Mkt4041 wrote: Fri Jul 11, 2025 7:31 am In many cases, there's no deal or fun game being played. My partner, who is primarily bottom, has about 80% power in our relationship in general, and that extends to the bedroom. There's no kink allowed, just having my feet worshiped, being sucked and then fucking. I am mostly there to perform as needed and ensure he has a good time. That is how we have a sexual relationship with no deal. He gives me little power, and if I want anything sexual, I must initiate, insist, and perform. So the way I see it, there are "play" agreements that are formal and understood, while there are default situations like ours that are created through years of habit. I'm sure many straight couples experience the same type of dynamic between husband and wife, whereby the husband does what he can to please the wife while the wife retains most of the power to control the course of the relationship. That has little to do with a slave contract and more to do with the way things end up between two people.

I think you and I are saying much the same thing, just in different ways... (and some would say foot worship IS kink, but who cares?) Note that I didn't say the deal had to be explicitly spelled out, just that there was always some set of 'rules' in the form of what everyone involves expects to be going on, and what is 'off the table' (or bed, or hanging from chandelier or....) It doesn't really make any difference to this discussion about whether it's an informal and unwritten set of expectations like you describe, or a more formal negotiated explicit set of rules, as either way there is a 'deal' of sorts.

As a crude analogy, if you go on Amazon and click the 'buy this now' button, or go to a flea market and have a lengthy negotiation about the price of an item, you are still making a "business deal"

I also was using 'game' in the broadest possible sense of doing things with each other for mutual enjoyment (at least I hope you are enjoying it...) without going into any irrelevant details about just WHAT the participants were doing...

What you describe to me sounds like a totally reasonable 'game' in this sense, and you describe the 'Rules of Engagement' that you both follow, even without a formal agreement... I'm guessing that if either one of you wanted to add in some element that wasn't at least an occasional part of your routine, you'd probably be talking about it and getting each others agreement... Similarly while you have a routine now, I'd bet that when you first met you had some level of "negotiation" if only in the form of being sensitive to how you reacted to each others moves on the way to evolving your routine...

WheelyFixed