Thoughts: Contractual Considerations

I've been meaning to do this post for a long time. Daddy and I have had a few contracts now, for various reasons. We recently wrote a third contract and in order to do so, I looked over the older contracts as well as my FetLife account to find a list of things we had thought about.

To me, a contract is a very important thing. It means more than I thought it ever would, though we don't always follow it to the letter. We use our contract a little more as a guideline at the moment because that is how we like it. We have tried being more rigid with rules and rituals to follow but that wasn't necessarily the best option for us. Keeping things simple has been better, because it allows us a certain level of adaptability depending on our moods at the time.

If you're thinking of entering any kind of BDSM contract, I would like you to read this post. Though you don't have to have all the things in it that we have, a guideline to work from or brainstorm on will hopefully be useful to you! If you do happen to find this post of use for you and your partner I would be honoured.

When we decided to write our first contract, we sat together and spent an entire evening making it; going over everything and every possible situation just in case there was something we missed. We also allowed there to be alterations made to the contract at any time, as long as we both agreed on it first and changed it together.

The thought here was that it was better to be prepared for all possible outcomes, just in case BDSM and rigorous contracting wasn't for us. We had dabbled in kinky play before but hadn't gone into a BDSM lifestyle before so we felt very cautious. It didn't help that at the time there was something in the news about a man who got prosecuted for practising BDSM with his girlfriend when she decided it was abuse.

Because of how cautious and detailed we were about it, the contract ended up going well over 4 pages. I don't regret ever having a long contract, however, as it means the time you spend putting it together and talking everything over is time you have spent thinking about one another. In that way, it's kind of romantic.

When we made our first contract, here are a few things we considered:

• Time limit - how long the contract is for, when it begins and when it ends. Ours was 3 months, as a test to see if it would work out.
• Days - Once a week I was allowed to have a day "off" as it were, to recharge my batteries and have a rest.
• Health - What would happen if I was ill/he was ill. Whether the dynamic would continue or not in these circumstances and what particular ones would cause it to pause.
• Property - What was mine, what was his, what he was allowed to control my use of. Other things in this category were what accounts/programs I could use on my computer and when I could use them.
• Privacy - Whether or not we could look at private documents/etc of each others. We chose to leave this one alone and have private things private, out of respect.
• Education/work/family - no Orders were allowed to get in the way of our success at university, or interactions with our families. If something needed to be done while any family were around, he would do a particular action when asking me to do something, to let me know it was more of an Order than a request. Back then, we had decided to keep our actions a secret from our families, though this is not necessarily the case any more. To find out more about this, please look at this post: Thoughts: Family and Kink.
• Safe words/actions - What to say or do in particular situations if there's a problem. We had a safe word, a safe action (tapping out) and a third for if I couldn't do the others, which was lean hard to my left. For more on all of this, please see this post: Thoughts: Safe Words.
• Limits - What we would/wouldn't do. The limits applied to both of us and we fortunately found we had the same ones. More of my feelings about limits can be found here: Thoughts: Regarding Limits in BDSM.
• Terms of cancellation - Who could cancel and when, what action was needed on behalf of each party in order to do so.

As you can see, there is a lot to think about. The current contract we have is a bit different and has more details than listed here but this should be plenty of information to give you an idea of what one is like. It requires a lot of energy and discussion to make one so you need to make sure you are both ready before you start. You also need to be prepared to make compromises to keep each other as safe as possible and be aware that you might end up in heated debates. While it is a lovely thing to do it can be very mentally and emotionally draining.

So these are just some things to think about when you write a contract! If you have any questions you need answering, just ask me in the comments and I'll reply asap!