How to lose a sub

I met him on Fet, as one does. He said he was a dom, as men do—whether or not they have any idea of the responsibility that role carries. He was about 15 years younger than I was, and I wasn’t sure he could convince me that he was in charge, but he had been in several D/s arrangements, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

He answered my questions about D/s relationships, and how he’d arranged and run his before he’d moved here. I felt a bit the way I did back when I was considering joining the Catholic Church and encountered a bishop on an early online bulletin board: he was friendly and open as long as I said the right things, but when I questioned anything, he became saturnine and censorious.

We agreed to meet at a park between our houses, a place where I had traded gold coins from a vending machine for a trip on a carousel with my young daughter. Little League teams shouted from nearby fields, but the wood-chip-lined path we agreed to walk was empty.

He came in a beat-up minivan. It was fine, as I was in my own smaller, streamlined minivan, and as soon as we rounded a bend in the path and the parking lot was no longer visible, we were able to pretend we were the people we felt like we were: adult sexual beings, kinky, meeting another of our kind.

We walked, we talked, we got bitten by mosquitoes, we danced around the idea of whether we would start a relationship. And then we stopped at a bench, where he immobilized my jaw while he kissed me, and it was good. The fingers of his other hand strayed up my shorts, slid up the leg to graze my clit, and I was ready to entertain the idea that he could be my dom.

Then, back in our separate homes, we tried playing via text. Given that he was married, and I have kids at home, and neither of us could afford regular hotel rooms, we knew the bulk of our relationship might occur via text. He gave me an instruction—I don’t even remember what it was, something about not coming or not masturbating for a certain amount of time—and I asked for clarification.

That’s all it was. His words were not clear. Words often aren’t clear to me, as a language expert and a word artist who sees in words all the myriad things they could possibly mean.

But these words would not have been clear, definitively, to anyone. Even a straightforward, not-enamored-of-words sub.

“I’m done with this bratty shit,” he said.

I started to protest that he hadn’t been clear, that I’d been looking for elucidation so I could better follow his instructions, but he cut me off. As a sub, I didn’t have the right to explain or to defend myself. He was done.

I blocked him and moved on. I know that people say “his/her loss” primarily as a sop to their ego or as a way to bolster their lovable friends when someone else doesn’t see their value. But I know that it really was his loss. His unwillingness to accept my inexperience for what it was—and his inability to acknowledge his own failure—made him lose a sub who would have been eager to learn and to obey.

Until, of course, she found someone better. Which she did, rather quickly.