One of the funniest things about kink is how convinced people are that they’ve understood an entire category of human beings after learning one word.
Take cuckolds.
Mention the word online and suddenly everyone becomes an expert.
The internet tends to imagine every cuckold sitting in a corner crying while someone insults him.
Which is a bit like assuming everybody who walks into a pub orders the same drink.
The reality is far more complicated.
Also far more interesting.
Over the years I’ve met people who identify as cuckolds, hotwives, stags, vixens, swingers, and people who seem to collect labels like Pokémon cards.
What I’ve learnt is that two people can use exactly the same word and mean completely different things.
Some people are drawn to humiliation.
Some aren’t interested in humiliation at all.
Some love comparison.
Some love voyeurism.
Some love the excitement of sharing experiences.
Some are fascinated by desire.
Some simply enjoy seeing their partner feel confident, wanted and attractive.
For some, it’s about submission.
For others, it’s about freedom.
For others, it’s about trust.
And for some, it’s a little bit of everything.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that cuckolds must be insecure.
That simply hasn’t been my experience.
I’ve known men who were confident, attractive, successful and deeply loved by their partners.
Some enjoyed comparison.
Some were fascinated by watching desire unfold.
Some loved the psychology of it.
Some simply found genuine pleasure in seeing the person they loved being desired by somebody else.
Humiliation can absolutely be part of cuckolding for some people.
But it isn’t the defining feature.
Just as submission isn’t the defining feature of every submissive, or pain the defining feature of every masochist.
Human sexuality has never been that tidy.
That’s why I’ve always found people far more interesting than labels.
The label gets you through the door.
The conversation is where things get interesting.
The more people I’ve met, the less interested I’ve become in trying to put them into boxes.
The label might tell me what someone searched for.
It tells me almost nothing about who they are.
That’s why I ask questions.
Because the stories are always more interesting than the labels.
The longer I’ve spent around kink, the more I’ve realised that very few people fit neatly into a category.
We’re all collections of experiences, fantasies, insecurities, desires and contradictions, pretending to be organised.
The internet loves simple answers.
People rarely are.
So whenever someone confidently announces that all cuckolds are the same, I tend to smile.
Because I know they’ve probably never spent much time talking to one.
Maybe that’s why I find kink so fascinating.
Not because of the labels.
But because every conversation reminds me that people are wonderfully, frustratingly impossible to reduce to one word.
If there’s one thing kink has taught me, it’s that human beings are always far more complicated than the labels we give them.