The next episode of ‘Femdom does vanilla dating’…
When I popped back onto the vanilla dating site, I clicked a few things and lo and behold if I didn’t see pictures of two beautiful local men. One was a reminiscent of Anderson Cooper, and the other had a whole ‘George Clooney-esque’ vibe going on. They each had smart, thoughtful profiles.
Well, hellloooo…
I messaged them both.
Anderson Cooper was a cold call, and we were really not that compatible (our match percentage was high, but he’d answered very few questions, and had ‘Catholicism’ listed as important to him, so that was a long shot). I didn’t expect to hear back from him.
George Clooney had messaged me at some point when I was dating My Gentleman (I cannot multi-task with the whole dating thing), so I figured a gorgeous looking man with a thoughtful profile would have been snapped up already.
He replied quickly, with delight and interest.
This is how it played out live on twitter (are you following me there yet? If not, you should!):
Me on the vanilla dating site finding pretty men:
Two messages sent. Exhausted now.
I’m curious what ‘Catholic and serious about it’ means in this day and age. Does it mean ‘right wing arsehole + no sex’ or does it mean ‘loves everyone like Jesus would have wanted’?
I suspect the former tbh (though still sex, but confession to nullify the damage)
One of these pretty men has a whole George Clooney thing going on. I am SO here for it.
(he messaged me first, but messages are not dated and I’ve not logged in for a month, so he’s probably married by now :P)
The only reason I was on that hellsite is because I’m sat at my proper-for-real workspace with the intention of writing…
And we all know what that’s like, don’t we, writerly friends? :/
He replied, so presumably not married yet.
Let’s see if I can line up a date with George Clooney shall we? :P
This version of George Clooney, in case you’re wondering :P
He sent another note before I answered his previous:
“Did you peruse our list of things we both agree upon? Uncanny and very…”
I DID NOT BUT I AM NOW BECAUSE MINE IS FULL OF F/m STUFF AND AND… *faints*!!
Oh.
“…maybe pretend to be real cool and act somewhat indifferent… I’m quite attracted to ladies with sexy impermeability…”
Look, I can’t vouch for the ‘sexy’, part, but ‘cool, indifferent and impermeable’ is 100% me… No pretending required :)
“I’d love to whisper sweet nuthins’ while scrutinizing your unflappable demeanor waiting for a crack to show under your unscrutable impermeability. Like a good puppy, I would…”
Well, hello puppy… :)
Doing a direct approach
Me: “I notice you prefer to ‘do the tying’, and prefer someone ‘submissive’, which is not the way I’m wired, for the record. But I am willing to see how things fit when I see a great smile, and you definitely have one of those.”
Him: “I did notice that you liked to do the tying up and so I thought I had alluded to my capable openmindedness when saying I would wait patiently like a good puppy.”
Oh you did, George, you did. I just wanted to see if you would say it out loud… :)
He asked for a phone call, I said no
Me: “I hate the phone. If I’m going to talk to a new person, I want to do it face-to-face… where if things go badly one of us has to throw a drink (that would be me, by the way, I call dibs on ‘drink-throwing’) and stalk out in outrage.”
Him: “I would feel terribly honored to be doused of a liquid that touched your lips and in public by a lady of your intelligence and humor.”
*laughs and laughs* George is fun :)
First date with George is a drink tomorrow afternoon, so we will see if a few cute emails and a Clooney-esque face is the extent of this
I think the little clarification about who does the tying has addled his mind. Or maybe it’s just my aura or something. Bless.
(by ‘doing this’ he means ‘meeting him’…)
The whole exchange was sweet.
He has no car at the moment, so I drove the 30 minutes to him. He picked a cute bar that had velvet couches, I grabbed us some wines over his protest, and we chatted for some 2.5 hours. He is a French-Canadian involved in the creative arts, has a lovely French accent, lives here now.
Our conversation was much better than most first date conversation: We talked about passion and social change, angst and carrying things from the past, melancholy and vulnerability, about how things make us feel. He was remarkably open and honest.
In that vein I was not cagey about anything to do with BDSM or about my content: Blog, podcast, books, I told him. He did not ask for any links, but he did want to understand the BDSM aspect, and I realised I need to get better at summarising how it works for me.
I have come up with a great ‘elevator pitch’ for BDSM:
For me, D/s feels like love, and BDSM play is about intimacy and vulnerability.
It’s true and I love that. But I need a better answer for ‘what kind of control makes you happy’ because ‘he does what I want’ leads to ‘okay, but what is it you want?’ and I don’t have an easy high-level answer for that, and ‘everything!’ is not a good one.
He was curious, somewhat ‘BDSM-adjacent’, but open. I could see him looking puzzled when I found it difficult to give examples of how my D/s manifests because small examples are trite, and not the point. But the big picture is hard to grasp. I need to work on that.
He was unabashedly excitable and enthusiastic when he talked about things he cares about, and that’s very appealing to me. Always (I don’t care if it’s model trains, or gardening, or what it is: Show me the things you love, I want to see you light up about it).
We argued heatedly about our different views a couple of times. He was, I think, used to espousing his opinion and not having it questioned, but it was the kind of hot little disagreement where you each spark up and touch each other to emphatically make points. No rancor in it.
At one point his face lit up as if he’d had a revelation: “Geena Davis! You look like Geena Davis!” I laughed because, well no, but the way he said it made it seem like he’d been trying to come up with her name for a while. THIS is the reason for the photo and blog title :). And I have to say that when I found ‘blonde Gina’ and put her head on my body like some Dr Frankenstein of photoshop, I will concede that I do kind of look like that.
I leaned in for a first kiss when there was a break in our conversation, he was puzzled, didn’t know what I was doing. Men are really not used to women making the first move. It was sweet and I asked for another, then another.
Another kiss a bit later, still sitting there on the couch, I think I asked him for it. I can’t remember. He relaxed into it a bit, we weren’t quite in synch, but it was still good.
As a note on that, vanilla men are used to leading kisses, and I am used to leading them also, so finding a balance is surprisingly challenging. Kissing can feel a little combatitive at first, like jostling for what you want.
When he finished his second glass of wine, it was getting to a point where I could either settle in, maybe go to dinner a bit later, or to head home. I decided to go. Not because there was anything wrong, I just don’t think hugely long dates serve me so well. I was starting to feel antsy and I’d prefer to walk away earlier than stay until my social energy is depleted.
He walked me to my car, and we kissed goodbye and oh my: It was really good. Not even the kiss so much, but when there’s something working, there is an energy flow in it, and phew, there was capital P Potential in it. He held my waist during the kiss, stepped in closer so we were lightly pressed against each other, ran his thumbs firmly across my stomach, my muscles felt strong under his hands, his body gentle against me.
I felt him start to smile, could see his teeth when I opened my eyes and the smile got bigger.
I chuckled, “Are you laughing at me?”
He laughed. “Not laughing AT you…” His thumbs still stroking my belly, forceful against my tensed muscles, a restrained desire of the kind I recognise and love. “No I was laughing because I don’t think you could control me,” he gestured at this, ‘us’, standing hip-to-hip in the street. I literally felt my pussy get wet. Unf.
We parted ways then. There has been no post-date contact.
I expect that it might have felt to him like I left abruptly (I dunno, how do you end a date other than ‘I’m heading off now’), and since he has an inkling of what I’m like now and knows I’m not shy to go after what I want, he will wait for me to contact him.
I should get on that.
27 comments
Once again, fantastic. Sexy, funny, interesting. And on a vanilla date, no less!!!
Thanks :).
Honestly, vanilla dating is so fucking EASY. For real.
They show up(!), they’re personable, they’re not playing games, there’s no layers of shame or preconceived ideas to dig through, they’re socially skilled etc etc.
If I actually liked dating, I’d be having a ball :).
Ferns
So why not do quick and easy vanilla dates with submissives, rather than forcing them to first pass through an obstacle course of online communications? You shoot yourself in the foot, if you ask me. You have probably rejected many who would have fared very differently had you given them a chance to actually meet you. Ultimately, whether a relationship works is about how it is to BE with the person rather than how they communicate online. Given how poisonous the online environment has become, many people are very different, and more distrustful in that space, and find it exhausting and depressing. A quick meet would result in either an “OK, it wouldn’t work, I can save my time”, or a “wow, this might actually work” that is grounded in broader reality, with an unavoidable requirement to relate at a vanilla level, rather than a narrow fantasy in people’s heads. There might be a lot of the former, but that is par for the course in any form of dating. I daresay that your hit rate might be better than in the online approach you have been pursuing. Anyone who wants an actual relationship surely would prefer to get to know the vanilla person first, so you will be doing everyone a favour.
If only I’d written something about this in great detail… If only I’d written nearly 1000 words talking about this very thing with excruciating clarity… If only that were a thing I had done… *looks wistfully off into the distance*
Ferns
I don’t know about him because I don’t know him but both times a man who identified as Dominant was -into- me and said those words it was a challenge they dearly hoped I’d take them up on. The unspoken part to “I don’t think you could control me.. ” was always …”but man I hope I’m wrong.”. For the record, both times they were incorrect and both times were thrilled to be that way.
Here’s hoping that’s how he rolls as well.
He doesn’t identify as dominant (he was hardly versed on BDSM at all), though the very fact that he even answered those questions certainly says something.
I’m glad those instances worked out so well for you :).
I think the social stigma of submission leads a lot of men to hide who they are: There are so many self-identified dominants who want to be ‘secret’ subs. I always say no: If he’s so ashamed that he can’t admit to his desires, he’s not strong enough for me :).
Ferns
Yeah, and that post shows exactly what I am talking about! You are cutting off the possibility of “well, that person does not fit precisely my fantasy, but now that I have met them, gee, I feel something and I want to make this work”. Sure, there will be the no shows and ghosts, but that happens with vanilla dating as well.
Hmm, my previous response went oin the wrong place, look above.
@D: If that’s what you took away from it, I don’t know what to tell you.
Ferns
Teach him how to spell honour FFS Ferns, standards! *waves arms wildly*
Coug
Bahahahaha… Right?!!
Ferns
Ferns, I have read you for years and you are my D intro and role model. The “how to talk about what I want” question is really difficult, but I feel like I have better learned my own answer from reading you. I am definitely into obedience, and that’s where the “like what?” question inserts itself, but obedience is way, way secondary to what I really want and what turns me on beyond all sense: utter vulnerability (goes perfectly with my wonderful, troublesome Scorpio Venus). I arrived from reading you that if I talk about vulnerability first (or only in the beginning), that keeps the conversation there, and since, for me, obedience is something of a subset (no pun intended) of vulnerability, the conversation can idle there without having to go down the twisty, turny lane of specific “things.” Huge gratitude for all you do.
Thank you so much for the loveliness :).
What you’ve described sounds like a great way of introducing it.
Where I run into trouble is that all of this *points at my books, my blog, my podcast, my fetlife group* is the answer to the sad and predictable ‘what do you do’ dating question, and THAT’S where I have to make a decision about what to tell, and obviously I won’t lie about it, not even by omission because it’s too big.
So with MG, I essentially said ‘I write relationship content and it’s pretty personal, so I’m not ready to share it yet’. With GC, I said ‘I write BDSM content’. MG thought I was hiding something (I was) and GC got worried about it and where/how/if he fits. Neither is a great outcome.
If it was solely personal (vs 10+ years of public content) it would be much easier to manage because I’d get the chance to see how we relate without saying a thing about it and if I’m just ‘how I am’, I will see pretty quickly how he responds to it. Then I could explicitly reveal a bit at a time if and when I feel comfortable.
Maybe my subconscious has been scheming all this time to cut off an easy route to vanilla men: ‘No vanilla dating for you!’ :).
Ferns
Thank you so much for your reply, Ferns! I see what you mean from your explanation, that your complexity is underscored and exposed by “what you do” in ways I do not have to anticipate and address. All true. The only comparison that touches on your public presence might be how I worry my students might discover and read my okcupid “answers,” which are unambiguous in their bent. A minuscule chance by comparison, to be sure, but, despite my regular-life openness and lack of shame as to who I am and whom I want, Awkward! I so appreciate you sharing your struggles and joys. Tho currently heartbroken and in hopeless-love limbo, I can report from past experience there are at least a couple of vanilla men out there who found their passion to be delightfully infused/infected with D/s proclivities, thank heavens. Your vanilla dating adventures have been quite inspiring…and tantalizing. ❤️
Boo for ‘heartbroken and in hopeless-love limb’, though to be honest, I often think I’d rather feel *something bad* than being all ‘meh, whatevs’ like my emotions are forever on ice.
I hope things get better soon.
And yes, there is a small risk on dating sites where presumably your actual face is up and identifiable. Funnily, I don’t worry about that. If something comes out of it, I think there’s always room for plausible deniability there: ‘I answered what now? No, I’m sure I didn’t. Oh, ha ha, I guess my friend got on my computer when I wasn’t looking, the scamp!’ :D.
Ferns
????! And many thanks for the well-wishes. Fingers crossed.
You are far mor stunning and amazing then Geena Davis