What Kink Has Taught Me About Platonic Vanilla Relationships

I recently watched a two-year friendship melt into a toxic cesspool of gaslighting and mean-spiritedness. I cut contact based on two meagre conversations — Something my pre-kink self would never have done. She always tried to forgive because everyone makes mistakes, you know. Besides, you owe people second chances. You need to be justified in ending a relationship. You can’t just cut people off without good reason.

The kink scene has taught me an awful lot about things that have nothing to do with kink. My ex-friend took joy out of cruelty. She apologised, but Post-Kink Me has hard and soft limits, even in platonic vanilla relationships. If you violate one of them, we’re done. If you’re capable of contempt, I don’t require your friendship and will withdraw my trust. It doesn’t matter if I’m right or wrong. You crossed a hard boundary.

If you’ve done it once, you’ll do it again. Am I willing to let you do it again? No. Post-Kink Me doesn’t spend days trying to work out if she’s justified to end a friendship. Post-Kink Me knows that she gets to choose her boundaries unilaterally, no peer review necessary.

I draw a hard line. I’ll give you that, but d’you know what? Post-Kink Me feels comfortable with hard lines. Post-Kink Me has even learned that she can cut people out of her life for spurious reasons because she has the right to choose who she surrounds herself with. She’s learned to identify the behaviours she can survive and those that she cannot.

I’ll forgive just about anything. If you descend into a fiery pit of active addiction, my inner Desmond Tutu will happily accept you back when you stop using. If your insecurity makes you a naggy wreck, I’ll bring out my inner Oprah. If you’re perpetually late, I have all 20, 000 forgivenesses stacked on a shelf for you.

Yes, forgiveness can be pluralised. Just be quiet.

Post Kink Me has learned that my boundaries aren’t your boundaries, and that’s okay. Different people are destroyed in different ways. For some, addiction is a hard limit because they:

a) Aren’t addicts themselves.
b) Don’t know how to grok the sincerity of a recovery attempt.

These two things don’t apply to me. I’m quite comfortable being friends with recovering addicts who've harmed me. Contempt, on the other hand, can destroy me, so when I see it, I end the friendship. You can define that as self-worth if you like. I no longer absorb blame for other people’s failings.

If you tie my waist to a St Andrews cross, you have violated a hard limit and we will not play again.

If you take joy from cruelty, you've violated a hard boundary and we won't talk again. So long and thanks for all the fish.