The Need for Connection

I’m not a group person. I prefer one on one contact so that I can make a genuine connection and talk in-depth with the other person. So why did I feel the need to join the local BDSM community? Like real life, with real people? Being a sexual submissive is something that I’ve always tried to hide the hardest, knowing it would make me extra vulnerable in the vanilla world. But after having lost most of my vanilla friends, I felt the need to try the BDSM community, even maybe only once. Everyone in the online world is always raving about munches and going to play parties, so there could be something. I checked the area where we live now, and there are two munches in cities close to us. I messaged each of them. This is where our journey began.

Together Yet Alone

Let’s go back a little. My husband and I have both been interested in BDSM for roughly twenty years, but where my husband joined chat groups where he was invited to munches, I wasn’t. My husband never went though. Back then, twenty-year-old Doms weren’t accepted. They had to try being a submissive first, and my husband wasn’t up for that. I was never invited to such an event and never really knew it existed.
For many years I had friends, but all were vanilla. I didn’t mind. That was just the way it was, and I cherish all the years we’ve shared a friendship. I never imagined things could be any other way.
Over the last decade, I lost all my friends. Not directly because of BDSM per se, though it may have contributed. Where they focused on having children and starting a family, I focused on finding the perfect Master. Whom I did find, by the way.
Meanwhile, I did try joining groups in the vanilla world, but I never found a good connection. A couple of times, they accepted me, but I always felt like an outsider, like the odd one out. So, I wondered, how could this be different in the BDSM-community?

Nervous Business

I could not have been more wrong. After corresponding with the girl who hosts the munch in one of the two cities closest to me, I set a date for attending my first munch. A munch is a gathering of like-minded people who are interested in the BDSM lifestyle, and it’s usually in a neutral environment. Beforehand, I didn’t sleep for three nights, that’s how nervous I was. I was sure I was going to be skinned alive.
I wasn’t. The girl who organizes it was as lovely in real life as she had been in our online conversations. Everyone else was just as friendly and inviting. The setting is a separate area in a bar, so we could talk in the open about whatever we wanted.
And we did. The atmosphere was so friendly and open. I could talk about how I write about sex. I could discuss my knowledge of different fetishes and porn sites without having to be ashamed. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to censor myself! My husband and I were even the last ones to leave.

Not Only Once

Since then, we’ve visited another munch, a peer-rope (what I will describe in a separate blog post) and a market. It has been lovely every time. What strikes me most is that people don’t judge. People are friendly and are genuinely interested in you, in your opinion, in how you see the world. From what I’ve read online, that is not the case in all BDSM communities worldwide. It probably isn’t even the case in all gatherings here in my country. I’m just fortunate to have found the right group of people, where I already feel like I’m accepted within their midst, even though I’m a submissive woman. I had never imagined a group like this could exist at all. And now I’m already counting down to the next meet-up. Two more weeks…