New Year Q&A with Dawn: The Truth About Trust in D/s Relationships

Welcome to 2026! After a month-long break, Dawn and I returned to the podcast to answer your questions, and one theme kept surfacing beneath almost every single one: trust.

Not the fairy tale version of trust where nobody ever gets upset. The real kind. The kind that actually makes a dominant/submissive dynamic sustainable over years, not just weeks.

The Question Everyone Gets Wrong About Trust

Someone asked us: "How did you build the trust for your D/s relationship?"

Here's what most people miss when they ask this question. They're actually asking: "How long did it take before you never upset each other anymore?"

That's not trust. That's avoidance dressed up as harmony.

Dawn and I were together for 10 years, married for 8, before I asked her to be my submissive. So yes, we had history. But that history wasn't what made our D/s dynamic possible. In fact, much of what we thought was "trust" in those first 10 years was just both of us trying very hard not to rock the boat.

Real trust had to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Trust Isn't About Never Being Upset

As Dawn put it in the episode: "I had to dismantle my concept of trust. What I really felt and thought trust was in order to really rebuild it from a place of truth."

Most people think trust means: "You never do anything that upsets me, so I can trust you."

But think about what that actually creates. If the only way you can trust me is if I never upset you, then I can't actually be myself. I have to constantly monitor and manage your emotional state. And you have to do the same for me.

That's not trust. That's mutual emotional management. It's exhausting, and it doesn't work long-term.

Real trust looks different. Real trust means: "Sometimes you do things that upset me. Sometimes those things are about you and your own process, not about me at all. And I trust that you doing what you need to do, even when it upsets me, doesn't mean you've betrayed me."

That's a much deeper and more nuanced understanding of trust. And it's absolutely essential in a D/s dynamic.

Why Submissives Struggle With This

Here's where it gets tricky for submissives.

Another question we got: "I only feel calm when my husband picks the choice I want. If he does something else, I feel very dysregulated. How can I learn to fully let go?"

Notice what's happening here. She wants to let go. She wants to surrender. But her nervous system goes haywire when he makes a choice she doesn't like.

This isn't a character flaw. This is protection mechanisms doing their job.

Dawn's advice: "Learn to love the fact that you don't right now, because the fact that you don't is your fear and it's your protection mechanisms. So instead of trying to get away from that, can you let yourself feel it?"

The path to letting go isn't through forcing yourself to be okay with things. It's through actually feeling what comes up when you're not okay, and getting curious about why.

What are you actually afraid of when he makes a choice you don't like? What does that touch in you? What old wound or early life experience is getting activated?

That's where the real work is. Not in white-knuckling your way through submission, but in unwinding the patterns that make surrender feel unsafe.

The Dominant's Side of This

And if you're a man reading this, wondering how to build trust with your woman so she can surrender to you, here's what you need to know:

You can't convince her into it.

If you're trying to talk her into being your submissive, you've already lost. Because trying to convince someone is a form of pressure, and pressure creates the opposite of surrender.

What actually works? Become someone worth following.

Spend 2026 becoming as Dominant of a man as you can be. Take responsibility for your life. Live according to your own values. Get yourself in shape. Become more proactive and organized. Start leading in the areas where you already can.

Plan a date. Handle all the logistics. Tell her when to be ready. Take her somewhere. Show her what it feels like to be led by a man who has his shit together.

Don't ask for permission to lead. Just start leading.

Then, when you've actually built something real, you can have the conversation about what kind of relationship you want to create together.

Words don't mean shit. She needs to experience you differently.

What Else We Covered

This is just scratching the surface of what we talked about in this episode. We also dove into:

• How Dawn integrates being a submissive with being an individual (and why letting go of labels is key)
• What to do when your dominant gets in a funk and loses his edge
• How to navigate vanilla topics when you have strong preferences but don't want to be in charge
• The real answer to "how do I become a hypersexual nympho like Dawn?" (spoiler: you probably have some unhelpful perceptions about what that even means)
• Where we're taking OnlyFans in 2026 and what that has to do with soul work
• Our vision for strengthening our dynamic this year (hint: it's about letting go, not trying harder)

If you want the full conversation, listen to episode 114 here.

And if you're serious about creating a dominant/submissive dynamic that actually works in your real life, not just in fantasy, check out our courses at InfiniteDevotion.com/store.

Here's to 2026. Let's make it a year of actually letting go instead of just talking about it.

— Andrew