How do you feel when you play?

February 4, 2020 36 Comments

A new dominant woman asked this of more experienced women in a discussion forum: “How do you feel?” She meant ‘when you play’, and it’s a great question that I’m not sure gets explored all that much from the dominant side.

She wrote:
So far, I don’t think I’m getting it… the thing that befuddles me the most, is how am I supposed to feel? Is there a way you should feel about this? Or does it make you feel a certain way? Is it pleasurable, like an orgasm, or like eating chocolate? Or is it something else? I read what people say here. Strangely enough, it lacks any description of sensation. The few times I have “Dressed the part”, I feel this surge. It’s like a confidence, if that makes any sense. But sadly, it doesn’t carry over into interaction. When play starts, the only thing I feel is awkward.

My response:
In those instances where everything emotionally, physically, and mentally clicks into place, what I feel most is connected: Intimately connected to my submissive. There is just us and nothing else exists. I can crawl under his skin and into his heart and mind and I know exactly what he feels and I know just how to pluck at his insides to get at his most vulnerable places. I both want to destroy and protect what I find there. Electric energy flow and intense intense intimacy.

When everything doesn’t click into place like that (just like how sex isn’t always some transcendental, super intimate experience), it’s more ‘fun, hot play, whee :))’, and that’s great too :).

To expand on that further, ‘it’s complicated’ and ‘it depends’, neither of which are useful answers for anybody.

That doesn’t make them untrue. It does depend: What kind of play is it, what’s my mood, what am I wanting out of it, are we doing something new, how long have we known each other, how close are we feeling that day, etc etc.

I’ve spoken about Domme space (dom space, top space) before, and I think that’s something else again. That’s the rarified air of the perfect storm.

Either way, though, there’s no ‘single way’ that it feels, not even when it’s with the same submissive, under what looks like the same circumstances, doing the same kind of play. People are too complicated for that and any small change in mood or emotion or stress or room temperature or goodness knows what can change how play pans out, where it goes, how it feels.

I think back to my very first, very simple, playtime where I flogged two men, one after the other. For some reason that I still can’t understand, playing with the first was ordinary, I felt nothing, it was literally just doing the physical act of flogging him, and thinking ‘well okay then I guess’. Playing with the second, though, was ‘oh my god’ level mind-blowing. I don’t know why. Something ‘clicked’ with the second one, we connected, even though I was a know-nothing newbie and didn’t really know how to do that and didn’t think I did anything different. It was an ‘us’ thing that was, in those days, largely out of my control. In all truth, if I hadn’t had played with number 2, I might have walked away thinking ‘huh, well, that was NOT what I thought it would be’ and drifted away from BDSM altogether.

For me ‘how it feels’ is different every time.

Sometimes the stars align and angels sing and we have some other-worldly shared experience, and sometimes I can make ‘amazing’ out of thin air by force of will and emotional work that I don’t even really understand, but I still know I’m capable of conjuring it up out of nothing.

When it’s not all that intimate-special, it can absolutely still be really hot and fun, or it may end up with laughter and silliness, or it may be pure top/bottom play for sport and sensation. And sometimes the entire mood is just wrong for some unknown reason and it feels like we’re emptily going through the motions, in which case I may try a few things to see if I can fix it, or I may just… stop, and maybe we cuddle and whisper together that it’s okay, that we’re good, instead. We probably don’t hear about or talk about those times enough. The ‘this-isn’t-working’ times.