People Pleasing is NOT submission

The purpose of this post is to explore the differences between people pleasing and submission inside of a loving Dominant/submissive relationship. Assumptions will be made here. Namely, that the relationship between Dom and sub is healthy and loving, that the Dominant is respectful and desires consent, and that the submissive desires the same. 

Of course, not all situations will be the same, and not everything here will apply to every situation. As always, I write about our experiences from my perspective, and I trust your intelligence and ability to draw the applicable lessons from this and apply them to your own life. 

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People pleasing is the act of a person attempting to get some need or needs met within a relationship by giving of themselves to affect their counterpart to meet said needs. It is an attempt to compel their partner to act in a certain way without having to verbalize their desires or needs. Or at times, it is a complete abdication of one’s own needs in favor of those of a partner. But it is always done in an attempt to attain something.

Submission is a consensual surrender of authority over portions of one’s own life to a Dominant partner within negotiated limits. 

Early on in our discussions about adding a Dominant/submissive dynamic to our marriage, I told Dawn the following, which I’ve copied verbatim from a message that I wrote to her. 

“The way I see it, you’ve always been submissive. The problem is that you’ve been submissive to everyone who wanted to be Dominant to you, and that has left you open to being manipulated and controlled by people who only want to use the best of you for their own purposes. I want to channel that submission into me, the person you can trust never to take it for granted.”

Now, several years later, and after having written tens of thousands of words on Dominant/submissive relationships, I realize something important. 

I had identified Dawn’s people pleasing and mislabeled it as a part of her submission. 

And as I look around, see other D/s authors and social media accounts, and consider all of it, I realize how often these two things are conflated. 

Indeed, they weren’t consciously separated in our D/s dynamic, and that fact has led to some pretty severe growing pains for us recently. 

How Submission Becomes People Pleasing

I’ve said it before, our relationship is not a relationship of equals. It is a leader and a follower. A Dominant and a submissive. 

But this is not to say that Dawn has no power. Quite the opposite. In our particular relationship, I am the more “open” partner. I seek more novelty and crave more new experiences and experimentation. 

Because we emphasize consensual D/s, Dawn actually has a lot of power, because she will end up setting many of the “boundaries” by the simple fact that she is the partner who, at least currently, craves less experimentation. 

Also, and even more importantly, she is an autonomous individual with her own needs and desires. And inside of a consensual D/s relationship, she is completely empowered to speak up for everything she needs and for all of her boundaries. 

So, while we have equal power, or she may actually have slightly MORE power, I have authority.

But if she doesn’t USE her power to speak up for her needs and boundaries, or say them out loud when she recognizes them, she can find herself going along with things she doesn’t want to do or negating her own needs. 

This is where submission becomes people pleasing.

If I don’t know this has happened, then I’m taking advantage of her without knowing it. Or, to put it differently, she has put me in a position to push beyond her limits without my consent. We are both treating each other in a non consensual way. 

This isn’t fair or healthy for her as the submissive partner. It also isn’t fair to me as her Dominant. It is my nature to lead and take responsibility, and I will do so. But if she hasn’t spoken up assertively, she’ll be experiencing me as someone who is using her and disrespecting her limits. 

Only I’ll have no idea that I have been disrespecting her limits, except for the fact that she suddenly starts treating me poorly out of resentment that has built up in secret, perhaps even without her realizing it was happening until it explodes. 

The Difference Between Submission and People Pleasing

Submission is an active state. It is a choice to surrender certain parts of life to the authority of a Dominant partner who the submissive trusts to take charge and lead in those areas. 

People pleasing is silent by nature. It is the attempt to secure love or affection by behaving in ways that the pleaser believes (mostly subconsciously) will compel their partner to treat them the way they want to be treated. Often, it shows up by going along with whatever the other person wants while ignoring one’s own needs completely. 

A healthy Dominant/submissive dynamic says all of this out loud. Both parties agree that the Dominant is in charge, the submissive will obey. 

People pleasing says it covertly. The pleaser wants her Dominant to treat her a certain way, so she begins to act in ways that she believes will get her treated that way.

In our dynamic, I take control, lead, and make decisions. All things I like. It allows Dawn to relax, be feminine, and experience the emotional freedom of not being the one in control. All things she likes. 

We have equal power to pursue the relationship we want to have. I have the authority to make those desires into reality. 

It’s only AFTER that agreement has been made that I execute that authority over her. She must have taken an active role in deciding, even if that active role was deciding that she wants to be passive, owned, controlled, and Dominated. 

To quote the band Rush: “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

It’s the absence of making a choice, or the absence of communicating the choice that’s been made, that draws the line between healthy submission and unhealthy people pleasing. 

How People Pleasing Builds Resentment

It is my belief that people pleasing is a core reason for resentment building inside of Dominant/submissive relationships. I believe that it is a big part of why we’ve been experiencing some challenges in ours. 

Here’s one example.

Dawn found herself needing more time to herself and apart from me. We are both retired and don’t work, and we have spent a LOT of our time together over the past 6 months. 

She found herself going along with my plans that I made and the way that I was leading us through our days. She wasn’t standing up for her needs, and certainly at times wasn’t even thinking about or recognizing them. 

For my own sake, I need less of that separateness than she does. I also get more time apart from her because I wake up several hours before her every morning, which gives me time and space to myself. 

I was going about my days doing my best to lead and take charge in the ways we had agreed upon. 

But for her, it was something that slowly built up over time. The people pleasing of just going along with my plans rather than speaking up for wanting to do things apart from me ended up with resentment building up over time. Until there was too much pressure, and it exploded. 

In hindsight, I can see exactly how this all played out. I can see the ways she was pulling away from me emotionally and physically in an attempt to meet the need to have her own separateness. I can see the signs I missed and the ways I should have handled it differently. 

But I didn’t. And neither did she. And we ended up with a big wedge driven between us that had her questioning if her entire attachment to me was unhealthy and codependent. 

Ending People Pleasing Through Assertiveness

People pleasing is an attempt to look passive and submissive while trying to be in control and in the Dominant position. It is using passivity covertly, trying to get a need met, or to avoid having to look at those needs at all. 

It is controlling and manipulative behavior, and goes directly against the ethics of consensual D/s. It has no place in our relationship, and it will be removed, somehow or another.

It’s hard for Dawn to stand up for her needs. She wasn’t raised to be assertive or to think critically, and she definitely didn’t associate assertiveness with submission. As I said back at the beginning of this post, I conflated her submission and people pleasing myself, and in some ways I bear the responsibility for not leading her to ask for what she needs and to stand up for it, even when it was uncomfortable for her to do so. 

I err on the side of taking charge, which has made it easy for her not to confront her own lack of assertiveness. And even though my leadership was always from a place of love and good intentions, I allowed her to default to people pleasing me. And I mistook the people pleasing behavior as submission in some cases. 

As I come to my own realizations of how I’ve allowed her not to be assertive, I see some areas in our relationship where a similar pattern has played out. 

I also see other areas in our dynamic where there’s a battle between people pleasing behavior and things we have made consensual agreements to. Places where she has agreed to give me authority, but we still experience resistance and tension regularly. 

If there is actual consent, there’s no reason that there should be resistance or tension, unless the resistance or tension is spilling over from resentment that has built up from other areas, or if the consent hasn’t actually been given on her part, even though she claimed to have done so. 

So, in our relationship, we will become vigilant for feelings of resentment, resistance to agreements that have already been made, or tension where none belongs. And we will get to the root of them, hopefully before they turn into future explosions. 

The Dangerous Ends of People Pleasing in D/s Relationships

This brings me to my last point. 

One of the most dangerous ways that I see people pleasing playing out in a D/s relationship is if the people pleasing behavior infiltrates the spoken or written consensual agreements. 

The risk being that the submissive partner makes overt agreements and gives verbal and/or written consent to the Dominant partner not out of actual consent, but out of an abdication of her own needs. 

It could even lead to a person agreeing to enter into a submissive role in a relationship in entirety out of people pleasing, rather than out of desire. 

This is an absolute worst case scenario. As not only is the entire relationship based on a lie, an otherwise loving relationship could be at risk over what one party thought was a mutually desired power exchange. 

One partner could, in theory, be involved in what they believed to be a loving, consensual Dominant/submissive dynamic while the other partner could be experiencing it as an abusive, manipulative, unloving, coercive relationship. And the only evidence would be the building resentment and tension under the surface. 

Conclusion

Authentic submission is only possible with assertiveness and spoken needs and desires. Unspoken needs and desires are poison to a healthy power exchange dynamic, and will eventually lead to an unhappy and/or unhealthy experience for both partners, and if unchecked, will destroy not only the D/s dynamic, but the love relationship that underlies it. 

In most places, I say that it is incumbent upon the Dominant partner to have the leadership skills and intuition to  take responsibility for the direction of the D/s dynamics. 

But in this, it is even more important for the submissive partner to take responsibility for being assertive, and to be aware of creeping resentments that build, so that they can be communicated.

Without her assertiveness, I cannot lead Dawn in a consensual way. Without her consent, I don’t have her submission, I only have her obedience. 

Those two things are not the same.