotiating what we wanted out of the dynamic, just kind of feeling our way through it.

Actually negotiating the terms of the dynamic is important and feeling your way through it is… not ideal and honestly kind of dangerous if you don’t take it really, really slow. Which of course, in NRE (“new relationship energy”) and sub-frenzy… who takes that sort of thing slow???