Over the past two years, I have received enough TPE applications to recognise a pattern: long, sometimes spectacularly long messages about surrender, discipline, service, belonging and the life a man imagines under a woman’s control.

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Some take twenty minutes to read.

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And the more of them I receive, the less interested I become in what a man writes about TPE, and the more interested I become in what happens afterwards.

Because there is an enormous distance between fantasising about TPE and actually being capable of living it.

 

People confuse four completely different things:

“This idea turns me on” → “I want this” → “I am ready to do this” → “I am capable of doing this consistently.”

 

They are not the same thing.

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Fantasy sells loss of control without the actual price of losing control.

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In fantasy, it all looks magnificent:

“Take my life. Make my decisions. I am completely yours.”

No more deciding. No more doubt. There is a woman who makes the rules, creates the structure, permits, forbids and directs.

And this is where it becomes very easy to make a small but important mistake:

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“I think about this all the time → therefore I must really need it → therefore I must be ready for it.”

 

The first statement does not prove the last.

You can dream about running a marathon for years. You can watch videos, read about training, imagine yourself crossing the finish line and be entirely sincere about wanting it.

None of that gives you the ability to get out of bed four times a week and go running in the rain.

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TPE is not terribly different.

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Real surrender of control is not limited to the parts that are enjoyable to imagine.

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Reality can be remarkably ordinary and occasionally rather dull: getting up when you don’t want to, following boring rules, keeping agreements, reporting back, changing habits, accepting restrictions, investing time, effort and money.

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Above all, it means consistency.

Not for two hours while the idea of surrender is intoxicating. But at 7:40 on a Wednesday morning, when you would quite happily tell the entire world to fuck off.

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That is where the crash test happens.

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And that is often where something interesting becomes apparent.

A person can sincerely want TPE as a psychological state — the feeling of belonging, structure and being under another person’s control — but same time not wanting TPE as an organisation of his actual life at all.

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He is not necessarily lying. Perhaps, until that moment, he didn’t know the difference either.

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A three-page declaration proves surprisingly little - and these days, grand declarations impress me considerably less.

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“I want to belong to you completely.”

“I want to give you control.”

“I want to devote my life to serving a woman.”

“I am looking for real TPE, not a game.”

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Fine.

But those are still words.

Then I ask him to do something spectacularly unsexy: answer a specific question, read the information I sent him, fill out the contact form, move the conversation to another platform, arrive on time or simply do what we agreed.

 

And suddenly these tiny things can prove considerably more difficult than "surrendering control over one’s entire life"....

 

There is a certain irony in this - a man can write three pages explaining how much he wants to give me the right to make decisions for him, and then discover that he has considerable difficulty accepting one very small decision I have already made ( message me on telegram instead of Whatsapp).

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The paradox of TPE

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To hand control to another person, you first need a fairly high degree of control over yourself.

It requires discipline, consistency, the ability to listen, keep agreements and tolerate frustration.

Which is why these days I am much less interested in:

“How badly do you want TPE?”

I am much more interested in:

“What happens when reality disagrees with your fantasy for the first time?”

You can fantasise about running a marathon for years.

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Eventually, you still have to put on your shoes and go out in the rain.

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To be continued...