Remote Play Exposed What I Was Hiding

She thought she knew exactly what she wanted. Then one question left her searching for words she had never said out loud.

For the record, I consider myself sex-positive. I also consider myself open and relatively good at communicating about sex. I’m comfortable talking about fantasies, boundaries, toys, experiences, preferences: you name it. Anyone who’s interacted with me on my posts is probably aware of that. If anything, I’m an oversharer. The way I write is how I talk: verbose and long-winded, and with enough detail to satisfy even the most curious minds.

So imagine my surprise when I finally got around to allowing someone to control my toys over a voice call for the first time, and I could not get a single word out. And I mean: not. a. single. word.

There were a lot of contributing factors, sure. Nerves and excitement from a control freak who’d previously had trouble trusting even a simple pattern. An unnecessarily stressful prelude to the play where the universe did its best to put all sorts of blocks in the way. The simple fact that English is my second language and everything needs to be internally translated before being voiced. And last but not least, the sound of another person’s voice, even one already recognisable from voice notes, made it all feel indescribably real for the first time.

Because as I have discovered, there is a difference between discussing something analytically or theoretically and communicating that same thought in the moment. Analysing what I like is easy. Actually reacting verbally during play turns out to be much trickier. I can blame the language thing (I speak English every day, but certain terms are not part of my everyday vocabulary, to say the least), and I can blame the newness of it all. Or I can be honest and admit that saying “I want…” or “I like…”, or, God forbid, dirty talking directly to someone during play feels much, much more vulnerable.

Not exactly ideal for play sessions conducted almost exclusively through audio.

Not catastrophic either, when you have someone patient on the other end who can interpret my breathless giggles, distinguish my affirming “mhm”s from my reluctant “mh-hm”s, and read the pitch of my strained whimpers to get me exactly where I wanted to go. A few times, to be accurate.

So why is this so difficult for me?

It’s not really that I lack the vocabulary, or that I don’t know what I want. But in writing, I get to choose my words. I get to process, analyse, formulate, and edit. In-the-moment communication requires skipping several of those comfortable steps. I have to let someone hear the desire and embarrassment and uncertainty before I’ve polished it into something safe. The perfectionist in me panics. What if this isn’t the right word? What if I can’t pronounce it? What if my voice shakes too much? What if I sound fake? What if I start giggling? What if, what if, what if…?

It makes dirty talking unexpectedly intimate for me. Normally, I can rely on body language and physical cues, but those don’t help much during remote play. The Lovense Remote app gave us many ways to communicate: text, voice notes, and toy control. But it also exposed some gaps I wasn’t aware of. If I had been, I would definitely have warned my partner beforehand.

And while my verbal communication during play has gone from zero words to one or two halfway coherent ones (if prompted), I obviously have a long way to go.

So, how do I get there?

The “boring” and obvious answer is: trust and acceptance. I have to accept that I will not go from giggly and non-verbal to a sultry phone-sex operator overnight, and I have to trust my partner not to judge my sometimes awkward attempts. I have to accept that embarrassed, incomplete communication still counts, and trust my partner enough to let them coax the words out of me.

And sometimes I dump 600-word screenshots from my notes app into our chat with all the stuff I wanted to say but couldn’t 🤭💕💕