How to Communicate Your Interests, Desires and Boundaries

Your ability to effectively communicate your desires, boundaries and limits is your not-so-secret weapon to upping the satisfaction factor of all of your alternative and kink interactions.

With that in mind, before beginning a new interaction, I highly recommend setting aside a time to sit down with each other and learn the other’s preferred methods of communication for low, medium and high priority conversation. This is called “meta-communication”, or laying out the ground rules for general conversation as well as how conflicts will be managed.

Once you know how each of you prefers to handle conversations, you will want to turn your focus on understanding the other person’s desires and boundaries and effectively communicating your own. This means laying it all out on the table – including your personal boundaries, hard limits, soft limits and additional interactions with others (e.g. play partners.)

Also, keep in mind that these conversations are living, breathing things that have the potential to change every single day. For example, you may initially agree to have your partner play with someone else in front of you, but once it occurs you realize you feel too uncomfortable to do it again. In that case you’ll want to have another conversation to tweak your original agreement and devise a new protocol to address that issue.

What are the boundaries, desires, interests and limits that you need to discuss before entering into a new interaction?