What Was Made Without a Map

My journey into kink didn’t begin in a dungeon or community kink space. It began in the small, private world of my first long-term relationship—with the person I would eventually marry and later divorce. We were young and wildly unprepared, but we didn’t know that at the time. What we did know was how to follow our instincts.

Neither of us came from religious trauma or heavy moral policing. Neither of us had been steeped in shame. We stepped into intimacy as mostly clean slates. And that gave us an opening most people don’t get—a kind of erotic innocence. A freedom to explore before the frameworks of right and wrong could harden around us.

I remember the media I consumed growing up—docuseries, shows on cable networks like Real Sex on Showtime. They weren’t pornographic to me. They were invitations to be curious. Mirrors. Windows into bodies and behaviors I didn’t see around me in real life, but felt instinctively were real. I remember watching couples talk about kink and sensation and queerness without shame, without flinching and with joy. I didn’t know what kink was, but I knew those stories felt like a kind of truth. Not the truth of rules or categories, but the truth of sensation. The truth of wanting—of desire. The truth of being allowed to say yes.

That kind of content wasn’t hidden behind paywalls or filters back then—it was just there, in the quiet hours. Unlabeled, unguarded. And I know it shaped me. Not toward hypersexuality, as some might assume, but toward a sense of permission. Toward possibility. It seeded the idea that sexuality could be intelligent, embodied, and spiritually relevant, long before I ever heard those words used in the same sentence.

He and I didn’t have language for kink, or power exchange, or edge play—but we lived it. We followed what felt good. We listened to the body, to energy. Nothing was off-limits. And I mean that fully. Not just in the exploratory, try-anything-once sense—but in the emotional realm too. I’ve never felt more expressive, more raw, more fully embodied in my emotions than I did in that space with him. Especially inside the intimacy of our power exchange.

I could rage. I could sob. I could ache and scream and collapse into exhaustion, and he didn’t shut it down--at least not in our erotic container. He wasn’t always skillful, but he didn’t retreat. And so I stayed open. We argued, sometimes ferociously, and within moments we were tangled again—naked, urgent, still holding the echo of our fury between us. There were nights we pushed each other into sensation not to punish, but to release and to regulate. I wouldn't claim it as healthy, but I will claim it as effective at the time.

And it wasn’t always soft or gentle or easy. Our marriage—our relationship—was constantly in motion. Emotionally unregulated. Unskilled. We were navigating intense terrain with very few tools, too young and too inexperienced to understand the weight of what we were carrying, much less how to set it down.

But we lived it. Fully. We worked through it in our bodies. In the trial and the error. In the high heat of emotion and sensation. That relationship was the first place I touched the darker edges of my sexuality. The place where emotional sadism and masochism first made themselves known. There was anger. There was passion. There were fights that turned into sex. There were scenes we never called scenes, and dynamics we didn’t have language for—but they were there. Burning at the center.

And for the most part, it was consensual. Fierce, but consensual. Raw, but mutual. There were certainly moments that I now, with the benefit of hindsight and embodiment, would name as unhealthy. Patterns I later came to recognize and unpack. I don’t know if he ever did. But I did. And I hold them now not with shame, but with presence. Yes, that happened. Yes, I did that. And yes, it shaped me.

Because we weren’t living in a binary of right or wrong. We were living in a world of yes—until it became a no. That was our compass. We didn’t have rules or frameworks. What we had was energy, exchange, and an unspoken permission to follow what moved us.

Even in our anger—especially in our anger—that’s where we met. In the place where intimacy didn’t flinch. There was no compartmentalizing. That was the power and the danger of it: our emotional chaos bled into our erotic connection, and vice versa. The sex was sometimes a balm, sometimes a weapon, sometimes a ritual. But it always felt real. Present. Alive.

That space, for better or worse, gave me permission. Not in a performative way, not in a kink-community kind of way—but in my bones. It taught me that desire is valid. That intensity isn’t always a thing to fear. That there are parts of our eroticism that exist outside of polite society, and they deserve space too.

And I think that’s something I’ve carried with me. Even now, I often notice people struggling under the weight of morality—their internalized rules, inherited from family, religion, community, culture. I didn’t grow up with that same conditioning. I never had to deconstruct it. Quite the opposite: I spent years wondering if something was wrong with me because I didn’t have it. Because I couldn’t locate the shame that so many others seemed to carry.

Eventually I came to see that as its own gift. A strange kind of freedom. One that allowed me, from a young age, to follow sensation, voice, and pleasure without needing permission or justification. One that made room for the darker, sharper desires—the ones that don’t fit into public conversations, but still live in us all the same.

And yet, even with that inner clarity, there was still a split. I knew exactly who I was in the bedroom—but I hadn’t yet figured out how to bring her into the rest of my life. Outside of erotic intimacy, I softened my voice. Doubted my knowing. Tried to fold myself into what others could receive. There was a disconnect between the self who led during sex and the self who negotiated her worth in public.

She was fire in private… and fog by daylight.

It’s important to say this plainly: erotically, we were in a Female-Led Relationship. That’s just how we were built. The co-authored authority transfer in that space wasn’t something we learned—it was something we lived. It charged our intimacy with aliveness. It deepened our desires. And I think it’s part of why we stayed so long—because inside that container, we were our most regulated, our most aligned.

But outside the bedroom, we were misaligned. I was forcing myself not to lead. I had a trauma-conditioned response to wait, to defer, to hold space for equality and a balanced partnership. And yes—I said that. Because here’s the truth: I was raised around hyper-independent women who rejected the idea of men as equals—women who saw masculine partners as burdens or accessories at best. I saw how that created fracture and dysfunction. So I over-corrected. I leaned into balance, into harmony, into making space for the masculine. I wanted to do it differently.

But that didn’t work either. It created its own kind of imbalance. I suppressed my natural dominance in the name of fairness. And I didn’t realize until much later that the dynamic we were creating inside our erotic container was the most authentic version of us. I led. He followed. And it worked. It wasn’t forced or performed. It was intuitive. It was home.

Looking back, I see that relationship with new eyes now. Not to reframe it as perfect, or ideal, or even healthy in all moments—but to honor it as a crucible. The place where I started to become. Where I learned how to feel everything. Where I began to understand that power and surrender aren’t opposites, but invitations. That dominance can live in the body long before it lives in the name.

That first relationship wasn’t just my introduction to kink. It was the soil from which everything else grew.

And now—years later—I feel the wholeness of that in my bones. The parts of me that once only lived in the bedroom have spilled into the rest of my life. The command I once reserved for intimacy now lives in my voice, in my walk, in the way I show up in the world. The self I used to visit is now the self I lead with.

There’s no more fracture between the one who knows… and the one who speaks.

I am still becoming. Still integrating. But I no longer split myself in compartments. I live in one body now. And she embraces everything.