First: the boy I'd been talking with, who had been mine a couple of years ago, who had spent 8 months telling me he wanted to be owned again despite his fears, is no longer a candidate. His reasons for this are too ridiculous to mention.
(Don't get me wrong: I believe what he says. He's a good guy, in his own way that's different from the way of most other guys. He knows how much it would hurt me if he was lying, and I don't think he wants to hurt me. Nonetheless, were I to try to explain to you what happened, it would literally be ridiculous. So I won't.)
So what next? Probably nothing, for quite a while.
There are no current candidates. I got a "cruise" on Recon from a boy who spent most of May and June 2011 proving to me that he was entirely unreliable, so that's not getting any response. The death of Recon Chat means there's no way to easily talk to local boys with a BDSM interest. I'm still not effective at training anyone older than about 27, so a lot of offers from those boys have to be gently rebuffed.
I was talking with another local (good guy in his way) boy this week, who had expressed some interest in the past but was always put off by this. He thought he could handle it now...until he realized that when I said "shaved head," I meant "shaved head."
He thought I meant "short buzzcut." This kind of flabbergasted me, because I've never made any secret about my thing for shaving the heads of boys in training. But he saw the name "buzzerguy," and one boy that he knew I'd played with only had (as far as he knew) a buzzcut, so he thought that's what I meant and that I was changing the rules on him when I told him that buzzcut wasn't what I meant.
Now, I had suspected he wouldn't be cool with a shaved head (I know the range of boys I train is something I limit myself), and sure enough, he had been considering me because he thought he'd look good in a short buzzcut (and he very well might—but he was thinking fashion and I was thinking submission).
But what really bugged me, and still does, is that I thought I was being both clear and consistent in what I was communicating, and he still had the wrong idea. And it wasn't what I had said: although I had negotiated with him in the past about short haircuts instead of shaved heads, I always tried to be very clear about the difference.
It's easy for me to blame him, and probably wrong, too. From my standpoint, he heard what he wanted to hear instead of what I was saying. But I'm the dominant. I have to make sure submissives hear and understand what I'm actually saying, and not something milder that they want to hear. If I screwed up in some way and led him to believe that "shaved head" meant "buzzcut," then I'm at fault. If I was perfectly accurate and he still heard what he wanted to hear, then (in BDSM terms though probably not legally) I'm still responsible. I want boys to be "surprised" by not knowing what's going to happen, but never so surprised that they feel they've been pushed too far. When that happens, even when I'm in the right, it's a horrible, sickening feeling I never want to repeat.
So, with no boy on the horizon and my faith in my own ability to be clear about what I expect and require of trainees, I've got nothing. I haven't been on IM in weeks. I've looked around at some of the online meeting places (A4A, Grindr, etc.) but they're not BDSM-specific, and the ones with mobile apps make it damned hard to even say you're into BDSM.
So, as it stands, I'm pretty much "not looking." I'm around, but it's mostly window shopping. I haven't been completely away from IM like this in probably 8 years, but I really just have no desire to log on. We'll see what happens, though probably what will happen is nothing.
