#SpankingA2Z I is for Intimate

I is for Intimate

Intimate – now there is a word. My Chambers Dictionary defines it as this:

1 Adj: innermost; internal; close; deep-seated; private; personal; closely acquainted; familiar; in a sexual relationship; engaging in sex; encouraging informality and closer personal relations through smallness, exclusiveness.

I guess you could say it’s a pretty broad ranging word in one way.  I have a fair number of pretty intimate friends. Some go right back to my school days. More I have met along the road of life and even more I have lately met and become intimate with through as we met on our writing journey.

But is it essential to have an intimate friendship to have intimate relations? For some yes, for some no.  I have a friend who enjoys what she calls “Stranger Sex” and finds that the hardest thing about the fact that she is now in a committed relationship. She misses the thrill of going out and picking up a stranger and going to bed with them. She enjoys the intimate act without the complications of a relationship.

I’ve always been the opposite, I have to be intimately close with someone first – my brain has to be in the right space before my body will react. No matter how bloody drop dead gorgeous someone is, a sex-on-legs-Adonis nothing will convince my body to melt unless my head and heart have first. That will even stretch to having to be in a good headspace in my marriage. If we’re arguing there is no way in hell I’m putting out. The argument has to be resolved first. No angry sex for me. Nuh uh. Not my thing. Some will tell me I’m missing out there, that they really enjoy a good angry fuck, and often it will put them in the right frame of mind to resolve the argument.

For some sexual intimacy can only be with one person at any given time – or a monogamous relationship. For others, they do not feel sexual jealousy and have plenty of love and affection to go around and are more comfortable with a polyamorous set up. They can be or maybe even need to be physically and emotionally intimate with more than one person. Is that intimacy any less because it’s not exclusive to one person? I don’t think it is. Intimacy doesn’t demand exclusivity, just a close relationship.
And in the world of multiple relationships, polyamory is to monogamy as perhaps swinging is to stranger sex.  Polyamory implies intimacy on much, much more than a physical level.

Then there is another level of intimacy again. A dom. To sub, you have to trust your Dom has at very least your health and well-being at heart. Some may have intimate relationships with their Dom on a personal level, some may not. How do you learn to trust a dominant if you don’t know them outside their dominant role? Do they know what you can handle? How do they get to know what is good for you, as well as go with what is good for them? There are rules and guidelines and limits, I know that. And of course safewords. But still, to trust someone to bind you, punish you and bring you to the extremes of pleasure and pain, and to give oneself over to it completely, there has to be some form of intimate communication, even if it’s only around the oh so very intimate act.

I am curious to hear other people’s thoughts on this apparently simple little word that for me, opens a minefield of questions. 

Many thanks to Celeste Jones and Spanking Romance Reviews for hosting this challenge.

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