My all-new collection, Holiday Heat, comes out Monday January 15. Click here to pre-order!

Recently on Fetlife, SpanishRed wrote a post called “In the end, you turn a little bit vanilla”. She’s talking mostly about how, in the beginning, people go through frenzy and want to do ALL THE KINKY THINGS ALL THE TIME, but over time BDSM becomes just another element of the banquet that is relationships and sex.

I would contend that, even if you do want to do all the kinky things all the time, turning vanilla is pretty normal. Last week I had a date night with Partner 1; we went to a munch, came home, and had sex. During the sex, we paused for some spanking, but we don’t always do that. Sometimes we engage in rougher sexual activities, and sometimes we don’t, but when I say rougher sexual activities I mean more along the lines of what vanillas call “rough sex” — some hair pulling, some nipple pinching, some face fucking. In fact, that night the only truly kinky thing we did was spanking.

That doesn’t make us any less kinky, and it doesn’t mean we like spankings any less. It just means that, at this point in our relationship, we don’t need there to be kink all the time for us to be happy together.

On the other hand, sometimes the kink just… goes away. I’m thinking about my second wife; we started out connecting over spanking and sex, but in our last two years together I spanked her maybe a dozen times. I still loved spanking, but the nature of our relationship had changed and we’d become more vanilla. We did other kinky stuff too, but primarily our sex life was just that — sex. We turned mostly vanilla.

It does happen, and it’s okay if it happens. Sometimes you don’t want kink; sometimes you just want to have a sexual connection with someone. Just remember that the desire for kink never truly goes away, so don’t settle for a non-kinky person when you’re just going to want kink later — especially if you’re monogamous. I made that mistake with my first wife. Learn from me.