Do you have to fancy each other?

No, and the number of people who love this activity the way somebody loves tennis is far larger than it looks from outside. That is the true answer. It is also a simplification, so most of this page is the complications, particularly the one where only one of you is hoping.

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.

No, you do not have to be attracted to each other. A great many people love the activity for its own sake, giving or receiving, in the way somebody loves tennis or golf, and it implies nothing further about the pair of you. Throughout, that means two consenting adults, both over 18.

People play squash with the same partner for ten years, book the court, play, drive home separately, and nobody wonders whether the two of them secretly want to go to bed together. The same is true here. It only sounds odd because this involves bare skin and somebody's hand, so everyone assumes the wanting must be pointed at a person. Often it is pointed at the thing itself.

Whether the activity itself is sexual is a separate question with its own page at does spanking have to be sexual. This one is about the two people in the room.

Where the clean answer stops being clean

I stand behind all of that, and it is still a simplification. Attraction is not a switch with two positions. Somebody can find a situation charged without finding the other person sexually attractive, and those are different experiences that share a word.

A woman I saw for two years told me the ten seconds before the first stroke were the most charged thing in her month, and that she had never thought about me in any other way. I believed her. I have been on the other side of it.

Timing complicates it further. Some people find that after five years of monthly sessions something has moved and they want more than they did at the start. Others do the same five years and nothing shifts. If your kink and your sexuality point in different directions to start with, there is a page at when your kink and your sexuality do not match.

When one of you is hoping

Here is where the harm happens. One person hopes and the other has no idea, or has a fair idea and says nothing, because the arrangement suits them as it stands.

The signals arrive well before anybody speaks. Messages between sessions about things unconnected to the arrangement. Questions about your dating life, dressed as friendly interest and asked a bit too often. Disappointment out of all proportion when a date moves. Compliments changing register, from how well you took the cane to how you looked when you walked in.

None of that is sinister. Somebody is developing feelings, which given what the activity involves is about as surprising as rain. If you are the one who knows, you say it. Waiting for them to raise it is a way of keeping a situation you have already decided you will not honour, and six months of silence is six months of their attention taken on false terms.

I have handled it badly myself. Somebody I saw monthly for a year asked me, in her kitchen, whether I ever thought about her when we were not doing this. I said something warm and useless, because I did not want to hurt her at nine on a Tuesday.

She heard what she was hoping to hear, which is what a vague answer is for. Four months later she asked again, straight out, and I gave her the flat answer anyway. All my kindness bought was four more months of her hoping.

How to actually say it

"I am not attracted to you" reads brutally on a page. Said out loud to somebody who has been wondering for months, it lands far better than you expect, because the alternative is worse. Ambiguity only looks like the gentle option. It charges the same pain in instalments.

What helps more than softening it is framing the thing around what the arrangement is rather than what the other person is not. Compare "I do not fancy you" with "this is the only thing I want from anybody at the moment". Both are honest. One hands them a fact about your life, the other a verdict on their face.

• "Let me say what this is for me. It is the spanking, and that is all of it, now and later."
• "I like you enormously and I am not attracted to you. Both true, and I would rather say it than let you work it out."
• "If you are hoping this becomes something else, it will not, so you can decide what to do about that."
• "You have done nothing wrong. I realised I had never actually said it, so I am saying it."

Say it somewhere neutral with your clothes on, and not in the twenty minutes after a session, when one of you is floating.

What the good ones have in common

They get negotiated like anything else: what happens, what does not, how often, who can call it off and how. The absence of attraction makes that groundwork more important rather than less, since no romantic frame is doing the explaining for you. The method is at negotiation.

After that, no ambiguity anywhere: not in the first message, not between sessions, not in a text at midnight, and not after a second glass of wine. Every arrangement of this sort I have watched come apart came apart by drift.

They are also usually warm, which surprises people who expect something clinical. Affection and attraction get muddled constantly and are not the same thing. You are fond of people you have no interest in sleeping with, and so am I. That this fondness involves somebody bared over your knee changes nothing about the arithmetic.

Aftercare without romance

This part is real and common, and it is almost never written down. Someone can hold you while you cry, fetch you a glass of water, sit with you until you are back in the room, and want nothing further from you at all. That is a whole thing in its own right, and it does not want completing.

It looks romantic from outside because we have so few other pictures of one adult holding another. The mechanism is on aftercare: being seen, being defenceless and coming to no harm, a physiological event, then somebody looking after you immediately afterwards. It produces closeness, and closeness gets mistaken for desire more often than anything else here.

The part that wears people down

For a lot of people the heaviest part is explaining it to everybody else. Tell a friend you meet a man once a month to be caned, and that neither of you has the slightest interest in the other, and watch her face. She will nod, and privately conclude that you are lying or being had. Family are worse, partners hardest, since their disbelief has consequences. You do not owe anybody a demonstration, and "it is not like that" is a complete sentence.

If either of you is attached to somebody

A partner will care far less about attraction than you expect and far more about what they were not told. Whether any of it counts as cheating turns on the agreement between you two, including the parts never said out loud, and I have worked that through at is it cheating. Leaning on "there was nothing between us" answers a question they were not asking.

Whether it will suit you

Some people run arrangements like this for twenty years and would not swap them. Others try twice and find them hollow, because the appeal was never separable from wanting the person, and a session with somebody they feel nothing for turns out to be an odd evening and a sore backside. Both are common.

You will not settle which one you are by thinking about it. I have never met anybody who predicted their own answer from an armchair, myself included. You find out by doing it once, carefully, with somebody you checked out first, and then noticing what you feel on the way home. If the answer is that you wanted the hairbrush and not the man holding it, nothing is missing from that.