If you’re a member of the kink or poly community, you already know these two lifestyles can overlap many ways. I’m a polyamorous collared and owned BDSM slave, so I have to navigate those intersections often in my life.



I recently started dating a poly and kinky woman (T). She is married to her Dominant. They also have a live-in BDSM slave who is owned and collared like myself, but my relationship with T isn’t kinky. In fact, we’re careful to keep our relationship deliberately vanilla. Well, as vanilla as strap-ons and hair pulling can be. Why? Because of boundaries, my darling readers.

The labels of poly and kinky give the impression that they’re one big free-for-all sexcapade. The truth is that if you want to sustain ethical relationships in either community, you have to honor one another’s boundaries.

In my example, T doesn’t want another slave and I don’t want another Dominant. There’s the possibility that we may have a scene together (I’ve had a couple already with her husband and my sir) but it’s not a priority for either of us. Plus, I’m very sensitive to the fact that anything kinky in my life needs to be coordinated and approved by my master.

If my romance with T strayed into kinky territory, then I would remand it over to my master to handle. Not because I lack the ability to do so myself, but because he has exclusive dominion over my kinky life and that’s how the rules of our game have been constructed.

T and I are busy, professional women with a lot of responsibilities. When we get together we want to savor the time as best we can. Let’s be honest, no matter how careful I am to keep my poly and kinky relationships separate, there’s overlap that I can’t avoid. Plus, we’re human. In other words, we’re bound to have feelings about a lot of it even when we don’t want to. The only way to combat the drama that comes naturally with dating and fucking more than one person in an ethical arrangement is to communicate. In fact, I probably over-communicate.

I lack a filter which sometimes annoys the bejesus out of my Dom, but I can’t help myself. I want to know what my partners are thinking and where they want our relationship to go. I want to talk about all the lines we think we shouldn’t cross especially if we’re feeling uncomfortable about something. And don’t get me started on jealousy.

Look, y’all, it’s utter bullshit to proclaim that you don’t ever feel jealous of your partner’s partners. Saying that you don’t “allow” yourself to feel jealousy only means that you’re suppressing it which is damned unhealthy. Jealousy is normal, healthy and a part of being in any kind of relationship. What counts is how you deal with that jealousy.

Personally, I use it as a road map because jealousy can point to the things that I really want. I ask myself, “What aspect of their relationship is causing this jealousy in me?? Do I want more time with that person? Am I jealous of the activities they’re doing or is there a facet of their relationship that I wish was a part of mine?”

People construct their poly and kink lives in a million different ways. So, talking about your emotional reactions is essential. Otherwise, it gets swept under the rug only to blow up on you another day. I’ve tried being that woman who says, “We’ll just figure it out as it goes,” or, “Boundaries? What boundaries?” Inevitably it blows up in my face and I’m left looking at the mass destruction of an imploding relationship.

I once dated a woman who declared that she had no rules when it came to polyamorous dating and I took her at her word. At the end of our relationship, though, we were both looking at our time together from completely different perspectives. While she was analyzing our interactions from a Dominant/submissive context, I was viewing our relationship through the lens of a mostly friendly/slightly intimate poly thing. We couldn’t make the overlap work and I mashed her unspoken boundaries up one side and down the other.

It turned out that she had them, but she chose not to articulate them to me. Instead of nodding and smiling and pretending we didn’t have rules, we should have been talking about our expectations and intentions for the relationship from the beginning. .

I know this all sounds like a lot of work and not a lot of play, but this is only one small part of a vibrant, colorful tapestry of love, sex, kink and relationships. My objectives in both poly and kink are to forge meaningful connections and to have significant experiences with my partners. Yes, it means having an abundance of patience and communication. But it also means that I’m living the life I dreamed of and for the first time in a long time, I feel like I’m fully myself.