For years, I called myself a submissive man. Not just in the bedroom, but in my bones. I craved dominance, structure, surrender. I wanted to belong to her. The mythical capital-M Mistress who would be my soulmate, my partner, my lover, my ‘till the end, my all.

So I searched. On FetLife, on dating sites, in chatrooms. I read every blog about “how to attract a Domme” and perfected the sacred art of respectful messaging. I was eager, deferential, available. And I waited.
And waited.

I quickly learned what most submissive men do: there are a lot of us, and very few women willing to offer real, consistent dominance. Supply and demand isn’t just a metaphor here: it’s a quiet economy of desperation. Dommes, even the half-hearted ones, are overwhelmed with options. Messages flood in. Offers of servitude, tributes, obedience. A sea of men who would do anything just to be noticed.

And that imbalance breeds something poisonous: indifference.

I encountered Dommes who expected complete devotion before they learned my name. Who offered no warmth, no curiosity, only cold scripts and condescension. I was expected to pour out my inner life while receiving little more than clipped demands in return. “Be useful.” “Pay tribute.” “Wait your turn.” It felt less like intimacy, and more like an emotional vending machine with broken buttons.

To be fair, not all Dommes are like this. Some are sincere. But the system itself, this lopsided dynamic where submissive men chase, flatter, and debase themselves in hopes of being chosen, invites a kind of casual cruelty. It rewards aloofness. It punishes vulnerability.

Eventually, something inside me began to fray. Not because I no longer wanted to submit, but because I no longer wanted to beg for recognition. I missed being human. I missed feeling seen outside of my submissive tendencies. The search in vain for a dominant life-partner had left me emotionally stumped and intellectually eroded.

So I stopped. Not all at once. But piece by piece, I let the dream go.

And then came the silence. The part no one talks about. The quiet reckoning when the fantasies fall away and you’re left staring at yourself, stripped of scripts and protocols. I had to sit with the question: what do I want, really? Not what turns me on. Not what the subreddits say. But what kind of life feels good to wake up in?

What I found wasn’t revolutionary. Just… real. I wanted connection. Kindness. Depth. Mutual care. Something rooted in humanity, not hierarchy. And it shocked me to realize how long I had mistaken these things as simple, secondary givens. How long I had believed that if it wasn’t wrapped in dominance, it wasn’t what I was looking for.

My search for dominance had become so narrow. A lodestar that had obscured every other beam in my rich prism.
A grave injustice done to myself that I had to right.
And so I did.

I haven’t renounced submission. It’s still a part of me. But I’ve stopped letting it be the entire story. I don’t need to be owned to feel whole. I don’t need someone else’s structure to give my life meaning. I can choose intimacy over power, honesty over performance, substance over scarcity.
And in that choice, I found something better than obedience.
I found peace.