Practical Considerations
There are plenty of factors which should be taken into consideration if you’re planning a first meeting of any kind, and especially if your budding relationship falls outside the boundaries of what might be considered a vanilla connection. The most important, of course, should be safety considerations, and we’ll cover them at length in the next section. Before we do that, let’s discuss timing, expense, settings, distractions, and some of the other practical considerations you should include in your plan.
Timing, as they say, is everything. The timing of a first meeting should be commensurate with its purpose. It may never be too early for an acquainting first meeting, but a hook-up or transitional first meeting that happens too early in a relationship could be a disaster. There are other timing considerations that you might not think to include in your planning, but can definitely spell the difference between a successful meeting and an epic failure. Take, for example, the timing of a woman’s menstrual cycle. By failing to take something like that into account while coordinating your kinky weekend together, you could inadvertently be throwing a monkey wrench into your well-laid plans.
Expense is one of those considerations that we don’t really like to have to think about, but are forced to by the harsh realities of life. Factoring the expense of a meeting into your plan should go beyond simply deciding whether you can afford to do it or not. It’s obviously not going to be an issue of any real significance if your meeting is local and can be accomplished at minimal or no expense. But if there’s going to be any travel involved, things begin to get a little more complicated. You may be able to afford to do it, but the question that you should really be asking yourselves is, is this the best way to commit our resources? To better illustrate this point, consider this hypothetical question: Assuming you had the money to do it, would you spend two thousand dollars on meeting and spending a fun-filled week together now, if it meant that you’d have to wait an additional six months before moving in together? Finances are almost always a trade-off. Make sure you both fully understand what it is you’re sacrificing in order to accomplish your plans.
The setting for a first meeting is another one of those considerations that we typically just don’t think about until it’s too late to do anything about it. A little contingency planning for any likely scenario can go a long way towards making your experience a good one.
Janet, a twenty-year-old submissive friend of mine who lives at home with her folks while attending a local college, told me about her plans for a transitional first meeting with her Dominant, Bradley. They were planning on spending four days together and were trying to decide on an affordable way to do it, since Bradley would have to travel quite some distance to come see her. For obvious reasons, spending four days together in her parent’s home was not going to be a viable option. I suggested that they find a modestly priced hotel that was within walking distance of restaurants and entertainment. Instead, they chose to spend the most important four days of their relationship in the guest room of a friend’s home. The friends were certainly gracious and hospitable enough, but their home had paper-thin walls, three small children, a noisy macaw, two cats and a dog, which Bradley just happened to be allergic to.
Potential distractions should certainly be high on your list of considerations for your first meeting. Having friends or relatives around while you’re trying to focus on your new partner can be incredibly distracting, even in the best of circumstances. You not only run the risk of them disliking or criticizing your potential new partner before you’ve even gotten to know him, but the alternative can be just as bad. They may like your new partner so much that you can’t get rid of them. Other potential distractions may include such things as cell phones that never stop ringing, frequent texting, or an addiction to social media such as Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr.
First Meetings: Sheila’s Story
When it comes to safety precautions for a planned first meeting, regardless of the type of meeting, it is important to remember that sometimes, when it comes to our own affairs, we are absolutely the worst judges of what may or may not be a potentially dangerous encounter. Our good judgment quickly becomes clouded by emotion and hope and we start to make critical mistakes, one of which is to seriously underestimate the magnitude and possible consequences of those mistakes.
When I caution friends to be wary and to take precautions prior to a first meeting, I’m sometimes told, “Don’t worry, that won’t be necessary. I’ve been chatting with this guy for months; I think I know him pretty well.” One very pretty but incredibly naïve nineteen-year-old friend cockily assured me, “Nothing bad is going to happen!” When I asked her how she knew, she replied, “I know how to tell a guy no, if I need to.” And, I believe her; she probably does. Unfortunately, there may be times and circumstances when that simply isn’t going to be enough.
Take, for example, the case of Sheila, who was a hard-working, intelligent forty-five-year-old widow who lived in Pueblo, Colorado with her twenty-one-year-old daughter, Debbie. Her husband had passed away eight years previously from cancer, and she missed his companionship. Her daughter Debbie was confined to a wheelchair due to a spinal condition called spina bifida, and Debbie’s care requirements kept Sheila at home most nights with only her internet chat room friends for company. She had just moved to Pueblo a few months earlier from Fullerton, California and hadn’t yet made many friends in Colorado.
Eventually, through a personal ad and subsequent online chats, she became acquainted with John, a successful fifty-year-old businessman in Kansas City, Missouri. John was a lifestyle Dominant who was also a scoutmaster, tee-ball coach, Sunday school teacher, and had even been a member of the board of directors of a charitable organization that helped the handicapped. As far as Sheila was concerned, the fact that he was knowledgeable and experienced in the BDSM lifestyle and financially secure were just icing on the cake.
It didn’t take very long for Sheila to fall head-over-heels in love with John. He seemed to be everything she had ever wanted in a mate; incredibly smart, funny, successful and kinky. He told Sheila he had a job lined up for her in Kansas City. He even promised to support Sheila and Debbie financially, take care of their mounting medical bills, and pay for Debbie’s therapy if they would be willing to move in with him. Sheila didn’t have to be asked twice. She jumped at his offer. The last eight years had been exceedingly difficult, struggling to survive on the $1,016 per month she received from Social Security. Sheila and Debbie immediately began making preparations to move to Kansas City.
Sheila told her friend Nancy about her plans, and got lectured about the dangers of running off to meet someone that she only knew through internet chats and phone calls. Sheila told her friend that her ship had finally come in; John was her dream come true and no one was going to dissuade her from following her dream of a happy and secure life with him. Nancy truly wanted to be happy for her friend, but she was still very much concerned, and begged her to take precautions. A few days later, in the middle of the night, John arrived in Pueblo to take Sheila and Debbie back with him to Kansas City. Nancy never saw nor heard from her friend Sheila Faith, ever again.
No one knows for certain exactly where or when it happened, but at some point after he picked them up in Colorado and took them to Kansas, John raped and tortured both Sheila and her daughter Debbie and then killed them both with hammer blows to the head. John Edward Robinson, who lived with his wife and four children and was known in internet chat rooms as SlaveMaster, then loaded the bodies into two fifty-five-gallon drums and deposited the drums in a storage facility in Raymore, Missouri. He performed this task quickly and routinely, a natural consequence of the fact that he’d done this several times previously. For the next six years John Edward Robinson collected and cashed Sheila Faith’s monthly Social Security checks, while he continued committing similar rape-torture-murders until his arrest on June 2, 2000.
John Edward Robinson is known to have murdered at
least eleven women, and some investigators believe the actual number may be significantly higher. Sheila’s story really wasn’t much different from the stories of any of the other women who became his victims, the one glaringly tragic difference being that Sheila’s misjudgments led to her daughter’s death, as well as her own. Robinson found many of his victims in internet BDSM chat rooms and used highly sophisticated deceptions to gain their trust, stoke their emotions, and compromise their judgment by promising them the world. Even when his victims were warned to take precautions by friends and family, those warnings were invariably ignored. John Edward Robinson has never offered a confession, explanation, or even expressed an ounce of contrition for the murders and the many other heinous crimes that he committed. He is currently awaiting execution on death row at El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas
Bottom line: Knowing how to tell a guy “no” is not considered to be a particularly effective method of preventing hammer blows to the skull.
Safety Precautions
Realistically, the odds of your date turning out to be a serial killer are quite low and for that, we should all be eternally thankful. It is a sobering thing to note, however, that many of us have gone out and bought lottery tickets with a one-in-a-million chance of being a winner, thinking that those were pretty good odds. You may not be able to do much to improve your odds of winning the lottery, but there are some things that you can do to improve your chances of not only surviving your first meeting, but of enjoying it.
How can taking safety precautions help you to enjoy your first meeting? You just might be surprised at all the ways! First, it can help to silence those nagging little voices of doubt in the back of your head that make you wonder if you’re doing the right thing, or exercising proper judgment. Second, it will help to reassure your friends and family (assuming anyone has any idea what you’re about to do) that you are not a complete idiot. While you may not particularly care what they think, overly concerned friends and family have sometimes been known to do crazy things to protect you from your own worst instincts. The last thing you probably need is some sort of whacky family intervention right in the middle of what might otherwise have been a perfect first meeting! Finally, the fact that you took safety precautions can make your partner feel better about you. After all, there are essentially two kinds of people who don’t take safety precautions: stupid people, and predators. Whenever I meet someone for the first time, and she tells me that she hasn’t taken any safety precautions, I think, “Seriously? Maybe she isn’t as smart as I thought she was.”
Here are some simple safety precautions that you can take prior to your first meeting. For the most part, there isn’t anything terribly complicated or difficult to accomplish about any of them. You may not be able or willing to do everything on this list but any one of them could save your life or, at the very least, ensure that there will be a trail to follow in the event you simply vanish.
Know Who You’re Meeting
The first of our safety precautions probably seems as if it should be absurdly obvious to anyone with a lick of sense; however, there really is a big difference between thinking you know someone, and really knowing someone. A harsh reality that we don’t like to think about is, we rarely ever truly know anyone, even when we interact with them every day in real life. John Edward Robinson, aka Slavemaster, lived with his wife and four children, arranged to be named “Man of the Year” by a charitable service organization, and had even been featured on the cover of a national trade magazine all while methodically raping and murdering at least eleven women. Over the course of almost twenty years, Robinson skillfully avoided becoming a suspect in the murders, but he wasn’t as successful in avoiding being convicted of dozens of other crimes, to include theft, embezzlement, fraud, and forgery.
Robinson’s long and well-documented history of criminal activity was a matter of public record and he was even sent to prison a few times. In fact, it is widely believed that Robinson met and seduced his fourth murder victim while incarcerated and serving time for fraud at the Western Missouri Correctional Facility. Her name was Beverly Bonner, and she was the prison librarian. Upon Robinson’s release from prison in 1993, Beverly Bonner divorced her husband and moved to Kansas to be with Robinson, who promptly murdered her and then cashed her alimony checks for the next seven years. In June of 2000, her body was found in a drum at the same storage facility as Sheila and Debbie Faith’s.
Could any of Robinson’s many victims have avoided their fate by doing a little bit of research on the man they loved and literally trusted with their lives? We’ll never know for sure. But one thing is certain; it is far easier today to check someone out online than it was just ten or twenty years ago. Whatever information you do have about the person you’re meeting, Google it. Even phony information can reveal a lot of real information. Google his name, email address, mailing address, and phone number. Google his job, business, friends and family members. Reverse Google any photographs. With the proper use of quotation marks in your searches, you could even Google his poetry, or other writings. Google it all. You may not be able to immediately differentiate between true information and phony information, but you can usually spot inconsistencies pretty easily.
Another way to know who you’re meeting is to tactfully ask for personal references from others who purportedly know the individual in real life. Everyone knows someone. If someone tries to tell you that he has no friends, acquaintances, family members, associates, clients or coworkers who would be willing to vouch for the fact that he is a real person with real community ties and not an axe murderer, then that should serve as a warning flag. He doesn’t have to reveal his kinky lifestyle to those people. All he has to tell them is, “I’m meeting someone for the first time, and I thought that maybe some personal references might reassure her that I’m not an axe murderer. Would you mind if I gave her your phone number?”
Finally, if all else fails, you could always resort to the tried-and-true strategy of blaming somebody else: “This is stupid, but my best friend is really worried and won’t let me come meet you until she sees a photo of your driver’s license first. I tried to tell her that I trust you implicitly, but she just isn’t budging. I really don’t want to lose her as a friend over this. Can we do this just to shut her up?” He may or may not agree to it, but either way, his response will tell you a lot.
Clarify Expectations
Clarifying expectations may not seem like much of a safety precaution at first glance, but it can make a huge difference in how your first meeting turns out. Even if you honestly believe that you both fully understand the purpose and limits of the planned meeting, it certainly doesn’t hurt to confirm what you think you both know. You may feel a little foolish doing so (see the section below on being willing to do just that) but no one ever really dies of embarrassment. People do, however, sometimes die of stupidity.
The most common reason for misunderstandings which could potentially lead to trouble involves one person’s naive anticipation of sex, when it is neither warranted nor planned. Even though you may have been asked to lunch, made the date for lunch, meticulously planned every detail of the lunch, and even enjoyed the lunch with your date, it’s entirely possible that your date is thinking, “Great lunch, but can we just get to the sex part now?” Some people simply have to have it spelled out for them in no uncertain terms. Here’s one example of how you can phrase it: “I’m really looking forward to meeting you! I just want to be absolutely clear, though. No matter how much I like you or how much I may want to, there is simply no way we’re going to be having sex on this first date. If that is going to be a problem, you need to tell me so now.”
On the other hand, if sex is mutually understood to be part of the plan for your first meeting, you may still need to clarify the fact that consent can be withdrawn at any time by either party. Just because you’ve discussed having sex, planned on it, anticipated it and have every intention of following through with your plan doesn’t mean t
hat you can’t change your mind, even at the very last second. You need to not only trust your gut when it comes to such things, but you also need to be able to trust your partner to understand that no means no, even if you’re naked and tied to a chair.
Meet In a Public Place
Meeting in a public place isn’t always going to be appropriate or possible, but whenever you can make it part of your plan, you should do it. Do it even if the plan is to go immediately to a hotel room and get naked. That way, in the event of trouble, at least someone will have seen the two of you together at some point. It’s even possible that the meeting will be captured on a business establishment’s security camera, which could be very helpful to the police, if they need to conduct any kind of an investigation. Award yourself big bonus points for actually knowing ahead of time where security cameras may be located, making that part of your plan, and letting a trusted friend know what to tell the police, if necessary.
Make Sure Someone Knows
Not everyone has friends who can be trusted with all of the sordid details of their kinky sex lives. That shouldn’t stop you from letting someone know where you plan to be, who you plan to meet, and most important of all, when you plan on returning. Serial killer John Edward Robinson actually sent forged letters, purportedly from the murdered women to their friends and families, which essentially said, “Don’t worry about me; I have a new job overseas and may be out of touch for a while.”
Again, there’s rarely any need to reveal everything about what you’re planning to do. It should be relatively simple to limit what you say to, “I’m meeting someone new this weekend, and expect to be back on Sunday. Please call the police if I am not.” The person you tell may indeed be curious about your plans and may even pepper you with questions, but you are really under no obligation to answer any of their questions. The important thing is to ensure that someone knows when you should be back.
Domination & Submission: The BDSM Relationship Handbook Page 20
