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... It's not the label itself that is the hindrance.  It's people thinking that you slap that label on yourself and that's good enough.  There's this myth that all it takes after that is to find somebody with the opposite label and everything runs in a pattern from there.  One takes charge, the other let's them be in charge and everything is hunky dorey.

Ummmmm, yeah.  It doesn't really work like that.  D/s or M/s or BDSM isn't the easy way to obtain or maintain a relationship.  It's not enough to say "I'm a Master so I want a slave" or "I'm a sub so I want a Dominant".  Sticking one label or another on yourself doesn't mean that potential partners are suddenly going to be throwing themselves at you any more than they were out in the vanilla world.  If anything, it just became a little bit more difficult because now you have even more areas of compatibility to examine because of wiitwd and you have to match in those areas, too.

Those labels aren't the get out of jail free card on building healthy relationships, honesty, and communication.  They are supposed to be the place you start.  If you want to call yourself a Dominant, a submissive, or anything else, you really need to figure out what that means to you before you even start dealing with somebody else. 

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I would only add that sometimes the problem isn't figuring out what the label means to you, but what it means to your partners or potential partners in crime. That's where the label itself can become a hindrance, because not everyone sees it the same way.

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ORIGINAL: sunshinemiss
I find it disturbing to see the women who move from man to man without taking a breather, not really spending time with them, just falling into a "role" instead of actually being with a person. By the same token, I wonder about the men who are not wise enough to say no, wait a reasonable time (at least until the grief process is over or at least mostly finished), and jump in. It seems so desperate to me. In the past, I've wondered - what is up with these people? What's that girl got that I don't that I actually need some down time between relationships?

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My first reaction on reading this was, well, doesn't everybody want to honesty and communication label? I would like to think that they do, but that might be a little naive of Me.

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ORIGINAL: pdv99

VERY Interesting topic. Yes, I am many things to many people, - worker, boss, partner, lover, teacher, student, top, sub, survivor, and a whole load more. Which is the real me? all of them. It depends on the time of day, the phases of the moon, the weather, the place, and most of all, who I am with. So I've never felt that anyone can be defined satisfactorily by a one word label. Labels can be handy shorthand for explaining a role, but "sub" for example is to me more of a verb than a noun.

That's why I've always struggled to understand people who insisted that "switches" were somehow lesser beings, impure forms of a Dom/Sub ideal., or people who were dishonest about who they "really" were. The obvious analogy to me is that plenty of people cope with being both Father and son (Mother/daughter) without any conflict .

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ORIGINAL: cloudboy
I think his point is that rigid expectations (based upon BDSM roles and and labels) can steer people away from themselves, and instead of "being" they end up "trying" and maybe misfiring too.

If I am going to meet someone, the first step would be to see if a personal connection is there -- and then work off of that. I do think this is a better approach than trying to be "submissive" so as to attract a "dominant." (This is just one example that springs to my mind.)