It Was Always About More Than Dom/Sub

A note to anyone finding Infinite Devotion for the first time, and to everyone who's been here from the beginning.

Three years ago, this podcast launched under the name Infinite Devotion.

A year or so later, it became Dom Sub Devotion. The reasoning made sense at the time. Dawn and I were going deep into the world of dominance and submission dynamics, we were teaching people how to build those dynamics inside loving relationships, and naming the podcast after that world helped it find the right audience faster.

It worked. For several years it worked well.

But something kept being true underneath all of it, something that the name Dom Sub Devotion could never quite say out loud.

This was never really about dominance and submission.

It was about what two people found when they went all the way in.

What the Dom/Sub Container Actually Was

Dawn and I have been together for over 15 years. We live and travel full-time in an RV. We run a business together, coach people together, and have built a life that is, by most conventional measures, unusual.

At some point about ten years into our relationship, I asked Dawn if she would be my submissive. Her answer, by her own account, was something close to: sure, what does that mean?

She didn't come into it with an identity around the label. She didn't have a fantasy she was trying to live out. What she heard underneath my question was something simpler: I wanted to lead, and I was asking if she'd follow. She trusted me enough to say yes and find out where it went.

Where it went was not what either of us expected.

What the Dom/sub container turned out to be, for us, was an extraordinarily demanding school of self-knowledge. To lead well, I had to go inside myself and find out what was actually there. To follow with an open heart, Dawn had to locate every place she was trying to control outcomes through compliance, withdrawal, or emotional management and let go of it.

The collar, the rituals, the explicit power exchange, those things were real and they mattered, but they were the surface of something much deeper.

Underneath was embodiment. Shame work. Learning to be present in a body and a moment instead of managing an experience from a safe distance. Learning what trust actually requires of the person who gives it and the person who receives it. Learning that desire doesn't die in long relationships because of familiarity. It dies because people stop being honest.

These are not Dom/sub lessons. They are human ones.

What I Actually Do When I Coach People

Here's the thing that kept becoming more and more obvious the longer I coached people inside the Dom/sub world.

When someone came to me struggling with their dynamic, I almost never talked about dominance and submission. I told people that at the start of every coaching relationship: the dynamic part gets easy. It's everything that gets in the way of the dynamic that we're actually here to work on.

The shame that makes a man collapse his leadership the moment his partner pushes back. The wound underneath a woman's need to control the environment before she can let herself be led. The people-pleasing pattern that looks like devotion but is actually a way of avoiding the discomfort of being fully known. The emotional suppression that a man has been performing since childhood because somewhere along the way he learned that his inner life was inconvenient.

None of that is about Dom/sub. All of it is about being human inside a relationship with another human.

And I kept watching the people I worked with transform. People who had spent years in therapy and felt stuck. People who had read every book and couldn't figure out why knowing things wasn't changing anything. People who came in talking about their dynamic and left talking about their marriage, their sense of self, their capacity for joy.

The work was reaching them. But the name on the door was keeping other people from even walking through it.

The Ceiling the Name Created

The Dom/sub and BDSM world has a shame economy built into it.

This isn't a judgment. It's just a reality. A significant number of people who live in that world and consume content in that space do so anonymously, with separate email addresses, fake names, and no visible connection to any of it. Everything about what they learn, about themselves, about each other, about sex and love and leadership and all of it, stays private because the world inside which they did that work carries stigma they aren't ready to own publicly. 

Which is entirely their right. 

Dawn and I have never operated that way. We use our real names and real faces. We've never been ashamed of how we live. But we spent years building inside a world where shame was the water everyone else was swimming in, and that created a ceiling on who everything we were sharing could even reach.

Someone struggling with disconnection in their marriage, someone watching desire quietly die in a relationship they don't want to leave, someone who has never heard the word Dom/sub and never will, that person was scrolling right past everything I had to say because the packaging told them it wasn't for them.

It was for them. It has always been for them.

The Name Is Returning to What It Always Was

As of this episode, the podcast is Infinite Devotion again.

Nothing about the actual work is changing. Dawn and I are still who we are. She still wears her collar. The Dom/sub reality of our relationship isn't going anywhere and we aren't pretending otherwise. The back catalog of 130-plus episodes is still there and still worth your time if you want the full picture of where this came from.

But the name on the door is now the honest one.

Infinite Devotion is what this has always been about. Two people who refused to accept that soul-deep love and genuine erotic desire couldn't coexist in the same long-term relationship. Who went deep into one specific container and came out transformed in a way that doesn't belong to any lifestyle or label.

The Full Picture of What Infinite Devotion Is

One more thing worth saying clearly, especially for anyone finding this for the first time.

Infinite Devotion is not just a podcast. It's the whole life Dawn and I have built and continue to build.

The podcast, the blog, the coaching, and the book that's coming are where the depth lives. The written work, the long conversations, the real thinking about what it takes to stay genuinely alive inside a long relationship. That's what you'll find here and at infinitedevotion.com/blog.

Dawn's Instagram, dawn.of.desire, is where the aliveness shows up in a different form. The silliness, the fun, the evidence that a healed and whole relationship is not a serious, sanitized thing. It's playful and primal and completely human.

And the OnlyFans, at dawnofdesire.net, is the sexual side of our relationship, lived openly and without apology. Not as a performance, not as a departure from the depth work, but as another honest expression of a life that isn't hiding anything.

These aren't separate businesses that happen to share our name. They're facets of one integrated life. The depth, the joy, the sexuality, the devotion. All of it together is our lives, lived openly, as an example of what becomes possible when you embody the lessons we share. The lessons we've learned through experience.

You can live without hiding. You can have the love and the desire and the aliveness and the fun. You can stop partitioning yourself into acceptable pieces for different audiences.

That's what this is about. That's what it has always been about.

Listen to the Episode

The conversation that goes with this post is Episode 138 of the Infinite Devotion podcast. Dawn and I recorded it together and covered the full arc of why this change is happening now, what Dom/sub dynamics actually taught us, what the shame economy costs people, and what devotion actually means to each of us personally.

It's worth the full listen.

Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you want more, the blog is at infinitedevotion.com/blog.

Welcome to Infinite Devotion.