Beginnings

If there is one thing that is constant in life it is change.

    My fantasy life started a long time ago, with thoughts of serving as a slave which were pre-sexual in nature. They eventually became sexual fantasies, but not ones that I shared with anyone. As a feminist, a liberal, and an independent, stubborn woman I was ashamed of these fantasies because they didn't fit in with my views of the world or myself. So they were just lurking there, to be brought out as needed for sexual stimulation in my own head.
    I met my Master in high school and it was an instant crush for me. I was very shy, and he already had a girlfriend, so it took some time for a relationship to develop. We started dating just before he left for college. We had a long distance relationship, conducted mainly by letter (snail mail of course, this being in the days before email) except for visits back and forth for 4 years. I still have hundreds of letters we wrote back and forth, many of his with elaborately painted envelopes. I followed him, choosing a college which was close enough to his to get there by bus for a weekend. Neither of us had a car. One summer I lived secretly in the dorm with him, which was definitely not allowed. I spent most days while he was at work playing pool in the dorm basement, until I finally got a temp job in a factory.

    The first time he tied me up, I was 17.  We did not do bondage related activities regularly though. After we moved in together, when I was in college and he started graduate school at the same university I attended, we started doing a few more kinky things. This turned me on an unbelievable amount but I didn't ask for it all the time. I don't really know why, perhaps it was shame and embarrassment. He always had a much higher sex drive than I did, which was frustrating for both of us. At one point he insisted on going to counseling for the issue of not enough sex. The therapist seemed to blame me entirely, and just said I should do it more. It was extremely irritating to me at the time. Now, it might have been useful if he'd said something like "Why don't you tie her up and beat her ass to turn her on", but I guess therapists aren't supposed to say things like that. Anyway, I wasn't a very good patient as I just sat there and didn't say anything.

   For years we played around with bondage with a nifty leather strap he made, some role playing and play-rape fantasy. It was more the exception than the rule.

   Then last summer something happened.  My husband took the kids and went to visit their Grandma in California, leaving me on my own here. I got bored and lonely and started looking up things on-line related to bondage and S&M, reading stories and finding out how big and varied the BDSM world was, and how much the whole idea turned me on. When he got back my sex drive was way up; I just couldn't stop thinking about it. My fantasies suddenly didn't seem so crazy and I started asking for more and more stuff to be done to me. He was thrilled that I was so horny and kinky all of a sudden. Some things he wasn't so sure about at first, like spanking, but after a few times he started enjoying the effects that it had on me. As he says, "It's no skin off my butt".

    The first month I insisted that I was not any kind of masochist, and I would let him know and tell him to stop if anything he did hurt. I meant it too.

    But the more I got the more I wanted it, and harder, until in the second month I admitted that I may actually be enjoying the pain and be a little bit of a masochist after all. His reaction was to laughingly say, "No kidding". I am not always exactly in touch with my feelings, as you may have gathered by now.

    The biggest thrill for me was when he would dominate me and I could just give in. At some point I stopped saying no. Anything he wanted, asked for, demanded, hinted at, I would do. This was my first step of submission. Around that time sex became painful, through overdoing it, I guess. I was stubborn and never let on that it hurt. Yeah, it was probably a stupid thing to do, but at the time I felt I had to. I just pushed through and beyond the pain until eventually it wasn't painful anymore. It was the second step in submission for me.
    By about 3 months, we had officially decided as a couple to be D/s but only in the bedroom or relating to sexual things. In every other aspect the relationship was as equals. He did not want me to become a doormat who would never disagree with him, or have an interesting debate. We discussed limits, hard and soft, and safewords, ideas I had picked up on the internet.

    I started feeling like I was falling down a hole, like Alice in Wonderland, a great big welcoming hole of submission and dominance, of sex and gratifying pain.

    After about 4 months I started feeling like giving up all my limits, and accepting his hard limits as my own. I wanted to give up my safeword, but through talking to others on line I was convinced this was a bad idea. I eventually decided to reserve it for when I thought was really in danger or in trouble, and this was just a way of protecting both of us from unintentional harm. Not to use it just because something was unpleasant or not what I wanted. For that I'd either just use regular communication, in which case he was free to override me, or to just be quiet. Since I mainly enjoyed the acts of Dominance and submission, it was not that hard to choose the last option most of the time.
     The next step in my submission was one night he told me to wash the dishes, which by an agreement of many years standing, were rightfully his to wash because I had cooked dinner. I said no, just no. He took me upstairs and gave me an angry thrashing. Not the funishment kind so much as the kind when I feel horrible that he really is mad at me. I apologized. I agreed to wash the dishes while kneeling at his feet and near to crying.
     The next critical turning point came when he told me to go off without him and do something that I really did not feel like doing. It wasn't a big thing, I just really didn't feel like it at the moment. I said I would, but it took me a little while to stop feeling crabby and resentful about it. Finally I accepted the task within myself with a feeling of submission and peacefulness and actually enjoyed myself.
     That was when I knew that I really was a slave 24/7, not just in the bedroom, because the task had nothing to do with sex, kinkiness or pleasure. It just was what he wanted me to do and I did it.
Around that time I asked him if he thought the word submissive or slave more accurately fit me, and he said slave, so that is how we became M/s. I had been calling him Master the whole time because it seemed right to me and fit in with my fantasies. I had a couple of leather play collars, but neither of us had much interest in a big ceremony or a "real" collar that I would wear all the time. We talked about it and decided it was not for us, at least at this time.
    Then, in another turn around, for Christmas he gave me a thick gold necklace, which I absolutely love, and said I could consider it his collar of ownership of me forever. I wear it every day, although at night I switch to a more sturdy leather collar. After that I stopped feeling like I was falling down a desperate and enticing hole, and more like I had found a comfortable footing.