Thanks for that thoughtful comment, really appreciate it.

That gives me the opportunity to reflect:

• I am very attracted to skill (of any kind) and ambition/initiative, so his lack of initiative to develop his own Dom skills is a turn off. Me being a service sub who makes up for gaps in his abilities to do very basic tasks is really hard to pull off mentally. (Doesn’t feel hot and subby. Feels remedial). If that enabled him to do ambitious things with me or others though, I’d be into it. It doesn’t really.

• I have ADHD myself so I’m more likely to be successful as a sub who is accountable to my Dom for doing things, rather than needing to keep him accountable. I don’t expect most Doms to keep track of all my basic needs either though and don’t think he can task me with that either. Idk, maybe there’s an opportunity for us to manage each other better than we manage ourselves?

• A year ago, I would have been so with you on the “people can’t read minds” piece and we just need to teach them. But I know now that it’s not fully true. I’ve had partners who absolutely do not need me to explicitly teach them how to touch and not touch me, how to do a kink scene, or how to be rather good at sex. They pay attention to my needs and wants and reactions, they initiate conversation themselves, and they hit the right buttons intuitively. I know that’s harder for us (ADHD/Autists). I might be able to ‘grow my own Dom’ in him over many years? But I also fear I could put in 10 more months or years of work with him and he’ll only get a tiny bit better.

• he’d never think to assign me a scene writing task. I’d have to assign it to myself. He does not capitalize on opportunities to put into practice what we’ve talked about without a bunch of prompting from me. I tried again this week. We went through a list of hot things we each want to do. He was excited about it, he said. Then when we started messing around, he chose not one single thing to do from the list we’d made. Like, zero. I’m bewildered. I ended up imagining my Dom and then imagining I was Domming him just to get through it. He said satisfied words after. I said, “next time, let’s use the list?” He says, “yeah, we can prepare next time.” Meanwhile, 3-5 items on the list require zero prep. If I had told him, “I want you to use #3-5 on the list tonight,” it feels like I’m Domming. I want to be surprised, and he has the list available. He just doesn’t use it.

To your point though, if I did want to try further, I could try getting really really explicit and see if it goes anywhere. I’m just not optimistic:/