u/Odd-Membership7054

Hi everyone!

Sorry in advance, this is going to be long. I’m giving quite a lot of context because I think the details matter, and I’d really like perspectives from people with more experience than me rather than a simple “leave him” or “you’re jealous because he got a girlfriend.”

I’m still fairly new as a Domme. I’ve had other encounters, but this is my first real ongoing, dedicated submissive. We’ve been in this dynamic for a little over six months.

I want to make one thing clear from the beginning: I am not in love with him, and I have never wanted him to be my conventional boyfriend. I am, however, deeply attached to him as a person and as a presence in my life. Over these six months he became an important and fairly regular part of my everyday life.

We would often see each other around once a week, sometimes more, sometimes less depending on life. This was not just someone I occasionally ordered around online. He would come to my home. Sometimes he would come in the morning just to wake me up and serve me. He would cook for me. We would spend time together, have a lot of sex, cuddle, talk, experiment, and explore kink together.

He actually has more practical BDSM experience than I do, even though I’m the Dominant in our relationship. He enjoys buying toys and has accumulated a ridiculous collection of them, and a lot of our sexual relationship involved bringing things over, experimenting, discovering preferences and exploring what we both enjoyed.

There was also a financial/service aspect to our dynamic. He has supported me financially and given me gifts as part of his submission, but there has also been ordinary real-world trust between us outside of kink. For example, he recently bought a house. At one point I temporarily helped him financially with part of the purchase and he reimbursed me exactly as agreed. There was never any issue whatsoever around that. I trusted him, and I think he trusted me.

I mention this because I don’t want to give the impression that our connection was a purely sexual fantasy or an online arrangement. We had developed a real, established relationship around the D/s.

At the time, he was living with a woman I understood to be his flatmate. I knew they spent time together. I knew they had dinners together and obviously shared part of their daily life because they lived together. But it had never been presented to me as a romantic relationship developing in front of me.

Then everything changed very quickly.

He told me that he had fallen in love with her and that they were now entering a serious conventional relationship. She is also apparently planning to move with him into the house he has just bought. Again: him falling in love is not the betrayal for me. I never expected romantic exclusivity, we discussed about this. I did not expect him to ask my permission before having feelings for someone. I am not competing with her for the role of girlfriend.

What I’m struggling with is how the transition was handled and what it has done to our existing relationship.

He says that he had wanted to explain everything to me face-to-face. During that period, however, we had holidays, work travel and scheduling difficulties, so we didn’t manage to have that conversation immediately.

I can understand preferring an important conversation in person.

What I have a much harder time accepting is that, while supposedly waiting to tell me, he continued behaving towards me largely as though nothing fundamental was changing.

I started noticing things myself. And then I had to ask questions. And more questions. And more specific questions. I genuinely feel that if I had not noticed inconsistencies and kept digging, he would not have volunteered the full picture at that point.

Meanwhile, one of the things he was telling me was that I would probably have much less time with him. So there was this strange situation where apparently there was important information he wanted to save for a face-to-face conversation, while at the same time I was already being told to expect a reduced place in his life.

That is one of the things that makes me feel betrayed, although I’m still not sure “betrayal” is exactly the right word.

Maybe breach of trust or betrayal of relational trust is closer.

It feels as though the architecture of our relationship changed around me and I was informed once much of it was already decided.

There was another thing around the same period that hurt more than I expected: he forgot my birthday. Normally I wouldn’t present forgetting a birthday as some enormous relationship crime. But he had previously talked a lot about celebrating it, gifts, travel, things he wanted to do for me, etc. In the context of everything else, it reinforced this feeling of hearing a lot about how important I am while his actual behaviour was starting to place me somewhere very different.

His explanation for a lot of this is that he is extremely impulsive.

And I actually believe him.

He describes himself as someone who goes “100%” into things. He says this is how he was with me too: when he wanted to submit to me, he went fully into it.

But I’m now seeing the uncomfortable other side of that personality trait.

He can go 100% into me, then go 100% into buying a house, then go 100% into a new serious relationship and the people already in his life are left adapting to the consequences of whatever he has gone 100% into next.

His new girlfriend knows that he is submissive and kinky. The problem is that she does not like that side of him. From what he has told me, she would not be comfortable with or accept the kind of submissive/D/s relationship he has with me.

She also does not know the full reality of who I am to him or what our relationship has been.

That creates the biggest ethical issue for me.

• He still wants to be my submissive.
• He still wants to serve me.
• He still wants the sexual/D/s side.
• He still wants to give financially.
• He still wants my attention and affection.

In fact, since entering this new relationship, I sometimes feel like he is craving more attention from me, not less - presumably because the submissive part of him has nowhere to go in his conventional relationship.

But I absolutely do not want to become the secret compartment where he gets to express the part of himself his girlfriend does not accept. At one point the possibility was essentially raised that, if necessary, our relationship could simply remain private or that I could be presented as “a friend.”

I am extremely uncomfortable with that.

To me, if she would make different choices about their relationship if she knew he was still having an ongoing sexual/D/s relationship with me, then hiding that information is not ethical non-monogamy. It is deception.

And I do not consent to being made part of that deception.

There are also very practical consequences now.

• He is moving almost an hour away from me.
• His girlfriend has his location. I don’t find location sharing itself strange — I’ve done it with partners, friends and family too.
• But in practice he now worries that if he comes to my part of the city she may ask why he is there.

So suddenly, seeing me has become this logistical puzzle.

• When can she not see his location?
• When is she busy?
• Where could we meet without creating questions?
• Could I travel somewhere?
• Could he briefly meet me here or there?
• Could we do more remotely?

And I keep thinking: this is not how I want to experience my own D/s relationship.

I don’t want to be squeezed into whatever secret 30-minute slot remains available around somebody else’s couple. And, frankly, it also clashes badly with the dynamic itself.

He calls me his Queen. He talks about serving me, making my life easier, showing me my importance and proving his value to me.

Yet I’m now apparently supposed to be highly flexible, travel around according to his restrictions, be available when circumstances allow and accept whatever scraps of physical availability survive his new relationship.

There is something almost absurd to me about being called someone’s Queen while being treated logistically like an inconvenience that needs to be hidden.

And I don’t want to turn our dynamic into a primarily online relationship either.

We did plenty remotely before: tasks, games, messages, teasing, service, sexual things.

But the online component worked because it was an extension of our physical relationship. Maybe he had come over that morning, woken me up and served me sexually. Maybe we had spent the previous evening together. Maybe we had recently experimented with something new. The remote dynamic continued something that already existed between our bodies and in our everyday lives.

If we barely see one another anymore, online tasks do not feel like an equivalent replacement to me. They feel like trying to preserve the shell of the old dynamic after removing a large part of what gave it meaning.

And this is where I’m stuck.

• He keeps telling me that he does not want to lose me.
• I believe him.
• I believe he is genuinely attached to me.
• I believe his submission to me matters enormously to him.
• He has even described our relationship as something that has helped him enormously psychologically and given him an outlet he really needs.

But I cannot become responsible for regulating him because his girlfriend does not like an important part of his sexuality whilst not having her consent.

And I don’t want his need for me to become the reason I continue something that no longer feels good to me. I also don’t want money, gifts, sexual service or submission to function as substitutes for repairing trust.

He often approaches the problem as: How can I still serve you? What can I do remotely? When can we meet? How can I keep supporting you, even by just sending a regular bank transfer?

Whereas internally I’m thinking: that isn’t the part that broke.

Something in my trust towards him has changed.

Something in the way I experience his submission has changed too.

Before, receiving service from him felt connected to this larger relationship we had built together.

Now sometimes it feels like he wants to preserve access to the parts of our dynamic that fulfil him while I’m supposed to accept that the surrounding relationship has fundamentally changed.

And because this is my first serious, ongoing submissive, I’m questioning myself.

• Am I expecting too much?
• Is this normal when a submissive enters a conventional relationship?
• Am I confusing attachment with entitlement?
• Or is my discomfort actually telling me that some very reasonable relational and ethical expectations were violated?

I would really appreciate input from experienced Dommes, particularly around a few things:

• Would you consider this a genuine breach of trust even though we never had romantic exclusivity?
• How much proactive disclosure would you expect from an established submissive when another relationship is developing in a way that will fundamentally affect your dynamic?
• Would full knowledge and consent from the new partner be a non-negotiable requirement before continuing sexual/D/s contact?
• Would you continue a dynamic if the submissive’s partner knew he was kinky but explicitly did not accept the specific ongoing relationship he wanted to maintain with you?
• How do you handle a submissive who genuinely needs and values your dynamic but whose life circumstances now make the relationship significantly worse for you?
• How do you tell the difference between repairing a relationship and simply preserving service/sex/submission because the submissive is afraid to lose access to it?
• And, particularly for other newer Dommes: did your first significant rupture with a dedicated submissive make you question what you were actually “allowed” to expect emotionally and relationally?

I don’t think he is evil. I don’t even think he deliberately set out to hurt me.

I think he can genuinely care about me and still have handled this badly.

I also don’t necessarily want strangers to simply tell me to dump him.

I’m trying to understand what exactly was broken here, whether it can realistically be repaired, and what an ethical version of continuing this relationship would even look like.

Because right now I know that I’m attached to him, I know that I don’t want him as a boyfriend, and I know that I still care about him.

But I also know that the dynamic I had six months ago and the one currently being offered to me do not feel like the same relationship.

Thanks in advance for your comments and opinions!