Subversed

Meghan once told me she didn't want to feel like my employee. She was my business partner.

I took that seriously.

Maybe a little too seriously.

Last issue, Meghan wrote about the weird tension of being my co-founder in one context and my submissive in another. This is the other half of that story, because from my side I realized I may have created part of the problem by trying very hard not to prompt a different one.

For context, Meghan and I are long-distance polyamorous partners. We each have our own marriages. We don't share a house, or a daily routine, or a default bedroom we eventually wander back into at the end of the night. We have calls and texts and visits and time zones and this business we somehow built in the middle of all of it.

So when she told me she didn't want to feel like my employee, I got it immediately. I don't want that either. SubTasks isn't Rob's app with Meghan helping from the sidelines. This is ours. She gets to disagree with me, push back on my decisions, tell me a feature is confusing, tell me the onboarding is bad, all of it.

And honestly, I think I got pretty good at that part.

I got good at not slipping into Dom mode during business calls. I got good at making sure she had equal weight in the room. I got good at treating the app like something we were building together, because that's what it is.

The overcorrection is that I may have gotten worse at recognizing when Dom mode was actually being invited.

Which is funny in the deeply annoying way life is sometimes funny, because we are literally building an app about power dynamics. I spend all day thinking about tasks and rewards and protocols and how people maintain a D/s dynamic across real life, and somehow I still managed to miss the obvious thing in my own relationship.

Meghan wasn't saying, "never take control." She was saying, "don't take control in the place where I'm your partner and equal." Those are not the same sentence.

The hard part is that long distance makes "the place" much harder to identify.

I keep saying "in the bedroom," but for us that's not always a room. Sometimes it's a video call. Sometimes it's a text. Sometimes it's a task in SubTasks. Sometimes it's a voice note she hears while I'm asleep because the time zones are ridiculous. The same phone can hold a product decision, a romantic message, a logistics problem, and a D/s moment within the same hour.

So then the question I actually struggle with is: when is the right context?

When is taking control wanted, and when would it feel like I'm steamrolling my co-founder? When is a task part of our dynamic, and when is it just one more thing added to an already full day? When is she asking me to step in, and when are we just two tired people trying to make a relationship work through a screen?

I don't think the answer is "be more dominant all the time." That would miss the point completely. The answer is probably more explicit context, which sounds less sexy but is probably the whole ballgame for us.

A phrase, or a check-in, or a clearer opening and closing to the dynamic. It's a way of saying, okay, business mode is done now. Or, no, this is still business mode, please do not make this weird. Some signal that tells both of us what room we're in, even when there isn't an actual room.

And there's the SubTasks mirror, obviously. A task, a reward, a protocol, even a silly little check-in, all of those are really just signals. They tell both people what game they're playing right now. The structure isn't there because anyone forgot how to have a relationship without an app. It's there because real life is noisy and sometimes you need a clear flag in the ground.

Apparently we do too. Shocking discovery from the people who built the app.

So if Meghan's question last issue was, can I be both of these versions of myself, my half of the answer is yes. And I have to help make room for both. In the business, that means protecting her authority. In the dynamic, it means not overcorrecting so hard that I leave her holding the clipboard there too.

We don't have a perfect ritual for it yet. We probably won't. But naming the overcorrection helped, and now I can't unsee it.

If you've navigated this, especially long distance or with a partner you also work with or build things with, I'd love to hear how you know when the context is right without making it feel fake. Hit reply, or find us on Reddit, Discord, FetLife or social. I'm reading these as much for us as for the newsletter.

Rob

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Subversed is the newsletter from SubTasks  ·  subtasksapp.com

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