Reply to the Diarist: When Kink Turns Tender

Source: The Cut, Sex Diaries

Published: 2025-12-05

Summary

This week’s diarist is a clinical sexologist, sex writer, and kink educator traveling between Berlin and London for her birthday. She spends the first half of the week with her dom, D. He's a porn performer she met at a sex conference and now travels with regularly. Their relationship is deliberately undefined, but carries a tenderness neither seems ready to name.

She books two Airbnbs that are famous in kink circles: one with a pillory-style bed, floggers, cages, and medieval-themed décor, and a second with a built-in sex swing, mirrors, hot tub, and restraints. On page seven of the diary, she notes she is trying these places partly for work — to see if she can recommend them to future clients. 

Over the week, she and D move between high-intensity BDSM scenes, playful sightseeing, long walks, and quiet moments of aftercare. The sex includes breath play, spanking, sensory deprivation, and impact toys, all practiced with signals, safe words, and post-scene grounding. The emotional center comes late in the diary, when she wakes from a nightmare in which D vanishes, and realizes she’s experiencing subdrop.

What begins as a kink-tourism adventure ends as something much softer: two people orbiting love but afraid to call it that.

My Reply to the Diarist

I’ll be honest: I’m not a kinkster myself, and the fetishizing of the rooms and their equipment wasn’t my bag. No shame at all. It's just not my flavor. But the diary worked on me in another way. Beneath the toys and the impact play and the sex-swing theatrics, what I found genuinely moving was how tender the two of you are with each other. You care for D, and he cares for you, far beyond the scenes you’re playing. There’s affection and steadiness in every transition. You feel more connected than either of you seems ready to admit.

I also had to smile at the “I’ve never seen Fifty Shades” moment. It’s possible, of course, but most sex writers and sexologists I know don’t describe their lover as their personal Christian Grey or find the movie wholesome. Still, your joy landed, even if the cultural reference made me squint a little.

And as the duly designated ENM watcher, tell me I wasn’t the only reader who wondered whether something might unfold with S — you and D and S, or even just you and S. The energy was right there under the surface. Even if nothing happened, the possibility felt alive.

The ENM Angle:
This diary isn’t “polyamory,” but it is a portrait of how non-monogamous dynamics often grow sideways into emotional territory people don’t expect. The diarist and D insist their relationship is “vague,” but the behaviors tell a different story:

• They travel together
• They meet each other’s families
• They practice intense kink safely and thoughtfully
• They talk about hosting retreats together
• They sleep curled around each other in unfamiliar cities
• That is not casual. That is intimacy, even if it resists naming.

What stands out is the trust architecture they’ve built. Safe words. Taps for when a mouth cannot speak. Aftercare every time. Long walks after spike scenes. Checking in across borders. This is what healthy kink and healthy ENM look like when practiced by adults who know themselves.

And yet, like many people in open or undefined relationships, they hesitate to admit the emotional truth: this is a bond. Not exclusive, not monogamous, but real. Naming it wouldn’t break anything. It might actually anchor the connection they already inhabit.

One-Line Takeaway: You can call it kink, or casual, or undefined, but sometimes the real story is the tenderness people are afraid to name.