Light bondage adds variety to relationship

My girlfriend likes to engage in a little light bondage, tying me up and blindfolding me, etc. 

It’s fun, but it makes me feel prudish because I’m not as adventurous as her. How much should I experiment? I don’t want her to get bored, but I worry that if our expectations from sex aren’t aligned the relationship can’t last.

Couples who are mismatched sexually are often mismatched in other ways too, but your relationship is not otherwise discordant so I suspect you are over-thinking this a bit. In the greater scheme of all things relational, one partner being a bit more sexually adventurous than the other is generally not a deal breaker. In fact, many of this column’s regular readers would give their eye-teeth to be tied up and blindfolded of a Saturday evening.

Prudishness is an interesting choice of word. It implies that you feel slightly shocked and intimidated by her sexual behaviour. Is that because her experimentation challenges your sexual limits? Or because she inverts expected norms about female sexuality and feminine behaviour? We all have sexual boundaries, but because they differ from person to person it is very difficult to define what constitutes normal and what might constitute deviant. For example, a lot of couples engage in the kind of light bondage that you describe, but the very same couples might regard the intensification of those practices as abnormal.

It might be helpful to go back to the beginning and contemplate why you chose to have a relationship in the first place with a woman who enjoys light bondage. We are not, as a rule, very “conscious” of the criteria we use when choosing new romantic partners. Even the terminology that frames the inception of a new relationship — to “fall” in love — is predicated on a lack of agency. Yet a wealth of evidence suggests that our subconscious is pretty damn choosy when deciding who we should, or shouldn’t, hook up with.

There are several theories regarding mate selection, but the principle that we tend to be attracted to people who are similar to ourselves is probably the most established. Various psychology studies have shown that we choose mates who are similar in physical attractiveness, religion, education, age and even height (Hill, Rubin & Peplau, 1976). In contrast, the “complementary needs” hypothesis argues that we pick partners who possess dissimilar but interdependent characteristics to ourselves. In this context, you might interpret your girlfriend’s sexual adventurousness as the yin to your yang. Though your decision probably wasn’t conscious, perhaps on some deeper level you recognised that her sexual confidence and your sexual reticence were apposite traits that complemented each other and made you a good sexual match.

You seem to be particularly concerned about her expectations concerning reciprocation, but I don’t think you should assume that she wants you to become more experimental. Often it is the difference between two people that creates the sexual momentum, and if you start trying to mirror her behaviour you might inadvertently destroy the buzz. Sexually adventurous people usually enjoy taking the lead and you might find that your “prudishness” is precisely the reason that she is attracted to you. For a dominant, sexually assertive female a caring, thoughtful and, no offence, possibly slightly sexually naive, male is partner perfection personified.

Perhaps what you really need is some reassurance that she isn’t expecting you to change your sexual self and that “light” bondage won’t escalate into anything heavier.

If you air those concerns she has an opportunity to assuage them, but if you bottle them up they will eat away at your confidence in the relationship. You are already questioning whether the relationship is sustainable if your sexual expectations don’t align, but when it comes to sex the only expectation anyone should ever have is that it will be a pleasurable route to increased intimacy. Over time people change, relationships evolve and none of us has a clue what will happen to us next.

One thing that is certain is that spending all your time anticipating what “might” be in the future means you miss out what “is” happening in the present. And, since what is happening in the present sounds like quite a lot of fun, you should probably just get on with it.

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