Binding Alan.

I tied Alan up once. It was terrible.

Very early in our relationship, I brought my rope over to his place, and in retrospect I made a serious error of overenthusiasm--I brought all my rope. So he kinda freaked at that. And then he refused to tie me up. Just flat refused, wouldn't give a reason, just an incredibly not-open-for-discussion "no."

But he agreed to let me tie him. I didn't do anything fancy, no hundred-foot full-body harness with those fancy diamond patterns and a loop that tightens around the balls if you try to straighten your back, I just very loosely tied his hands together in front of him. He extracted about 500 promises that I would not hurt him, I would not do anything "freaky," and I would not steal his guitar (sheesh).

And then I fucked him. He said near the beginning "I don't see why it's different," and sadly, he was completely right. Besides that he couldn't use his hands, it was exactly like every other time we'd had sex, except unbearably awkward. If you tie up Benny or me, even slightly, it changes the dynamic, it establishes who's in charge and that the sex will be rough and intense. With Alan, it pretty much established that he would be baffled and unaroused. Not completely, we did manage to have sex, but it wasn't very pleasant.

I never tried it again. I guess I learned a valuable lesson about trying to make a person into something he's not. You can lead a horse to leather but you can't make it stop looking at you like that.