How to prevent Domination Drift

"The pain and pleasure are real,
the obedience is real."

Erotic domination and submission is  real.

Yes, even if it's bedroom-only, even if you call it "role play" or "spicing things up", it's still real.

The pain and pleasure are real, the obedience is real.

If she says, "Kneel!" and I kneel, then that's real in the same way that it's real if when the referee blows his whistle and all the footballers stop playing.

This is great. I don't want to pretend to be a slave, I want to be a slave.

The snag is, we want to be slave and mistress on Friday night and Saturday morning, but not the rest of the week, and the beautiful reality of our domination and submission can chip away at this....

 It's possible to suffer from Domination Drift:

The threat of Domination Drift

In an otherwise vanilla long term monogamous relationship, it's easy for power relations to leak out of the BDSM zone, for the domination to drift into real life.

Deliberately or not, subs have a way of stealth submitting, which is made easy because erotic doms usually have a dominant streak in "real" life. If you have submissive tendencies, then you're going to be attracted to people who push those buttons. In my case, I've always liked forthright women who say what they want and don't look for approval.


With a partner like that, all the sub has to do is stop pushing back! This is not necessarily a good thing for either person.

Why part-time D&S?

"We're vanilla most of the time, 
and that's how we like it."

I think most Femdom couples are like us. We're vanilla most of the time, and that's how we like it.

Others do it 24/7, or have a gentle patriarchal or  FLR with more intense episodes. I'm sure that can work for some couples. However, for most of us that would have a too-many downsides:

• The sub usually won't want to submit all the time (no matter how much they fantasise about this).
• The dom usually wants a conventional relationship most of the time; the benefits of being in charge 24/7 being outweighed by the responsibility and potential loneliness.
• A lifestyle relationship may be inappropriate, e.g. because the couple are raising children.

Part-time domination and submission also has an erotic advantage along the lines of "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas". New, nasty, developments apply only to the kinky corner of the relationship. The dominant partner need never define themselves as "somebody who does X or Y to their partner - it's their inner master/mistress that does that to their slave.

Why self control isn't enough to prevent a drift into a 24/7 relationship

"All the sub has to do is
stop pushing back"

It would be nice to be able to say, "Exercise self control"! However, remember that in most cases, for drift to happen all the sub has to do is to stop pushing back. This means there are two problems:

• If the dom tries to exercise self control, that means they will always be second guessing their normal behaviour. I can't think of anything more irritating!
• If sub tries to exercise self control, that means remembering to actively assert themselves. Can they be trusted to do this? Will they have the energy?

No, if there's a strong BDSM undercurrent to the relationship, relying on self control will just put strain on the vanilla relationship.

Fortunately there's another approach. It's much easier to manage the subtle dynamic rather than to try to resist it.

"No collar no command" - the power of the firewall

"No collar no command"

Peel back the layers of the brain and we're all Pavlov's dogs. If you establish a context for the domination and only do it there, then that's the only place it will happen. By context, I mean "the stuff that accompanies the D&S" - time, place, props, toys, protocol.

In our case, I only ever submit when locked into my male chastity belt on. Conversely, I am always submissive when chaste.  Over time, thanks to conditioning, this feels like the natural order of things: without the chastity belt, D&S is simply not on the menu; with it, it is unthinkable for me to be anything but a slave.

In effect we've created a firewall around the Femdom. It keeps our day-to-day relationship vanilla, and at the same time strengthens the D&S one.

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For how to make this work in practise, see my Femdom self-help guides for couples where the female partner is mostly vanilla....