Your Relationship
AHHHH! The R word!!!
What you can do with someone definitely depends on what your relationship with them is. I’ll be honest, in Primal sex there is really no such thing as a casual partner. There can be friends with benefits to a degree, but people in our world tend to have a higher standard for the word “friend” than most.
Much like the rest of BDSM, a high level of trust is required to do what we do. There are risks of physical damage, perhaps of rape or assault accusations, and many other things that can go wrong. It is going to be a different relationship than with someone who makes sweet gentle whatever.
Now let me take a moment to define “serious”. For most of the world, especially vanilla people, “serious” means “leading to (monogamist) marriage”. By “marriage” I mean a formally/state recognized commitment. Some are flexible enough to accept cohabitation, but the end goal for most is that formal recognition of partnership.
For the BDSM world, “serious” is much more personal. It means that the two or more individuals involved recognize each other as important to one another. Nobody else needs to recognize them or even know about the relationship. They take care of each other’s needs to whatever degree they decide. So there are degrees and levels of seriousness. Maximum seriousness would be like ownership or blood level bonding. The people involved take a fairly high level of responsibility for one another’s needs and wellbeing. In a Primal tribe specifically, a group of members may all feel free to shag anyone else within the group, and maybe some outsiders too, but they feel much more connected to and responsible for those in the tribe, pack, coil, web, or whatever they call it, than those outside.
Unfortunately, we live in a time when many people under 40 don’t understand this. It is very common for people to panic, especially if they don’t really identify as Primal and have had no guidance. Guys especially will express fears of things getting too serious when they don’t know what serious is to us, or maybe if they do and it freaks them out. They may have even internalized the monster label because of too many people rejecting the intensity of their attention. They may believe that they are sick or crazy because this is what others, even some exes, have told them.
You may have to nurse some of them through the monster thing. There is no getting around that. If they think they are twisted, you may have a difficult road of either convincing them that they are not, or hey, getting them to be okay with being twisted since you like how they are twisted.
About the seriousness fear, that’s fairly easy to solve. Just let them know without actually saying the words unless it is appropriate, that they have no chance of being taken seriously unless the Primal sex graduates to a Primal relationship. Until a woman/feminine partner is a nurturer, or a male/masculine partner is a protector, or a variable partner is doing any of the above, they simply will not be taken seriously. Prey is not a mate or even a pet. If they’re just scratching an itch then you appreciate it but you can trade 100 of them for one functioning mate.
Some you can tell this verbally. Some you can tell this gradually. With most though, you’ll need to be very delicate. Most people hear, “Hahahahah! You have NO worries of me mistaking you for a boyfriend/girlfriend!” as, “You are just a piece of meat with no importance to me whatsoever, fuck off and die.” Even if they ask for it, read them well before actually saying it. More on this later.
Emotional Safety
And with that last bit, we get to the issue of intensity of the sex vs. expectations. As I’ve said in other articles, normal people sex is boring, and so most people assume that if the sex is very intense, you must be in love. Worse than if someone becomes afraid that you are too serious about them, someone could suddenly become very serious about you because the sex was too deep. Sometimes when they express a fear that things are too serious, what they’re really saying is that they are feeling things they weren’t ready to feel.
I wish I had a solution for this. My gut reaction when people start expressing these kinds of fears is to withdraw because in my experience, this is the beginning of the end, but I live in a very ethnically polarized, religious country wherein people will do and say incredibly cruel things to someone they’re confused about. Most of the western world doesn’t have quite the same kind of xenophobia or rigid cultural norms that Israel does, but everywhere, confused people do dumb things.
So both your and your partners’ emotional safety has to be taken into account. For this reason, you may want to start soft emotionally.
For instance, I may bite and scratch and take a bit of that from a casual partner, but there’s a limit. I tend not to hold anybody by the neck or get into wrestling or the really deep African soul sex practices until we are known as stable lovers. My intensity level for casual partners is maybe 3 out of 10. If I really really like someone as a person, and we have good natural chemistry, then I’ll get up to 4.5. I’ll give or take a bruise that might last through the day after. If they’re expressing fear of commitment at 4.5, then I roll back to 3.
You will have your own levels and lines. I encourage you to give this some thought. You can’t open up safely to everyone, and unlike other forms of BDSM, the negotiation is mostly nonverbal. So people might miss cues.
Click below for when to hit the brakes.
