Books, as Ray was eager to point out to anyone who would listen, were not his thing – and eventually, neither was I.
Finally the cracks just got too big and we separated. We were divorced within a year. It took me a while to get myself together, but after a few months I started, very tentatively, to date again. Fresh out of a long-term relationship, I wasn’t altogether sure exactly how or where to begin. So after a few false starts I turned to the place where a lot of us begin again: internet dating websites.
I think we’re often drawn to various incarnations of the devil we know – a type – and, having been married a long time, I certainly was. The men I dated after leaving Ray all seemed to have been cut from the same cloth. I was obviously doing something wrong. The men were all steady and practical, and I was still having married sex; I was just having it with new men.
Then along came Henry, my first attempt at trying to combine what passes for normal with some of the things I’d been fantasizing about.
After two glasses of house red and a light supper on our first weekend away together, I asked Henry if he’d ever thought about spanking anyone. You know – for fun. His eyes widened and his face took on an expression similar to the one I’d last seen on the face of a woman I’d offered a bacon butty, seconds before discovering she was a hard-line vegan.
Henry visibly stiffened and said, all outrage and horror, ‘Good Lord, certainly not! What on earth do you think I am – some kind of a pervert?’
Well, yes, hopefully.
‘Don’t you have any fantasies?’ I pressed, emboldened by strong drink and a nasty sinking feeling. The relationship had been pretty much doomed since lunchtime, when we’d been about to go Dutch on an uninspiring quiche and green salad when Henry had pointed out that actually I’d had a cappuccino and a sweet.
‘Of course I have fantasies,’ he said, ‘but mostly they involve world peace and captaining the English cricket team during a one-day test at Headingley.’
Buddhists, what can I tell you?
So how did he feel about underwear? What sort of thing did he like? I asked, giving it one last shot and my voice dropping to a seductive purr.
‘I haven’t given it a lot of thought, to be perfectly honest.’ He paused and then said, ‘Something from Marks, probably.’ I watched him slipping a bread roll into his pocket in case he got a bit peckish later. It wasn’t the answer I’d hoped for, to be honest.
So that was it: I was a pervert. My first very tentative attempt at expressing what I wanted – fuelled by a little wine and a lot of nerve – had been thrown back in my face. It confirmed what I had feared: nice men didn’t find this kind of stuff acceptable.
It was during that weekend that I decided it was time I found some way to let the genie out of the bottle and go in search of something else – something a little more rock and roll. I was in my mid-forties with a broken marriage and three children in their late teens and early twenties, and I wanted to try some of those things I had always dreamed of and been writing about, before it was too late. What had I got to lose?
It’s a scary journey to start all on your own. What I needed was a guide: someone to help me find my way through a sexual landscape about which, despite several books, in reality I had absolutely no idea – and more to the point, someone who I felt I could trust enough to bring me out wiser but unscathed on the other side.
It had also occurred to me that maybe when I got to the point of experimenting I would chicken out, so I also needed someone with a sense of humour and a lot of patience: someone who wouldn’t freak out if ultimately I put it all down to research.
I’m not sure I was setting out on a journey to look for a happy-ever-after with anyone, but there definitely had to be a spark, that magic indefinable something between us. What I needed was a hero, a dominant man – referred to as a Dom in the BDSM world – who I could trust implicitly and who I liked, and who was prepared to help me, and spank me, and who I fancied. And we all know how very easy men like that are to find …
Then again, if I didn’t try now, my fantasies would stay just that and I might as well settle down with someone like Henry and look forward to a lifetime of sensible pants and going Dutch.
When I arrived home after our weekend away I dumped him, put ‘BDSM’ into a search engine and watched the hits roll in. It is astonishing what you can find if you ask the right questions. There is everything you can ever want on the net and much more besides. Some of it in leather, some in plus sizes and an awful lot of it in America.
As I stared at the screen, flicking between websites, it occurred to me that I really needed to work out exactly what it was I was looking for. As research projects go I’ve had far worse. I made a list.
‘There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.’
Marquis de Sade
A lot of reading, trawling and research later I took out a three-month membership on a well-known international BDSM website. I printed off a picture of Henry and taped it to the edge of my computer screen, just in case I weakened, and spent evenings browsing the site’s personal ads for inspiration, trying to work up the courage to place an ad of my own. After all, that was why I’d joined, wasn’t it? You couldn’t contact anyone unless you had a profile on the site, so I couldn’t email the men I thought looked interesting until I’d taken the plunge and posted something.
The trouble with real life, unlike fiction, is that you have no control over the outcome or how the plot develops. I was nervous of making the move, nervous of making a terrible mistake, scared that I’d be exposing myself to things that I had no understanding of with people I didn’t know.
In the end, bizarrely, it was Henry who convinced me to get on with it. I’d read and re-read my profile, editing and adding to it until I’d almost lost sight of what I was trying to say, and was sitting with my finger hovering above the ‘post’ button for the fifth or sixth night in a row, trying to work up the courage to press it. I was about to have another go at editing my latest attempt when Henry rang and said he was sorry for whatever it was he’d done, and that he’d got tickets for an open-air concert at the weekend. Maybe I’d like to go with him?
And I almost said yes, except that he hadn’t quite finished.
‘I’d really like us to be friends, Sarah,’ he said. ‘The sex thing gets in the way a bit, don’t you think? The tickets are thirty pounds each. I’m happy to take a cheque. I thought perhaps you could come over and pick me up.’
I didn’t want a relationship with anyone who thought that sex got in the way. He was still talking when I pressed ‘post’.
As I did, a little message popped up on the computer screen:
‘Thank you for posting on our website. Your profile will appear on our system within twenty-four hours, although it is currently available for you to view and may still be edited. You may remove your profile or make it invisible at any time.’
My heart lurched. What the hell had I done?
‘So what do you think?’ said Henry.
‘I think that I’m busy on Sunday,’ I said, and hung up, still staring at