Good Girl, Pretty Girl

I used to wish I could disappear.

Not forever. Just long enough to avoid being noticed. 

As a child, I spent so much of my life being put on display. There were dresses to model, Thai costumes to wear, relatives to greet, photographs to pose for.

Wai to your elders. Bow your head. Be polite.

Smile.

Say hello.

Stand up straight.

Be pretty.

My mother was proud of me. I know that now. She wanted to show me off. There is a sweetness in that realization as an adult.

But as a child, it often felt like my purpose was to make someone else look good. 

What I wanted was much simpler: I wanted to sit quietly in the corner of the room on my father’s lap.

I wanted to disappear into the background. I wanted to be left alone.

I was selectively mute in the earlier parts of my childhood.

The strange thing was that I wasn’t incapable of speaking. I could read aloud in class. I could recite memorized lines. I could repeat exactly what someone told me to say.

What I struggled with was finding my own words.

At the time, people assumed I was shy. Maybe I was.

But looking back, I wonder if there was something more complicated happening.

So much of my childhood felt scripted. Wear this. Say this. Smile. Be polite. Make a good impression.

When you're constantly being handed a script, it can become difficult to recognize your own voice.

It’s funny then, that I grew up to become such an exhibitionist.  People hear that word and assume it means that I crave attention. 

The truth is almost the opposite. I don’t enjoy being looked at when someone else is directing the experience. 

I’ve never enjoyed “traditional” modeling. Being told where to stand. How to pose. Which expression to wear. How my body should appear for someone else’s vision.

What I enjoy is choosing to be seen.

The difference sounds small. For me, it changes everything.

As a child, visibility felt like an obligation.

As an adult, visibility becomes a choice.

The little girl who wanted to disappear didn’t grow up wanting more attention. She grew up wanting ownership.

Ownership of her body. Ownership of her voice. Ownership of her visibility.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons why swinging never quite felt enjoyable to me.

I want to be clear: I have no judgment towards people who love the lifestyle.

I understand the appeal. I’ve seen couples build incredible friendship, confidence, and adventures through swinging. I’ve seen people discover parts of themselves they never knew existed.

But kinks have a funny way of colliding with our personal histories. What feels liberating to one person can feel suffocating to another. 

In many swinging spaces, a man’s social value is closely tied to the desirability of his partner. The beautiful girlfriend becomes an asset. A status symbol. A source of social currency.

For some people, that's incredibly hot. For me, it activated something old, something buried deep beneath the confident facade.

The moment my sexuality stopped feeling like mine and started feeling like something that increased another person’s value, I felt myself pulling away.

I stopped feeling like a participant, and started feeling like a commodity. LIke my body was being negotiated rather than experience. Like I was being shown off. Like I was once again the little girl in the costume.

This is where things slowly began to unravel between Thomas and me.

In the beginning, it was fun. We explored together. We laughed together. We shared experiences that pushed both of us outside of our comfort zones. 

Thomas loved the lifestyle. It quickly became his primary kink.

And honestly, he was good at it. He was attractive, charismatic, socially fearless, and deeply extroverted. People gravitated towards him naturally.  He didn’t need me to attract attention.

Yet over time, I began to feel as though my greatest value wasn’t who I was. It was what my presence made possible.

The strange thing is that I didn’t feel this way during our BDSM scenes. There, I could surrender completely.

I could kneel. I could wear the collar. I could follow instructions. And somehow it felt freeing instead of restrictive.

The difference was choice.

Every act of surrender was intentional. Negotiated. Desired. Temporary.

I wasn’t being displayed. I was creating an experience.

Whenever we played with other couples, that feeling often disappeared.

The pressure was rarely explicit. No one was forcing me to do anything.

Yet I constantly felt nudged toward interactions that weren’t a full bodied yes. 

“Go give him a hug”.

“Why don’t you go make out with her?”

Come be social. Come flirt. Come play.

None of these requests were unreasonable. But they carried a familiar feeling. 

The feeling that my role was to participate because participation made everyone else happy.

The feeling that my body was no longer entirely mine.

Over time, resentment began to grow.

We spent less energy focused on each other. Our intimacy became increasingly transactional. If we went to the club for a BDSM scene that I wanted, I felt pressure to reciprocate by engaging with another couple afterward.

Everything started to feel like a negotiation. A trade. A compromise.

The joy started slowly draining away.

The irony is that polyamorous relationships don't always end the way monogamous relationships do. There isn’t always a dramatic breakup. 

Sometimes nobody leaves. Nobody cheats. Nobody slams a door.

People simply stop reaching for each other

I don’t think Thomas and I ever officially ended our relationship. We just kept encountering the same walls.

The same resentment. The same misalignment. The same realization that we wanted fundamentally different things,

Eventually, without either of us announcing it, we stopped trying to climb over it.

It took me a long time to realize that my primary aversion to swinging wasn’t about the other people. 

It was about a little girl who spent her childhood learning how to be a good girl and a pretty girl.

A little girl who learned how to wear a costume. How to smile for the photograph. How to say the right thing. How to keep everyone happy and entertained. 

What I didn’t know until much later was how to ask myself a different question.

Not, “What do they want from me?”

But; “What do I want?”

The answer it turns out, was never invisibility.

It was freedom. The freedom to choose when I am seen. The freedom to choose who gets access.

The freedom to belong to myself.