Our society has a hard-on for the idea of men leaving a legacy. Being remembered. Chasing immortality.
You see it in the tech bros doing their extreme all-meat diets, drinking the literal blood of their sons to stay young (yes, that’s a thing), hustling so much that they break the entire culture in an effort to matter.
It doesn’t seem to come from a place of joy. Not building something because you love it, because you want it to change your world in some way—but building because you desperately need to matter. Need to be remembered. Need to be important.
In other words: fear.
It comes from fear.
Fear that they are not enough on their own.
Fear that they really are meaningless.
Fear of being forgotten. Unloved. Disconnected.
Sometimes I see the echoes of this anxiety in D/s. A desperation to serve that comes from that same dark, anxious place:
Do I matter?
Do I have purpose?
This can manifest in the search for a domme, all anxious energy and a terrible fear that it won’t work. It can keep you from settling in to a dynamic and trying. At the first hint of challenge or reality, you want to move on because the magic you were looking for was a bolt from the blue, a lightning strike.
Purpose! Sudden and complete.
And for a lot of the best and longest-lasting dynamics, there is a slower build than that. A quiet progression. Built not on fear but on love.
I don’t mean romantic love. I mean that instead of being driven by the fear of not being enough, the fear of being meaningless, the fear of being unlovable—and a terrible need to prove those fears untrue—a dynamic can be driven by hope and admiration for another person and a slow-building trust that you can go this deep with them. That you can find yourself in the dynamic. That you can matter.
That love is for yourself. For your authenticity. And for your domme—because even without a romantic component, service is love. Because love is action. Love is care.
What we learn in moments of real connection is that we don’t need to matter to the whole world. We need to matter to a tiny slice of it. As our complete and authentic selves.
Which is why these kink relationships often have deep meaning beyond the sexy bits. For so many in this space (especially subs raised as men), a domme is the only person who sees that secret part of them.
And sometimes sessions and service are requests for the answer to that heart-heavy question:
Do I matter?
Am I enough?
Which means it’s vital for us as dommes to answer that question with a yes in our actions. This means aftercare. It means showing up after you have seen that secret part and saying I’m fucking proud of you or I want you to stay or let’s do it again, bitch. It means consistency. It means seeing and not running away.
And for subs, if this is the dynamic you crave, it means being brave. It means being honest with dommes as you build trust. It means working on entering into what you hope will be a long-term dynamic with a readiness to face the hard emotions instead of running from them. It means prioritizing care over fear. It means prioritizing the opinions of yourself and the person who truly sees you over the rest of our extremely dumb society.
It means facing the hard emotions along the way and finding the part of yourself that serves from a place of care, admiration, and connection.
And the big secret is this: that’s when the fear recedes. That’s when you stop caring about some big bad legacy, stop fearing that you are not enough, and find instead that you are precisely where you want to be.