Amanda time 1

I’ve sometimes described my relationship with Amanda as girlfriend, lover, office assistant, and slave — all of the above and not necessarily in that order.

She and I glide smoothly from one of these modes to another to another. Perhaps it is she has conditioned me to read her preference in specific moments, I don’t know. Somehow we do this, and it works.

What’s hard to describe is how she sometimes doms me in all four of these modes while maintaining the non-D/s aspect of each. In other words, the submissive Shae is never completely paused when I am her assistant or girlfriend or lover. And yet in those other modes of relationship we relate as equals. She sometimes doms me inside those other modes, although often she doesn’t.

For example, we are best of girlfriends, equals in our friendship as women. We enjoy bingeing on Netflix and popcorn, sharing makeup tips, and shopping for clothes. Yet on occasion she will interject into our girlfriend times a note of dominance. While shopping for clothes downtown, she will pull out of her purse one of my metal slave collars and have me wear it publicly. Again, nothing more than that — we are still in our girlfriend vibe. It’s almost as if she’s saying, “you’d look cute with this Kelly green scrunchie in your hair,” and helps me pull my hair in a ponytail and put it on — except the scrunchie is actually a heavy titanium slave collar that she puts around my neck.

She makes me both girlfriend and slave at the same time.

Likewise, as lovers we share our intimacy as equals, woman to woman. Usually. Yet sometimes Amanda will take me into her bed as the slave I am, giving me orders and sometimes putting me into a bondage. Recently she attached my wrists to a short spreader bar behind my back and gave me the simple order, “Satisfy me.” In every other respect our time was mutual and equal, not a bondage session but a sapphic lovemaking, albeit, interestingly, without the use of my hands.

I was both her lover and her slave at the same time.

For me, for us, this is not a problem, but the fluidity of my various relationships with her is sometimes hard to describe to others.

One of my theories is that Amanda can’t help but dominate, and even when we’re in these other modes, she just feels the need to imprint her control on me. Dominance, and for that matter submissiveness, know no bounds. We cannot help but fall into dom-sub.

It may be that the better way to look at it is that I am slave to her always, that “slave” is not actually one of my relational modes to her, but the baseline mode for everything. So all of these other modes are actually “girlfriend + slave,” “lover + slave,” and “assistant + slave.”

It makes me think that human relationships have the capacity for being a lot of different things, sometimes blended into new things. That traditional society and culture restricts relationships to a few absolute structures, often limiting. That alternative relationships perhaps offer us freedom to experience each other in new and surprising ways.