Hey everybody. This isn't so much a story as it is a pseudo-philosophical reflection that includes a story. To the point that I wasn't sure whether or not I should post it here or in TUGs talk. But I decided to post it in this category in the hopes that somebody might enjoy it.
Binding Reflections
Why do I love to be bound? I have asked myself this question innumerable times over the decades and yet even now, twenty years after unwittingly finding myself on this journey, I still am little closer to an answer than I was when I started. It seems strange to think that a characteristic that is so intertwined with my sexuality could far predate any concept I had about sexuality in general. I loved bondage long before the advent of puberty. The earliest memories I can reconstruct of reflection on the subject or any fantasy of being tied up dates back to my kindergarten or grade 1 year when I was around six or seven years old. It has been with me ever since. It is a giant facet of my personality, a subject that occupies my thoughts on a daily basis that I keep hidden from even those who are most dear to me. It’s a strange state of affairs to be sure.
What makes it even stranger is that such a large part of my personal identity is a part that I have so many times wished I could be rid of. Oh how many times I silently screamed at myself in hopes that my mental self-flagellation could somehow make me normal. Apart from being tied up, I also want what everyone else wants in this world. I want to be successful in my career and make a name for myself. More than that though, I want to find love, a wife, a partner, whatever you want to call her. Yet knowing that I would never truly be able to be myself and completely content spending my life with someone who is not compatible with this side of me makes that search orders of magnitude more difficult. Words can hardly express how much I wish it wasn’t the case. Finding love is hard enough already as it is.
Fortunately I don’t spend my time wishing for that anymore. Partially because I’ve given up any hope that this ‘fetish’ (much as I hate that word) will ever go away and partially because when I was finally given the chance to experience it for myself, I realized that it’s one of the most intoxicating feelings in the world.
Looking back, I had started to scheme to find ways to get tied up almost as soon as I realized that I wanted to be. But none of them were ever serious. You’re too young to understand anything at that age but even then I had this crushing sense that what I was feeling was wrong. Somehow without knowing why, I knew that these fantasies were not normal and something that I should be ashamed of. As such I kept them buried and a secret from everyone in my life until well into my teens.
It wasn’t until my early teens that I really began to acknowledge the presence of my unorthodox interest. I still remember the first night that I decided to turn a fabric textbook cover into a makeshift cleave gag. It was an experiment, I told myself. To see just how effective a simple piece of cloth pulled through the mouth could be at silencing someone. I like many people realized very quickly that the cleave gag is one of the entertainment industry’s greatest lies.
This may sound like an obsequious attempt to gain favour with the attendees of this website but when I finally found the courage to search the internet with the question of “why do I want to be tied up” I found Canuck’s old website that was the precursor to this one and learned that I wasn’t alone. For so many years I had felt like a lone freak with a strange desire that no one would ever understand or accept. Yet that day as I spent hours enraptured by the stories that I was reading, I learned that there was a community of people out there who felt the same way I did. There were even people who tied themselves up like I did.
A few years later I finally found the courage to admit my desires to my best friend. It gave me a small glimpse into the lives of my gay friends (although nowhere near comparable). It very much felt like I was “coming out” to him. It felt dishonest to keep something that was such a large part of myself from everyone and it felt so good to finally admit this to someone. He was as accepting as I could have hoped, responding simply: “Nice!”
It was only a few years later (at an embarrassingly advanced age) that I embarked on my first real romantic relationship, a pleasure that had been previously unknown to me. I threw myself into it with every cell in my body and was richly rewarded for it. It was a hard relationship to maintain, considering that we lived on opposite sides of the continent but we found a way to make it work as we lived from visit to visit. But I will never forget the combination of elation and relief I felt when I hesitantly revealed to her my secret desires and she told me she had the same ones. I couldn’t believe my luck. Perhaps it was fate? Maybe so.
The months went by and she finally arrived. Yet it was days later that we finally had the privacy to try ‘this bondage thing’ out. My roommates were gone for Christmas and we had the house entirely to ourselves. She appeared out of the corner of my eye and knelt down on the couch beside me. We began to kiss, gently but passionately. Suddenly I felt something coiling around my neck. As her face pulled away from mine I could see her tying a scarf around my neck and pulling me to my feet. Breathless with excitement I followed her to my bedroom. The door was left wide open as she pulled me to the foot of my bed and then pushed me down onto it. She had my collection of supplies pre-prepared on the floor and took one of the ropes into her hands, leaving the scarf dangling around my neck.
“You ready?” She asked with a twinkle in her eye.
“Yeah, I guess.” I replied.
“Alright then. Put your hands behind your back”
I did as she asked and she set about her task. I was amazed by how proficiently she was tying me, apparently she’d done research before she arrived.
Within a couple of minutes my hands were bound securely behind my back, another rope was looped through my wrist bindings and around my chest, pinning my hands to my back. Another rope was binding my knees and another my ankles. She took the slack from my ankle bindings and tied it to one of the legs of my bed, anchoring me into place.
It was one of my life’s most surreal moments to watch her applying those bindings to me. I had spent so many nights dreaming of this moment. I had spent hours and hours writing stories about myself or my characters being bound and yet after so many years of waiting it was finally happening to me for real.
“Oh right!” She said absentmindedly as she reached down and grabbed the scarf around my neck and pulled it into my mouth. She tightened the knots behind my head and stood up.
Immediately I started fighting against the cleave gag and within a minute or two I had worked it out of my mouth.
“Oh c’mon! You have to do better than that.” I said teasingly. She took this to heart and immediately reached for my role of duct tape. She started ripping off piece after piece and slathering them over my lips until a heavy grey mass of duct tape was holding my mouth shut.
She sat down next to me and stroked my hair for a moment. I looked back at her with a more contented gaze than I’d given anyone in my entire life. After a few minutes she stood and found another of her scarves. She tied it around my eyes, thrusting me into darkness. She’d always told me that the blindfold was her favorite part and whenever she tied me up she never failed to put a blindfold on me.
It was an incredible night. She spent a while torturing me with ice cubes and candle wax, playfully interrogating me about something. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t answer through my heavy gag, she punished me for my lack of response just the same. As the night went on she moved me through several different positions, culminating with tying me spread eagle to my bed and giving me a full body massage.
When she finally untied me it felt like only half an hour had gone by but I was shocked to see that it had been more than five hours.
She tied me up a number of times over the course of our relationship. Initially she had also enjoyed taking the submissive role at times but gradually she stopped asking to be tied and took on a purely dominant role which suited me just fine. Whenever I flew to visit her I would always bring my rope, tape and handcuffs with me in my suitcase and I’m fairly certain my luggage was searched a couple of times.
Yet much as I’d love to tell you that she’s still tying me up now, unfortunately that relationship has come to an end. I tell you this because now that I look back on that experience retrospectively I think it has brought me a little closer to answering that infernal question that has been plaguing my life almost as far back as I can remember. Why do I love to be bound?
I will never forget the electric charge that surged through my body when the ropes began to coil around my waiting wrists. Not only was I excited to be tied up but I was excited to find out what it was about the experience that I had found so enticing for so long. Unfortunately though, it’s impossible to point to just one thing. It’s such a rich multi-faceted experience that to point to one aspect of it as “the thing” would be incorrect.
The first thing I loved was the sensation. The feeling of the rope brushing against my skin and gradually tightening was incredible. The way that my arms and legs were pulled together without taking any muscle contraction on my part to keep them that way felt both relaxing and invigorating. I loved the smell of the duct tape as it wafted up to my nose and I loved the feeling of having my mouth closed by a foreign object. The physical sensations were everything that I’d hoped for and more.
The second thing I loved was the internal psychology. Responsibility has always been troubling for me. Ever since I was a little boy and put in charge of keeping track of my jacket and schoolbooks I was troubled by that responsibility. As the years went by and I gradually gathered more and more responsibilities they became no less troubling. It wasn’t until my early teens that I was finally diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and began taking medication but it ultimately did little to relieve me of my constant worries. When I finally went to University and moved out on my own the feeling of responsibility became overwhelmingly heavy despite my reputation as being a highly responsible person. I somehow wished that there was a way that I could be relieved of those burdens, if only for a little while. As I lay there, helplessly bound and gagged on my bed I realized that I had none of those burdens any longer. How could I? My wrists and ankles were tied and I was physically prevented from doing anything. I was even relieved of the necessity of speaking by the mass of duct tape gagging me. Another constant challenge in my life has been mastering the art of conversation and whenever awkward silences hang in the air I feel the compulsion to fill them something. Whenever I’m in any sort of social situation, I always feel responsible for the progression (or lack thereof) of conversation and it is another constant source of worry for me. In my mind, if someone doesn’t want to talk to me, they don’t like me. It’s as simple as that. Yet I wasn’t worried about it any longer. I was gagged, all I could do was make grunting sounds.
It wouldn’t be correct to say that I have to be bound to be truly free. Because very fundamentally you’re not free in a state of bondage, indeed that would seem to be the whole point. I was not free to go or do whatever I wanted. I wasn’t free to move. I wasn’t free to speak. Yet with those freedoms removed so were all of the responsibilities and duties that come along with those freedoms. Those anxieties which weigh so heavily on me were lifted from my shoulders. I was not free but rather I was relieved of the burdens of freedom.
The third thing I loved was the connection I felt with my girlfriend. I had never felt so loved or cared for as I did at that moment.
I’m going to tread into very dangerous territory for a moment, in an effort to illustrate my point. After some reflection I’ve come to realize that in a very, very, very small way I understand the idea behind rape fantasies. I can understand the allure of the idea that someone wants you so badly that they can’t help themselves but try to have you. It may never be fully understood why people have fantasies about something as horrible, scarring and utterly reprehensible as rape. Yet this same underlying principle is at work in my bondage fantasies, I think.
If someone ‘wants’ to take you, tie you up and dominate you, it represents a great deal of desire on their part. To do that to you, that person must really want you.
It was amazing to realize that my girlfriend actually wanted me. She wanted me so badly that she’d tied me to my bed just so she could do what she wanted with me. it was an incredible sensation of acceptance. As you might imagine, my anxiety issues extend to my self-image and for many years I had believed that I was unlovable and physically repulsive. Yet I wasn’t able to justify those beliefs to myself as she gleefully tied me to my bed. She wanted me. I was wanted. I was wanted so badly that she bound me to her will and that was incredible.
So I don’t think it can be said that there is any one thing that I love about bondage. Rather the more I explore it the more things I find myself falling in love with about it. I’m sure that as time goes by and I can find a new partner and explore it further, I will find more things about it that I love. Yet as it stands today, if I find myself asking why I love to be bound I can’t point to any aspect of it in particular.
In fact, what makes bondage such an incredible sensation to me is that it can combine so many intense feelings all at once. The sensations of the rope or handcuffs restraining me, the tense, nervous anticipation of what my captor might do to me in my helpless state, the sexual charge that makes all of my senses heighten, the trust, intimacy and psychological interplay between myself and my captor and so many other things, all combine into one glorious, sensual, intoxicating sensation.
So at present, I would say that I love to be bound because it is one of the most amazingly intense sensory experiences one can have and I deeply love that experience.
I love to be bound because being bound feels so incredible.