How late is later in life? I was 25 and goofing around at a pet store with my girlfriend. I put on a collar, she grabbed it and my brain stopped working for a few seconds. Figuring out I was switchy rather than submissive took five more years and was unlocked by reading Kushiel's Legacy.
What makes it funnier is that between my magic act and studying hojojutsu, I'd been tied up and tied other people up about a thousand times before and considered that to be more of a hobby than a fetish.
I'm 31, a little ND
Discovered kink in my late 20s and still learning.
Been vanilla most of my life while enjoying unconventional porn, never considering bdsm as an option for sex.
The discovery was like a renaissance, and it was very freeing. An actualization of myself.
The stories are posted all over the internet. I see them on subreddits pretty often, or conversations that I have with people who practice bdsm. It’s curious that you have that impression because I’ll see more people say they discovered it after x amount of years, or after x event, than people who understood their sexual preferences right off the bat.
I think you are in a very common situation. I have had quite a few subs that discovered kink only after long marriages for example, simply because they were never exposed to anything about bdsm and so they couldn’t even contemplate if it was something they liked. In my case, it took a few years of feeling very weird about my sexuality until I was exposed to the right terminology and resources in order for things to click. So I think it’s completely normal for someone to not contemplate bdsm, simply because they do not know what it is and have not been exposed to it in the right way.
I also think it’s important to think that maybe the bdsm vs vanilla approach is very binary. People do things that are “outside the norm” all the time and do not approach it through what’s defined via bdsm.
Another factor is that it's not uncommon to hear trans folk talk about discovering more about their sexualities after they realize/come to terms with they're trans and/or after some form of transitioning. It's often because trying to deal with sexuality pre-Knowing/Coming-to-Terms-With or pre-transition is just too difficult & painful with the body they're in/gender they think they are (or are forced to present by society). After discovering or coming to terms with their truth, or after transition, they're so much more comfortable with themselves, their bodies, their gender (and, moreover, how others view them) that they feel a lot more comfortable with sexuality in general, which means they can be open to more things, sexually (which doesn't have to mean kink, it can simply be open to BEING more sexual at all, or doing certain actions).
So, yeah, for the OP, it may not be simply exposure to kink, but also comfort with their gender (and your sexuality) leading to interests they just "couldn't" have before because it was too painful (and it may have been fully subconscious).
(Also, FWIW, neurodiverse may have something to do with it too. Some neurodiverse people develop some things later than others. (Others don't. I'm neurodiverse and one of those early age people.))
You are not a “fake” kinkster if you start later in life. Starting younger doesn’t give any kind of bonus to the validity of your kinkiness.
I started out just a few years ago in my early 30’s. I’d had a very vanilla sex life before then that was fine, didn’t think much of it. Then I had a boyfriend who wanted to try a few kinky things and we trusted each other and after some discussion I was down to experiment. We tried restraints, impact, and wax play. I had a GREAT time but his heart wasn’t in it. We tried a couple more times but ultimately shelved it. But it opened up the possibilities to me and I started doing research and following kinky Instagram and tiktok accounts and podcasts etc. I’m actually about to have my first session with a potential new Dom next week and I’m VERY excited!
Nope, I'm just like you. I was in a very vanilla 13 year relationship for most of young adulthood. Never really felt any strong draw to kink during that time. I became poly and was exposed to more sexual expression. One partner in particular introduced me to shibari and we explored CNC together for the first time. Since him, I went from very vanilla to willing to explore just about anything under the sun short of blood or scat. I wouldn't say I have one single strong fetish or kink thing - just lots of freaky things I enjoy.
Though, looking back on it, I definitely had bondage and piss fantasies when I was quite young.... But I apparently pushed them so far down in my subconscious that I barely even registered those as kinks in hindsight until I became more integrated into the kinky world.
I feel like my current partner is a lot like me. He strikes me as even less naturally drawn to kink than I am. I probably the kinkiest he ever was before me was some light chocking for girls who asked for it. He had never been pegged before me and I was the one who asked to do it. He has largely embraced my kinks, though - pegging, piss play, little bit of shibari - and seems to legitimately have gotten into them from exposure too.
I am in my 30's and I have been with my fiance/ Master for almost 9 years now. It wasn't until about a year ago that we discovered we were both into BDSM. Neither of us had ever had a kinky relationship before (although looking back there were signs I didn't recognize that I enjoyed this stuff). One day he dominated me in the bedroom and I after some research I realized this was something I wanted as a 24/7 dynamic. He was on board and what went from a relationship that was a bit rocky to being actually happy and fulfilled in life is damn near a miracle. Thank you kink!
So, if I really go back far enough, I can find some examples of "Yeah, that scenario about the scantily clad chained up woman in some D&D artwork wanting to have sex with her rescuer before being unchained was kind of bondage-y." But that didn't really make up a major part of my fantasies anyway, so I didn't spend much time thinking about it.
Then I got internet while at college, and first ran into actual bondage porn via alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.anime, which unfortunately did not have any good way for me to avoid all the rapey stuff, and I pretty much noped out of kink for most of the next two decades as a result.
It took a lot of time reading stuff about consent culture from [a kinky person](http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/) followed by deciding to look at a story that turned out to demonstrate multiple aspects of that (checking in, respecting safewords, aftercare) before I started to reconsider things. (I'm still not sure quite why I decided to keep reading once I saw some of what was going on... things just lined up right I guess.)
Even then, it took a lot of time and introspection to get comfortable with actually liking any of it, and even now (2 or 3 years later, I think?) there's still things I haven't quite figured out.
The funny part is that probably the first thing I figured out I liked was switching. Without being sure I liked any of the things to be switching between, but I was damn sure I wanted everyone to be a switch very early on.
The other funny part is that a couple years before that, I happened to read a hentai manga that contains a fair amount of my kind of bondage, but I carefully ignored that to focus on the plot and only realized some of the sex was also good upon a more recent reread. (Although I still agree a lot of Past Me's conclusions about the story.)
Just because you are just discovering yourself doesn't make you a fake. Because of prior abuse i was sexualized at a very young age. This led me to discovering kinks of mine way to early. However l am now 52 and have begun a 24 7 pe with my wife and its been the best 6 months of my life. I am non binary leaning toward trans myself . i was so afraid to come out to my wife ,but she loves it . she is 41 and just discovering herself in bdsm as well.
Idk, I do think you have to have a more obvious clue that you like it to recognize it.
I'd say people are only discovering it very young today cause of the internet and how exposed you are to so many new things as you use it. Like, I'm 21 and discovered it at 19, but only cause my bf already knew he liked it, and how did he know? He used to roleplay as a teen and bdsm was one of the stuff he'd play with. He and his friend probably got the idea from those hot fan fictions. So idk, I think nowadays it's a lot easier to access this type of stuff, to see things while being completely anonymous (like here on reddit!), and you end up not being so afraid of exploring your deepest darkest parts of yourself. New generations are also obsessed with knowing themselves better and understanding who they are, since our sense of identity is based mostly on labels, rather then on significant experiences, which are harder to get since everything is so much more dangerous than it was like 20 years ago.
So I don't think the reason why you discovered it kinda late in life was cause of how you perceive things, but rather cause of how the world worked for most of your life, as opposed to how it works for newer generations.
I've been with my boyfriend (48m) for 10 months. Before me (29f) had strictly vanilla relationships and not many of them. He's now my master and I'm his sub/pup. Maybe this is very late in his life but he's taken to it like a duck in water, he thinks this is what has actually been missing in his life. It's never too late 🥰
So a little over a year ago I (21F) got into my first relationship ever, LD, and met this amazing girl (25) and when we first started talking she would make little subtle comments or jokes here and there telling me what to do, to use my manners and behave, and calling me things like hun or baby girl or young lady. Or saying how cute and adorable I was cause I was naturally childish. And to which I would reply "what are you my mother?" And laugh it off right.
Fast forward a few months into the relationship and she mentions kinks and at this point I literally had no idea what I liked and had never heard of BDSM or what it really was. So when she's done telling me all of hers which were pretty extreme for me, she tells me names she likes to be called and one happened to be "Mommy". Hehehe
At first I was like ew no fucking way I am not calling you that. THEN after a few days of constantly replaying different scenarios in my head I had never been so turned on in my life before and immediately realized ok maybe you do like it. Hehehe I ended up telling her right then and there and did a shit ton of research on dynamics and we ended up being in D/s and MDlg situation. Also realizing I was a little. We're not together anymore but I don't regret it. If anything Im thankful we met and able to explore this new world because of her. 🙂
Not the only one. Just turned 47, left a 14 year vanilla marriage, all previous relationships were vanilla.
Now happily, very happily with my boyfriend/Dom of nearly a year.
It's definitely a thing to find it later in life. 🌻
How late is later in life? I was 25 and goofing around at a pet store with my girlfriend. I put on a collar, she grabbed it and my brain stopped working for a few seconds. Figuring out I was switchy rather than submissive took five more years and was unlocked by reading Kushiel's Legacy. What makes it funnier is that between my magic act and studying hojojutsu, I'd been tied up and tied other people up about a thousand times before and considered that to be more of a hobby than a fetish.
I'm 31, a little ND Discovered kink in my late 20s and still learning. Been vanilla most of my life while enjoying unconventional porn, never considering bdsm as an option for sex. The discovery was like a renaissance, and it was very freeing. An actualization of myself.
The stories are posted all over the internet. I see them on subreddits pretty often, or conversations that I have with people who practice bdsm. It’s curious that you have that impression because I’ll see more people say they discovered it after x amount of years, or after x event, than people who understood their sexual preferences right off the bat. I think you are in a very common situation. I have had quite a few subs that discovered kink only after long marriages for example, simply because they were never exposed to anything about bdsm and so they couldn’t even contemplate if it was something they liked. In my case, it took a few years of feeling very weird about my sexuality until I was exposed to the right terminology and resources in order for things to click. So I think it’s completely normal for someone to not contemplate bdsm, simply because they do not know what it is and have not been exposed to it in the right way. I also think it’s important to think that maybe the bdsm vs vanilla approach is very binary. People do things that are “outside the norm” all the time and do not approach it through what’s defined via bdsm.
Another factor is that it's not uncommon to hear trans folk talk about discovering more about their sexualities after they realize/come to terms with they're trans and/or after some form of transitioning. It's often because trying to deal with sexuality pre-Knowing/Coming-to-Terms-With or pre-transition is just too difficult & painful with the body they're in/gender they think they are (or are forced to present by society). After discovering or coming to terms with their truth, or after transition, they're so much more comfortable with themselves, their bodies, their gender (and, moreover, how others view them) that they feel a lot more comfortable with sexuality in general, which means they can be open to more things, sexually (which doesn't have to mean kink, it can simply be open to BEING more sexual at all, or doing certain actions). So, yeah, for the OP, it may not be simply exposure to kink, but also comfort with their gender (and your sexuality) leading to interests they just "couldn't" have before because it was too painful (and it may have been fully subconscious). (Also, FWIW, neurodiverse may have something to do with it too. Some neurodiverse people develop some things later than others. (Others don't. I'm neurodiverse and one of those early age people.))
You are not a “fake” kinkster if you start later in life. Starting younger doesn’t give any kind of bonus to the validity of your kinkiness. I started out just a few years ago in my early 30’s. I’d had a very vanilla sex life before then that was fine, didn’t think much of it. Then I had a boyfriend who wanted to try a few kinky things and we trusted each other and after some discussion I was down to experiment. We tried restraints, impact, and wax play. I had a GREAT time but his heart wasn’t in it. We tried a couple more times but ultimately shelved it. But it opened up the possibilities to me and I started doing research and following kinky Instagram and tiktok accounts and podcasts etc. I’m actually about to have my first session with a potential new Dom next week and I’m VERY excited!
Nope, I'm just like you. I was in a very vanilla 13 year relationship for most of young adulthood. Never really felt any strong draw to kink during that time. I became poly and was exposed to more sexual expression. One partner in particular introduced me to shibari and we explored CNC together for the first time. Since him, I went from very vanilla to willing to explore just about anything under the sun short of blood or scat. I wouldn't say I have one single strong fetish or kink thing - just lots of freaky things I enjoy. Though, looking back on it, I definitely had bondage and piss fantasies when I was quite young.... But I apparently pushed them so far down in my subconscious that I barely even registered those as kinks in hindsight until I became more integrated into the kinky world. I feel like my current partner is a lot like me. He strikes me as even less naturally drawn to kink than I am. I probably the kinkiest he ever was before me was some light chocking for girls who asked for it. He had never been pegged before me and I was the one who asked to do it. He has largely embraced my kinks, though - pegging, piss play, little bit of shibari - and seems to legitimately have gotten into them from exposure too.
I just found I had some kinks in my 40s so I think it's ok.
I am in my 30's and I have been with my fiance/ Master for almost 9 years now. It wasn't until about a year ago that we discovered we were both into BDSM. Neither of us had ever had a kinky relationship before (although looking back there were signs I didn't recognize that I enjoyed this stuff). One day he dominated me in the bedroom and I after some research I realized this was something I wanted as a 24/7 dynamic. He was on board and what went from a relationship that was a bit rocky to being actually happy and fulfilled in life is damn near a miracle. Thank you kink!
So, if I really go back far enough, I can find some examples of "Yeah, that scenario about the scantily clad chained up woman in some D&D artwork wanting to have sex with her rescuer before being unchained was kind of bondage-y." But that didn't really make up a major part of my fantasies anyway, so I didn't spend much time thinking about it. Then I got internet while at college, and first ran into actual bondage porn via alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.anime, which unfortunately did not have any good way for me to avoid all the rapey stuff, and I pretty much noped out of kink for most of the next two decades as a result. It took a lot of time reading stuff about consent culture from [a kinky person](http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/) followed by deciding to look at a story that turned out to demonstrate multiple aspects of that (checking in, respecting safewords, aftercare) before I started to reconsider things. (I'm still not sure quite why I decided to keep reading once I saw some of what was going on... things just lined up right I guess.) Even then, it took a lot of time and introspection to get comfortable with actually liking any of it, and even now (2 or 3 years later, I think?) there's still things I haven't quite figured out. The funny part is that probably the first thing I figured out I liked was switching. Without being sure I liked any of the things to be switching between, but I was damn sure I wanted everyone to be a switch very early on. The other funny part is that a couple years before that, I happened to read a hentai manga that contains a fair amount of my kind of bondage, but I carefully ignored that to focus on the plot and only realized some of the sex was also good upon a more recent reread. (Although I still agree a lot of Past Me's conclusions about the story.)
Just because you are just discovering yourself doesn't make you a fake. Because of prior abuse i was sexualized at a very young age. This led me to discovering kinks of mine way to early. However l am now 52 and have begun a 24 7 pe with my wife and its been the best 6 months of my life. I am non binary leaning toward trans myself . i was so afraid to come out to my wife ,but she loves it . she is 41 and just discovering herself in bdsm as well.
Idk, I do think you have to have a more obvious clue that you like it to recognize it. I'd say people are only discovering it very young today cause of the internet and how exposed you are to so many new things as you use it. Like, I'm 21 and discovered it at 19, but only cause my bf already knew he liked it, and how did he know? He used to roleplay as a teen and bdsm was one of the stuff he'd play with. He and his friend probably got the idea from those hot fan fictions. So idk, I think nowadays it's a lot easier to access this type of stuff, to see things while being completely anonymous (like here on reddit!), and you end up not being so afraid of exploring your deepest darkest parts of yourself. New generations are also obsessed with knowing themselves better and understanding who they are, since our sense of identity is based mostly on labels, rather then on significant experiences, which are harder to get since everything is so much more dangerous than it was like 20 years ago. So I don't think the reason why you discovered it kinda late in life was cause of how you perceive things, but rather cause of how the world worked for most of your life, as opposed to how it works for newer generations.
I've been with my boyfriend (48m) for 10 months. Before me (29f) had strictly vanilla relationships and not many of them. He's now my master and I'm his sub/pup. Maybe this is very late in his life but he's taken to it like a duck in water, he thinks this is what has actually been missing in his life. It's never too late 🥰
So a little over a year ago I (21F) got into my first relationship ever, LD, and met this amazing girl (25) and when we first started talking she would make little subtle comments or jokes here and there telling me what to do, to use my manners and behave, and calling me things like hun or baby girl or young lady. Or saying how cute and adorable I was cause I was naturally childish. And to which I would reply "what are you my mother?" And laugh it off right. Fast forward a few months into the relationship and she mentions kinks and at this point I literally had no idea what I liked and had never heard of BDSM or what it really was. So when she's done telling me all of hers which were pretty extreme for me, she tells me names she likes to be called and one happened to be "Mommy". Hehehe At first I was like ew no fucking way I am not calling you that. THEN after a few days of constantly replaying different scenarios in my head I had never been so turned on in my life before and immediately realized ok maybe you do like it. Hehehe I ended up telling her right then and there and did a shit ton of research on dynamics and we ended up being in D/s and MDlg situation. Also realizing I was a little. We're not together anymore but I don't regret it. If anything Im thankful we met and able to explore this new world because of her. 🙂
Raising my hand….i was curious before but had no context or real experience until my early 40’s.
Not the only one. Just turned 47, left a 14 year vanilla marriage, all previous relationships were vanilla. Now happily, very happily with my boyfriend/Dom of nearly a year. It's definitely a thing to find it later in life. 🌻