Mismatch in Kink Partnerships

As it so happens, my last post was my 50th! Wish it had been something more meaningful than my return from vacation, ha! I started this blog in January 2024 with the hopes of re-building some sort of community and re-connecting with other people who share this thing we do, and get back to the sort of long-form writing I miss the most about the earlier online-spanking-community days. I think I’ve succeeded. There aren’t a lot of readers on a day-to-day but I know folks are here and engaged and that brings me joy and keeps me interested in writing and sharing – both of which are good for me whether there’s an audience or not.

Onward to kink mismatches…

Many people believe that if they partner with someone who shares their fetish, everything will fall into place – I was one of them, too! The reality was much different once I finally started searching for a life/nesting partner and started to explore connections with people I wasn’t perfectly aligned with, kink wise.

This is a topic I’ve written about or brought up in many of my posts, but I haven’t written a post specifically about it, yet. However, I recently joined the Sips & Smacks Patreon Discord and suggested it as a topic for an episode in the course of another conversation. To my delight, they recently released an episode on the topic, so I decided to finally finish this up. As they discuss, the most common ‘mismatch’ for partners, is spanko + non-spanko, but something we talk less about (as a community) in my opinion, is being partnered to another spanko who’s kink manifests differently than your own – like my own partnership. How is it that two people can technically share a fetish (spanking) and yet express I so differently that it is as though they have completely different fetishes? I suspect this is more common than is talked openly about, since surely a spanko partnered with a spanko must not struggle in the same way as a spanko partnered to a non-spanko, but you really can. There are of course also people who are spankos and partnered with someone who has a completely different fetish or are broadly kinky/into BDSM, but I’m going to focus on what I know.

What I appreciated most about this episode was the validation from Adalia and Rex that being partnered with a fellow spanko who doesn’t share your version of the spanking kink, is hard and that specifically discipline vs non-discipline might be just as hard as the spanko & non-spanko pairing. They don’t delve into this, since it wasn’t the topic of the episode, but I personally think this is true at least partially because if you share this with a receptive vanilla partner, they are going to be taking their cues from you. They are specifically going to be hearing what you want/like/need and (hopefully, if they’re on board) striving to meet that – you are their guide. They won’t have their own ingrained fetish wants and needs driving their actions. This is an analogy they use in the podcast and I think it works here. If you think about having a fetish as like knowing another language natively, then you can see teaching a vanilla partner how to meet this need as similar to teaching them your language. The language of who you are, so to speak. They’ll never be a native speaker, but they can have an understanding of the grammar, sentence structure, and gain fluency over time.

For me, if I had to subcategorize my spanking fetish, it would be discipline/CP at the top, and then other ways I enjoy engaging with spanking (power exchange, stress relief, fun, foreplay, etc) but as mentioned, discipline is not it for my husband. My “native language” of spanking, so to speak, is a completely different dialect. We have a shared history and journey from childhood, startles, understanding of the world through the lens of a spanking fetish, but when we want to engage with it, it comes out differently. We can understand enough of each other to get through, but the different dialects mean there are necessarily bumps in the road. For me, discipline feels innate – it’s a part of me. For Daniel, because he doesn’t think about spanking in terms of discipline, it feels like work for him – something he has to work at, and often, that pushes his own personal limits. I don’t think a domestic discipline dynamic would work for us even if he was interested in discipline in the same way I am, because for me discipline is more about a broad structure (maintenance, so to speak) than it is about rule breaking. More about addressing real emotions, vulnerabilities, etc. than about having a list of rules and consequences.

I’ve written a lot about how that works for me, but one way is using spanking/discipline for falling short in real ways, but not set rules. Being disappointed in how I handled a situation, for example, or dropping the ball on a work thing, those sorts of things. We can make these moments work sometimes – it’s a compromise, right? I have to bring these things to him, I have had to outline what would work for me in these situations. He doesn’t naturally know what to do or say that helps the disciplinary headspace and he also doesn’t love to give the type of spanking I usually want/need in these situations so those are compromises for him. I’m not going to sit here and write that it always works – or even most of the time does – we’ve made it work, we’ve had successes where it feels like this part of my kink is being seen/tended to, but the reality is that most of the suggestions in the podcast are things we’ve tried that don’t work for us. I don’t like role-play and find it really difficult, so that doesn’t work. Focusing on a few rules doesn’t work because that version of discipline is hard for me to wrap my head around (I’m not opposed to rules, but I’d rather have them come up organically with someone who was equally as into discipline, then to concoct a list), maintenance has failed spectacularly because you have to prioritize it and that requires buy-in from both people. We’ve found that what works best for us, is for me to have this met by someone else outside of our marriage. This forms the foundation for our ENM.

Now, that’s not necessarily easy either, because of course I don’t want to do discipline with a casual play partner. Getting to know someone takes time, meeting people isn’t easy, figuring it out with someone new would involve a lot of communication also. I’ve only had a successful discipline dynamic with one person and it was more than 15 years ago, so it’s also fairly new to me to be figuring this out. I have – obviously, since I’ve written about it here – found people with whom discipline works with, but that’s also complicated – especially now. There are the ever present questions, even if you find someone it works with: Are they available (physically, emotionally)? Do they want the same things? Do they want it to be consistent? Can they make a commitment? What does commitment mean in this context?

But what we do know is that by taking the pressure off of us, off of him, stopping trying to force discipline to work for the two of us, we can more easily try and make the parts that do work, the focus. Focusing on those and the times when we CAN connect on discipline.

While writing this and thinking about mismatch, it occurred to me that there are other ways in which we are mismatched, kink wise – I am a much harder player (yes, a bit of a masochist) than he is often comfortable with, but that’s easier to find a happy medium with. We can use different implements that have a greater impact with less force, etc. Although we don’t have a direct orientation mismatch, he is a switch and I am a bottom. I sometimes wonder if this sounds like a lot? Occasionally, it feels like a lot, but it never felt like a deal breaker. I’ve mentioned before that there is a lot more to a relationship than solely kink compatibility and I think that’s true. Although I think our situation is more similar to the spanko vs non-spanko pairing than some other mismatches, I can’t compare them fully and I don’t think I ever would have been happy with a non-spanko pairing. Spanking is so central to my sexuality, it doesn’t exist without it. I’ve dated vanilla people and had “vanilla” sex that focused on PiV penetration, and does exactly nothing for me. In the absence of spanking, there is no connection, no feeling, no real pleasure, etc. so sharing it on any level, with someone – especially when the more broad expression is mismatched but my more sexual one is more on par with his – is far more important to me than an exact match so to speak.

Because relationships are complex and have more to them than just sexuality or just hobby sharing (though, ironically, we also differ quite a bit in our hobby enjoyment, too!), I don’t begrudge anyone a pairing that makes them happy or that works for them – I know my own pairing wouldn’t work for many people. I always assumed I’d find someone who was into domestic discipline or discipline in some capacity, and when I realized that the story or fantasy expressions of discipline I’d been reading about for years were nothing like the reality, I had to change my assumptions completely. I focused on finding someone I fit with and what that means is more complex than a single orientation or role or belief. Instead of fitting together like puzzle pieces with a perfect nestling, it’s more like two things that complement each other in a way that highlight bits of each other.

That’s not to say it’s easy to have a kink mismatch. Honestly, sometimes it’s really hard and it can be easy to fall into resentment that someone who it feels like should get it, doesn’t – but it’s not that simple so it’s important for me to stay aware of what the focus is, which is to connect on the things that do work…and happily get beat by someone else. There are a lot of feelings involved, of course, but all feelings are valid.

Do you have a kink mismatch? How does it manifest? How do you make it work?

-M