What we do in BDSM is linked to desire.

We can call it servitude, or dominance, or sadism or masochism, or sceneing or sessions, or any of the other many words we use, but ultimately it never fails to come down to desire. We do it because it fulfils this deep need in us, and that need is often erotic.

Here we are, in the second decade of the 2000s, and our sexuality is not rooted in breeding for children, or some sense of marital duty. We’re at a point in human history where, for most of us, it’s about pleasure and connection.

I’m lumping BDSM in with sex here. There are going to be voices that pipe up and say “it’s not the same thing”, and perhaps it’s not. There are relationships based on service, and I’m sure many other types of non-sexual relationships too, but I think they’re still driven by desire and satisfaction of that desire, albeit perhaps a different kind of desire.

ALL OUR NEEDS IN ONE NEAT PACKAGE

We have two fundamental needs in relationships, and they tug at each other, seeking a balance in forces.

We seek anchoring and centring — security, predictability, safety, dependability, reliability and permanence. Something solid that we can call home. But, we also seek growth and stimulation, and we’re drawn to adventure, novelty, mystery, risk, surprise and danger. We need thrill in our lives, we like the unknown. That’s why we travel and challenge ourselves with new experiences. It’s something that most people into BDSM will understand quite easily, because it’s the thing that attracted many of us in the first place, and it’s the fire that starts many of our relationships.

Some of us are polyamorous, some of us are monogamous, but we have this need for security and need for adventure and we seek the relationship/s where we can satisfy that. Back in the days of Downton Abbey a partner might have been about economic security, children, social status, succession and companionship. Now we want all that, but we also want friendship and passion.

Even in BDSM, we still want belonging, identity and continuity if we are going to commit to a collar and a bond, but we love the transcendence and mystery and awe as well. We couple up for familiarity and predictability, but we all secretly (or not so secretly) love the novelty and surprise.

THE CRISIS OF PASSION (IS A CRISIS OF THE IMAGINATION)

Let me reframe everything I’ve said so far as “love” and “desire”. I’ve avoided using the L word up to now, because for some it’s not really the word that fits.

Love tends to be about having. We want closeness, minimising the distances. It’s nurturing and we feel it best when we’re closest together. But, deny it all we want, desire requires elements of passion that come with a little mystery and adventure. It requires space.

I’m drawing a lot of this now from Relationship Psychotherapist Esther Perel’s excellent book Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic. She has travelled the globe talking to people about passionate marriages, and she asked people: “When are you most drawn to your partner?”

For an excellent 20 minutes of your time, check out her fantastic TED Talk, The Secret to Desire in a Long Term Relationship (embedded below) and listen to her explain the answers yourself.

What she found was:

• A common answer was “I am most drawn to my partner when she is away, when we are apart, when we reunite. Basically, when I get back in touch with my ability to imagine myself with my partner, when my imagination comes back in the picture, and when I can root it in absence and in longing, which is a major component of desire.”

• Another common answer, and actually probably the biggest turn-on was “I am most drawn to my partner when I see him in the studio, when she is onstage, when he is in his element, when she’s doing something she’s passionate about, when I see him at a party and other people are really drawn to him, when I see her hold court. Basically, when I look at my partner radiant and confident.”

There’s distance in there, but the second answer seems like great news for BDSM couples. When you are in your zone, when you are passionate and love your role and what you do, that’s an enormous turn-on to your partner.

LOVING OUR BDSM SELVES

The third group of answers Esther Perel got is fairly clear. “When I’m surprised. When there is novelty.”

In that answer, novelty is more complex than just a new toy or position. It’s about the person. Your partner and yourself. What parts of yourself do you bring out? What parts of the other person are just being seen?

“Sex isn’t something you do. Sex is a place you go. It’s a space you enter inside yourself and with another, or others. So where do you go in sex? What parts of you do you connect to? What do you seek to express there? Is it a place for transcendence and spiritual union? Is it a place for naughtiness and is it a place to be safely aggressive? Is it a place where you can finally surrender and not have to take responsibility for everything? Is it a place where you can express your infantile wishes? What comes out there?”

She explored this by asking a new set of questions. “I turn off my desires when …” and “I turn myself on when, I turn on my desires, I wake up when …”

“People began to say, “I turn myself off when I feel dead inside, when I don’t like my body, when I feel old, when I haven’t had time for myself, when I haven’t had a chance to even check in with you, when I don’t perform well at work, when I feel low self esteem, when I don’t have a sense of self-worth, when I don’t feel like I have a right to want, to take, to receive pleasure.”

And here’s the crisis, or at least paradox, of desire, that she found.

“Now, in this paradox between love and desire, what seems to be so puzzling is that the very ingredients that nurture love — mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other — are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire. Because desire comes with a host of feelings that are not always such favorites of love: jealousy, possessiveness, aggression, power, dominance, naughtiness, mischief. Basically most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day. You know, the erotic mind is not very politically correct. If everybody was fantasizing on a bed of roses, we wouldn’t be having such interesting talks about this.”

And this paradox exists in many, perhaps all, relationships. We need to reconcile these two sets of needs: for connection/separateness, security/adventure, togetherness/autonomy. We get worried, anxious and stressed in our lives. We spend a lot of time in the body and head of “the other” and not in our own. But desire requires being able to get out of that space to play.

WHAT DO EROTIC COUPLES DO?

We all want to sustain desire, and it’s possible. Couples do it all the time. Esther Perel has found that these ingredients are most common across couples with “passionate marriages”:

• Sexual privacy. There’s an “us”, but there’s also an erotic space that belongs to each of us.

• Continous flirtation. Foreplay is not something that starts five minutes before the real thing.

• Riding the waves. Passion waxes and wanes, but when it wanes you work to bring it back. It doesn’t just “happen” while you’re folding laundry, you have work for it.

“Committed sex is premeditated sex. It’s willful. It’s intentional. It’s focus and presence.”