How to tell your partner you want to be spanked
A guide to having awkward sexual conversations without the drama
Telling your partner you want to be spanked can be hard.
You want to be spanked. Spanking is the recurring theme of your fantasies. Ever since you can remember it’s been central to your own sexuality. Spanking is more than a desire to you, it’s a need.
And so you want to reveal your spanking secret to your partner, yet you’re also wary of upsetting the dynamics of your relationship. You don’t want to make things weird.
Why is it so hard to ask for something we already desire?
Our spanking secret is a precious treasure. It’s quite understandable to keep our kinky secret under proverbial lock and key, and be very selective of who we tell about it. We hold it tight not because it’s shameful, but because it’s valuable. Knowing about this most cherished part of us is a huge and intimate privilege, one we choose to grant only to those we trust most profoundly.
Learning to trust is something I’ve written about previously here:
By revealing our most private secrets we place our delicate vulnerability in another’s hands, and we have no way of knowing what they’ll do with it. They might be enthusiastic and supportive, and treat what matters most to us with utmost respect. Or they might not react as warmly as we’d hoped, leading us to doubt ourselves and the importance we’ve attached to what we held special. Even worse, they could respond dismissively, and use our revelation to humiliate or control us.
This is why coming out about anything sensitive is hard. Sexual matters can be wound up with all kinds of weird emotions and guilt. We have no way of knowing for certain how even someone we love will tread softly around our dreams until we tell them.
It is a common dilemma, at its heart is an anxiety called Loss Aversion — and at its worst, it can paralyse us. We’re terrified of destroying the balance we’ve taken so long to establish. We want our efforts to improve our lives, not make things worse. We dread living with our own inner critic shouting: “See! You should have kept your stupid mouth shut! Now everything’s ruined!”
This is why revealing intimate details about ourselves makes us feel incredibly precarious. If we stay silent, we know the delicate status quo of our lives will be preserved. But if we reveal our secret, we fear everything might come crashing down. Hence we become avoidant, hiding away, hoping to preserve what respect we have.
So the first stage of opening up is to acknowledge your own anxiety, not to strive to overcome it, as we can never switch it off completely — just to recognise it. Before you can be honest with someone you love, you need to feel justified in having your own desires, and secure in your own circumstances.
The challenge is to reframe your erotic desire from something you consider embarrassing or shameful into something you believe makes you truly interesting. No-one else’s opinion matters here. Just yours. No one else needs to be convinced. Just you.
For many, this is where they’ll stop. We make peace with ourselves, and resolve to be truer to ourselves. That’s progress, and quite acceptable, we all have the right to keep our own secrets that no one else needs to know. But if we want to be discovered, and play with others, we have to be found. And that might be just a conversation away.
“What’s sexually important to you?”
It is perfectly possible to have awkward sexual conversations with refreshing little drama.
One of the best investments we can make in a relationship is to sit down when we’re both emotionally sober and ask our partner: “What’s sexually important to you?”
And then, just listen.
Before you start, offer a little reassurance. Promise your partner you won’t judge them, that absolutely anything goes. Make the atmosphere light-hearted and genial, don’t frame it as “Time for a serious discussion about sex”, but rather “Hey! Would like to talk about sexy things with me?!”
By asking your partner what they find sexually important, you get them to go first. By asking the questions, you set the pattern your partner can follow later.
As your partner is talking, encourage them along, rather than listening in silence. Give them the validation they need to hear, tell them what they’ve revealed is so hot — it is, to them, and you pledged you wouldn’t judge. Tell them it would turn you on to fulfil the fantasies they reveal.
Then at some point, they’re going to stop and say: “So, what about you?”
That’s when you have permission to say it aloud.
“I would like you to spank me. Would you like to spank me too?”
Make it unambiguous. Not just “I love spanking”, tell them where they fit in. Then take the temperature of the room. If they seem genuinely curious, tell them a bit more, about actual fantasies you could play out. Like being spanked in the morning and sent to work with a pink bottom, or as soon as you get home. Or even just receiving a text at a random moment during the day saying: “Are you behaving yourself?”
You don’t need to justify yourself, or commence a lecture on why-spanking-is-not-as-weird-as-you-think. You are simply answering the question: what is sexually important to you.
If your partner is warm to the idea of spanking you, there shouldn’t any obstacles to making it happen. And as you now know what they’d like to do too, if you fulfil some of their fantasies, it would be extremely rude if they ignored yours.
Once the ice has been broken, you can start talking about practicalities. You might start sharing stories, or talking about the kind of spanking you want. Teach your partner the basics, after all, you’ve spent an adult lifetime fantasising about this, you’re the expert here.
Handling Ambivalence
This guide exists because in the real world sometimes things don’t quite work out as we’d hoped. It’s perfectly possible that your partner is ambivalent about the idea of spanking. That creates a more challenging situation, but it’s still something you can handle together.
Be assured it’s actually quite rare for both partners to be completely sexually aligned. Each is likely to be cool about at least a few of their partner’s hot buttons. Some people are ambivalent about spanking because it doesn’t fit in with their own personal definition of sex, (typically genital penetration of some kind).
Listen to your partner’s concerns. Some people are understandably adverse to inflicting pain on those they love, and may require considerable reassurance. Emphasise the light-hearted aspect, that spanking play is inherently make-believe. Reassure your partner they unquestionably have your full consent to make your bottom sore, that you’ll tell them to stop well before they do any possible harm.
Someone who truly loves us accepts us as we are, and won’t consider our idiosyncrasies weird. Even if what turns us on doesn’t arouse them, that’s not a rejection of you, more a reflection of who they are.
It’s also worth remembering that life is meant to be a voyage of discovery. We don’t stop writing our sexual dictionary when we leave adolescence. Once you know your partner’s desires, you can combine spanking into the activities you know turn them on, or ones they may be aching to try.
For instance, if a male partner likes being sucked, tease him by asking “Do naughty girls who suck big thick cocks get smacked bottoms?” — whilst you’re sucking him. Create erotic possibilities, set up the opportunities for him to give you the satisfaction you desire.
It might feel awkward at first, but if you’re both getting to do things that turn you on the enjoyment will ultimately outweigh the weirdness. It’s just when anyone is asked to step beyond their sexual comfort zone, you need to start relatively tamely and slowly build up the intensity.
One thing I’ve learned from listening to sex therapists is that many relationships tragically flounder on the mistaken belief of sexual incompatibility. If we’re not bold enough to ask, we default to guessing and assuming our partner’s needs. Often what’s missing is we haven’t taught each other what we truly want yet, and discovered how to blend our own needs with our lover’s desires.
Pleasure is the best motivator
If you can ask for a spanked bottom, I think you can ask for whatever else you want in life. If you can ask for something so intimate, and so important to you as a spanking, other everyday wants will seem trivial in comparison.
Yet we can not do difficult things without first imagining and desiring the outcome. Pleasure is by far the best motivator, something I wrote about earlier this year.
So here’s a challenge to motivate you, and an outcome to keep in mind to inspire you:
You’re going to teach your partner what makes spanking so wonderful. It might take years, but along the way you’re both going to have so much fun.
This may help in our situation, but he's been very adamant about not liking to spank me. He's had it drilled into him since birth not to ever strike a woman. How do I get him past that?