It’s amazing how many times I’ve been asked some version of this question on the internet. Oh god, what if it’s my auntie creeping on anon every single time?! What a creepy thought…

I don’t relate to people’s obsession with matrimony at all. At best I see it as a great excuse to get all your peoples together and have a party celebrating your relationship. A pleasant idea, but not really important.

I was married once before, but the rules said I didn’t get a green card unless we did that - and seeing as we were citizens of different countries every road led to us having to elope in order to stay living within a few thousand miles of each other.

Honestly, promising to be with someone forever? The vast majority of the time it seems like kind of a dick move. Are you qualified to make that promise? Do you know who you will be 10 years from now? Who they will be? What stuff will go down in your life? Why are you obligated to pretend you do? What does it achieve, other than perpetuating a culture of ignorance, falsehoods and denial based on archaic social norms and utterly ridiculous disney shit we’ve been fed on a steady drip of since birth?

But hey, if we’re still together when we’re old and grey and we wanna have a party to celebrate that? I’m down. And if we decide we want to go live in the UK for a bit? Hopefully this time if we do have to marry we can at least make it some kind of oddball fetish wedding. That I can work with.

There’s less consensus than some may have you believe over what these terms mean in a kink context, sure - but owning a person reads like a bigger deal than training one, right?

I tend to go with “training” to mean “I do stuff with this person and it’s involved and deliberate enough that we have some kind of ongoing dynamic". They’re… A project in progress. 

I think perhaps the confusion comes into play because some people use the word training interchangably with “play”, or “sessioning”. In… A kind of athletics sense. They train BDSM like some people train Kung Fu, or lift weights. Even once you’ve learned how to lift weights properly it’s still called training, eh. I personally tend to mean it more akin to “this person is training to be able to do this job”. I’ll call a newer partner my “trainee” sometimes.

Zita? Zita is out of training. The job is hers. She might need to train on some new skills here and there, sure, but she’s well out of her probationary period, she’s a valued member of the organization, and full employee benefits kicked in a couple of years ago at this point.

On the low? Ownership is actually some lofty high concept commitment thing for me. I don’t talk about it in those kinda terms much on the internet though, there’s enough people doing that already and it just reads like their dick is in their hands constantly. We tend to save our waxing poetic rambles about the nature of a person as property for our actual literal mutual masturbation sessions in this household. 

I’ll admit that I might occasionally talk about the idea of owning someone in private relatively quickly, because it’s a hot verbal narrative when we’re fucking and my hand’s around their throat, but… Posting it publicly on the internet? Engraving it on items they wear locked to themselves when they leave the house? You’re gonna look pretty lame if you’re proclaiming that one day and then they’re gone the next. Best to save it for the ones that seem like they’re sticking around for a while at the very least.

To summarize: Me and Zita live together, and we get the vast majority of our companionship and support from each other. We’re partners in all the ways that people generally recognize. Umi is a casual play partner I see generally no more than once a week. She’s not the only occasional lover I have, but she is the one I see most often. Sybella is… A whole other story. She’s awesome, but a tale for another day I think. ;-)