Do it again.

On Kinks and Loneliness.

There’s a particular kind of quiet that arrives after sex. Not the lush, glistening stillness of post-orgasmic warmth, but something more brittle. A silence like the one that creeps into a church after the congregation has gone. The ritual is complete, the candles flicker in their stubs, and suddenly, all that meaning feels invented. Fragile. There’s a loneliness that lives in that quiet. A loneliness sharpened by the intimacy that preceded it.

I have come to believe that loneliness doesn’t always announce itself in the absence of others. It appears just as often in their presence—in a gaze that doesn’t quite meet yours, in the carefully polite silence after a confession, in a hand that touches you without understanding what it’s touching. Loneliness, in that sense, is the failure of transmission. The ache of saying something true and finding it land like a stone.

Kink, for many, is an attempt to speak despite that failure. To create a new language for need when the old one has ceased to serve. To be kinky, I think, is to possess a particular kind of imagination. It’s the ability to take the raw material of your past—shame, power, longing, fear—and shape it into something that can be shared. Not necessarily understood, not always accepted, but shared.

And sharing is not nothing. It is, in fact, everything. To kneel for someone, to let her tie your hands, spit in your mouth, call you a name you’d never use in daylight—this is not just performance. It’s communication. A flickering Morse code: This is who I am, when I am most myself. Do you still want me?

I remember once sitting on the floor of a stranger’s flat, bare-legged and bruised, tracing the outlines of the carpet while she smoked by the window. We’d spent hours inhabiting roles that suited us better than our day-to-day lives ever had. I’d felt seen in a way that transcended the ordinary, if only because I’d offered her a version of myself that was truer than anything I wore in public. But then came the after. She looked at me like I was a puzzle she’d forgotten how to solve. As if I was suddenly too much, or worse, nothing at all. I left quietly. I walked home through a city slicked with rain, soaked through with the dull ache of exposure.

And yet, I wasn’t ashamed. If anything, I felt righteous. Because at least I had tried. I had spoken in the language I knew. I had made myself vulnerable in the hope of recognition.

Desire is often framed as hunger. But I think that metaphor fails us. Hunger is simple, linear. Desire, especially desire shaped by kink, is recursive. It loops. It deepens. It’s not just about the body—it’s about the psyche, the myth, the script we’ve been rehearsing in private for years. One person’s heel on another’s chest can be erotic not because it hurts, but because it affirms a story the submissive has been telling himself forever: I am small. I am hers. I am safe, finally, in my surrender.

This is why kink is never only about sex. It is about being known, in extremity. It’s about bringing the grotesque or the wounded or the taboo parts of the self into a shared space and asking: Can this be loved, too?

There’s courage in that. Immense courage. To say, I want to be degraded, or I want to be worshipped, is to reveal something terribly private about the way you see yourself, or the way you long to be seen. It’s to admit that the default modes of intimacy—dating apps, polite conversation, hand-holding in public—aren’t enough to pierce your aloneness. You need something stranger. You need ceremony.

It strikes me that kink and loneliness share a nervous system. Both arise from the same tender territory: the desire to be met, fully, by another. Not just touched, but understood. And so kink becomes a form of research. An experimental mode. We try things. We fail. We dress our desires in latex, or in language, or in silence, and hope they will be heard. We stage elaborate performances of punishment or praise, not because they are artificial, but because they allow us to say something real.

Of course, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes you find someone who wants the same acts but not the same meanings. She spanks because she likes the sound, but doesn’t care for the story behind your want. You’re a vessel, nothing more. And that’s when the loneliness seeps in again—not because you weren’t touched, but because you weren’t received.

And still we try. We send messages at midnight. We write long, meticulous lists of limits and longings. We re-read old conversations. We curate our profiles like altars. Sometimes, it works. You meet someone whose words thrum in your chest. Someone who sees your peculiar, glittering shape and doesn’t flinch. You kneel for her and, for a moment, you are not a freak. You are not a problem to be solved. You are precisely as you should be.

I keep coming back to the idea of kink as prayer. Not a cry for salvation, exactly, but an invocation: Let me be witnessed. Let this strange, luminous thing inside me find a place to land. And perhaps that is what makes it holy—not the acts themselves, but the yearning beneath them. The willingness to show up in the fullness of your need, and hope that someone else will stay.

In the end, I think of kink the same way I think of art: a method of survival. A way to transmute solitude into something shareable. A process of taking what hurts or haunts or excites you and sculpting it into a scene, a gesture, a gift. A way, in other words, of being less alone.

And that, I think, is worth the risk.