My Fetlife friend spankmeplz13 recently posted this question:

How many dates in do you usually enlighten vanilla dating prospects of your kinky interests?

This is an excellent question, and my answer is: I don’t have vanilla dating prospects.

I made the mistake of marrying a vanilla and staying with her for a total of 17 years. She knew from the start that I was into spanking, but she wasn’t. I thought my love for her could overcome my need for spanking. Spoiler: it could not. She did eventually agree to try being spanked, but only after it was too late and I’d brought up divorce. She even told me in the final year of our marriage that I could go spank other people — which still wasn’t enough, because I wanted spanking from the person I (thought that I) loved.

Since then I have really only dated one vanilla, and she was open to trying some spanking. I only spanked her once, and then the relationship ended, though not because of the spanking — there was a whole thing with my other poly partner, and her not being poly but liking me enough to be okay with me being poly, and we ended things amicably and are still good friends. Everyone else I’ve dated has been into spanking in one way or another. Everyone else I’ve even thought about dating since 2013 has been kinky, even if spanking wasn’t their primary kink.

I know that it’s possible for a kinky person to have a good relationship with a non-kinky person. Plenty of people do it all the time. But for me, I’m of an age where I don’t want to deal with that kind of potential drama. I’ll stick to dating kinky people, primarily spankos, thank you very much.