Ten Days, Ten Prompts: What is your prototype for power-exchange?

I’m a terrible tennis player but for many years I continued to play because of a tyrannical coach I absolutely loved. I never did get better at playing the game, mostly because my brain is completely unable to process a ball coming at me, I know I am supposed to hit it but I will almost always strike air instead and on the oft chance I do hit the ball, I will be so surprised I did it, I will stand there in shock while it is returned and let it hit me. Still, I kept going back to my lessons because of him. Initially, he tried very hard to get me to be good at tennis and when we failed, we shifted our focus to physical training with a side of tennis. I *loved* that. I am very good at being pushed and I respond quite well to an unforgiving environment. Every single day, he screamed at me to run faster and longer, to squat deeper, to do just twenty-thirty-fifty more push-ups and by the end of it, I just needed to hear him instruct me in order to just keep going. Initially, there was strife, resistance, reform, refinement of technique and active instruction but eventually, I stopped doing the math on when I’d had enough because that was his math to do, mine was to keep following. We played fifteen-minutes of tennis after we did sixty-minutes of other things and he never screamed or pushed then; it was clear I would never get it so he just celebrated me for showing up instead. Whether I hit the ball or not, he encouraged and motivated me. If I said I wanted to skip the tennis bit of the lesson, he let me but if I said I wanted to skip the running bit of the lesson, he made me run twice as much.

This relationship with my coach, in some ways, became the blue-print for power-exchange that works for me. If there is one thing I absolutely hate about how submission is presented, it’s how self-effacing, one-sided and martyred it is made to seem like a concept. The language around it is made to sound like everything an s-type does is entirely for the d-type and of their conception alone and anything that is rooted in the pleasure of the submissive is decidedly anti-authority. Of course, there is a lot of pleasure to acquiescing and the experience of the control is gratifying to people who are inclined towards it in the first place, but who I am as a submissive is deeply dependent on who I am as a person. My tennis coach taught people to play tennis and it would have been very easy for him to keep pushing me towards that, until I inevitably became convinced I was useless at it and stopped coming, but he dug deeper and found things I actually enjoyed and trained me to be good at them, instead. He adapted his technique in accordance with the student he had. That is the only type of dominant that works for me.

I’ve been with some of the other kind. The version of d-type who believes that an s-type is *supposed* to behave a certain way without giving any thought at all to whether they need, can or want to behave like that at all. It’s all about *how* they demonstrate their control and not at all about how that control is received and whether it is gratifying to the other party. For instance, I had the one partner who wanted to hone my lifestyle as an attempt to fix it by making me go to the gym, wake up early in the morning, work/study on a schedule decided by them and dress in ways that made me look more traditionally feminine because that is what he did with *all* his subs. I already worked-out every day, I woke up earlier than he did, my work/study ran efficiently as fuck and even if they fucking didn’t, I don’t need or want an authority-figure who tells me how to live my life. I got this, thank you. I don’t like that feeling of helpless or unconsidered control so I couldn’t make it work with him. I couldn’t make it work with many, many d-types who saw me as a blank slate upon which they could draw whatever they believed submission was supposed to be without so much as investigating who I really am.

I respond much better to a partner who gets to know me, realised what I am about and then applies their paradigms of control accordingly. I don’t mean it has to be entirely about me, because even with my coach, the goals and strengths were mine, but the techniques, skill and extent was his. Our roles were clearly defined but the responsibility, failures and triumphs were collective and collaborative. I don’t even mean it has to always be easy and catered to me in a way that doesn’t lead to challenges or strife. Certainly, the physical training I was put through was something I enjoyed, but it was also challenging enough that it frequently felt difficult, there were days when I was sure I just wouldn’t get through it and moments when I wanted to punch him in the face. Nor do I mean that there has to be a singular technique, my coach was harsh when we were pursuing things at which I was good and encouraging when we were doing something new or trying to hit a ball because different goals and processes require different approaches. That is also only possible if both parties actually listen to each other. He never thought or made me feel like my shit-show of a serve was because I was not trying, but if I took longer to kill a kilometre, he knew it was because I wasn’t pushing myself.

The relationship was intimate and it brought immense joy to both of us. It wasn’t just me *doing it for him*, I loved how I was getting stronger, how it felt to be good at things I absolutely loved and how much sheer pleasure my body was capable of, and he facilitated that for me, it wouldn’t have worked if he pushed me to do whatever he thought I should do. Just like it doesn’t work in power-exchange. When people tell me or send me messages that admire everything I do for my partner and attribute it to sheer devotion or his training of me, it turns my stomach a little bit because that’s not what is happening. I am not such a saint that I will take for granted that any goal a dominant partner has for me is the one I should blindly follow, nor would I ever allow myself to be with a person like that, I love the control and I even enjoy the twisted ways in which my partner wields it, but I don’t do all of this *just for him*. I do it, first and foremost, because I love it. I do it because I enjoy being in a relationship like this one. I do it because the goals were not decided by him alone, and they weren’t dictated to me. I do this for myself *first*, for the love of the game *second* and for him *after that* which doesn’t mean I am not devoted to him, it just means I am not self-effacing for the sake of image. He facilitates it all, he wrests his pleasure from the raw-material of my desires and designs the structures with which he functions, but he does that for himself *first* because that is what he is into. I don’t have to be a blank-slate for him to feel dominant. I have to be myself and without that, I couldn’t be in any type of relation.

Not with a coach nor a

dominant.