Confidence, worth and settling for less

Most of the questions people bring me are not really asking whether this is safe. They are asking, underneath, whether the person asking is allowed to want it and whether anybody decent would be interested. That sounds like a question about feelings. It turns out to be a question about safety.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Everything here is between consenting adults over 18. There is a question that turns up in a great many first messages, usually about four paragraphs in, after the apologising. It is rarely asked directly. It amounts to: am I allowed to want this, and would anybody worth meeting be interested in providing it.

I want to answer that properly, because the honest answer is yes on both counts, and because the belief that it might be no is the single most dangerous thing a person can bring to their first meeting.

Where it comes from

Usually from time. Somebody has carried this privately for years, never said it out loud, and spent all that time quietly assuming it was evidence of something wrong with them. A long stretch of that leaves a mark, and the mark is not really about spanking. It is about deserving.

For some people there is a second layer, which is a long habit of taking what is offered rather than choosing between options. If you have spent your adult life being the accommodating one, arriving somewhere new does not switch that off. It arrives with you, and it looks like being easy to please.

If any of that is landing, the pages on am I normal and is there something wrong with me deal with the underlying question at length. This page is about what that belief does to your judgement once you start talking to people.

The part that makes this a safety page

Here is the mechanism, and I would like it to be the thing you remember.

Somebody who believes they are lucky to be offered anything will accept a partner they would otherwise turn down. Not because they cannot see the problems. They usually see them clearly. But each one gets processed as something to work around rather than something to act on, because acting on it means losing the only offer on the table and going back to a wait that felt like it might be permanent.

That is how it actually happens. Almost nobody walks knowingly towards somebody dangerous. They notice the address changing at the last minute, notice the joke about safe words, notice the third message that reworded a limit they had already stated, and then talk themselves past each one individually. Every red flag on red flags is easier to ignore if the alternative feels like nothing.

So the confidence question and the safety question are the same question. A person who believes they have options behaves entirely differently in a conversation from one who believes they have a chance.

The tactics built for this

People who behave badly are good at recognising the state described above, and the vocabulary is consistent enough to be worth listing. Every one of these is scarcity being manufactured on purpose.

• You are lucky to have found somebody with my experience. Experience is common and it is not a favour. Competent people do not mention their own scarcity value.
• Nobody else is going to understand this about you. Untrue, and designed to make the relationship the only place your interest is permitted to exist.
• You will not find this again. A prediction about your future dressed up as concern, from somebody with an obvious interest in you believing it.
• Having that many limits makes you difficult to place. This one is particularly nasty, because it reframes ordinary caution as a defect that reduces your market value.
• Any version of being told you are not like the others, which sounds like a compliment and works as a fence.

Read all of those as information about the speaker. A person who wants you frightened of being alone is telling you what they intend to rely on.

Practical things that hold the line

Feelings are hard to argue with directly, so the useful approach is to build arrangements that do not depend on how you feel on the night.

Write your limits down before you talk to anybody. Not during the conversation, not afterwards. The point is that they then exist independently of whoever you are speaking to, so when somebody pushes you are checking a document rather than consulting a feeling that they have spent two hours influencing. There is a structure for it at negotiation.

Tell one friend, and specifically ask them to ask you about it afterwards. Somebody who knows what you agreed and will enquire how it went is worth more than any amount of private resolve, because the version of you who has to report back is much harder to talk round.

Give yourself explicit permission to leave a first meeting, including from the doorstep, including for no reason you can articulate. That is covered at meeting safely, and the thing to internalise is that walking away is not rude and does not require justification.

And use the response to your terms as the actual test. A good partner is relieved when somebody arrives with clear limits, because it removes guesswork from an activity where guessing is the dangerous part. Irritation at being given terms is not wounded pride. It is information about how they expect the rest to go, which is the argument made at vetting a partner.

The same problem from the other side

Worth including, because it is real and gets even less discussion.

Plenty of people who take the giving role privately believe they are not good enough at it. It produces its own failures, and the specific one to watch for is swinging harder than you want to in order to look competent. Somebody who is performing confidence rather than having it will take a request at face value when they should be questioning it, and will keep going past the point where their own judgement said stop, because stopping feels like an admission.

If that is you, the reassurance is straightforward. The people who are actually good at this ask more questions and stop earlier than the ones who are not. There is more at topping for the first time and, on why the role is more precarious than it looks, at dominance is a service.

Confidence and certainty are different things

The last thing, and the one I would say to anybody sitting on a first message they have drafted eleven times.

You do not have to feel worthy of this in order to be entitled to ask for it. The entitlement is not earned by feeling better about yourself, and waiting until you do is a reliable way of never starting. Confidence usually arrives after the thing rather than before it, and normally in small unimpressive instalments: one honest message, one meeting you left early, one limit you stated and had respected.

What you can do today, without feeling any differently at all, is behave as though you have options. Write the limits down. Tell the friend. Ask the awkward questions. Decline the first person who does not sit right. The feeling catches up eventually, and in the meantime the arrangements do the same job.