njlauren
Posts: 1577
Joined: 10/1/2011 Status: offline
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I agree that much of what make up vanilla relationships, like trust, honesty, communication and so forth, is the same thing in any relationship, including a D/s. Where I think it differs is that in certain forms of D/s or BD/SM relationships, the need to do these things well is enhanced. In a monogamous relationship cheating is an emotional barn burner, in the kink world I think there are more minefields around trust and honesty, because of how intense some relationships are in the kink world. When you do edge play, the sub and dom better be able to communicate well, read each other, and not be afraid to be honest, because without that, you are looking for trouble if a scene goes south, both physical and mental IME. A 24/7 TPE requires a lot of trust, and honesty, for it to succeed, and I think you can get away with a lot more in a vanilla relationship in this area then you could in a TPE (just my opinion). A poly takes many of these things in spades, having read the threads on the poly forum and from what I have seen, it can be a veritable emotional minefield if the people aren't open and honest, for example. The reason they don't teach relationship dynamics that much is in part because you don't learn those things in a 90 minute workshop easily, when couples go into therapy it can take a long time for them to learn what it is about, and then more time to get them into their lives. You can teach a course in basic knots or using needles in play in an hour or two, relationship stuff is much deeper, it would be more like a course in relationship dynamics would be pretty much "okay, here is an outline of what it takes in my experience to have a BD/SM relationship", and in the time they have, would be an outline. About the best they could do maybe would be to emphasize that the perils of something like trust being broken may be worse in a BD/SM relationship or whatever, but beyond that, it gets too complicated IMO. I have heard people give the secrets to a successful relationship, and the problem also is, it varies from person to person, too:).
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