Even if you don’t practice kink, even if you don’t have sex, you should still have a safeword and discuss it with your partner(s). I used my safeword for the first time last week, and it wasn’t part of a kink scene at all.

My girlfriend was spooning me and I jokingly mentioned that I still hadn’t forgiven her for killing a goldfish in Terraria. She started doing a routine riffing on the way some hunters force their kids to kill an animal as some kind of rite-of-passsage. She was whispering to me about how next time she’d make me kill the goldfish, talking about how she’d hold the knife with me and we’d do it together. It was an excellent performance, and should’ve been very funny… except it struck a nerve that I didn’t even know I had.

I don’t really know what happened but I felt suddenly panicky, I couldn’t formulate my words, and I wanted to get away, to get out of the situation. Instead of her arms feeling comforting like usual, I suddenly felt trapped within them. So I said “red”.

She immediately let me go and rolled away a little to give me some space. After a couple of seconds my panic subsided and I rolled over to cuddle her again, and cried a little. Then I explained as best as I understood what had set me off (I hate doing bad things in games, I stopped playing Disco Elysium because it pained me that there was often no good option), and then we talked about boundaries (she can keep doing whatever in her own games, it’s fiction so I don’t care, but in multiplayer games she won’t kill my animals). Then we cuddled a bunch more and re-affirmed our love.

Thanks to the safe word, she knew that I was being serious about not enjoying the joke. The use of a safe word immediately brought the situation back into something I was comfortable with.

Without the safe word, what would have happened? I could’ve tried to physically fighting my way out from her hug, potentially hurting her in the process. I could’ve gotten angry and yelled at her. I could’ve burst into tears in a less productive way. Perhaps I could’ve dissociated to make it through while hiding my “weakness”, internalising my ill feelings to brew until some later day.

For that matter, you should practice aftercare even outside of kink! Aftercare is useful in kink to debrief from emotionally intense situations, make sure that people understand what things that were said were true and what each others true feelings are, and to prevent any potential trauma from being carried out of the situation. But there are emotionally intense situations that arise outside of kink, and the same applies to those. If you argue, or if a joke goes wrong, or if anything emotionally intense happens, aftercare can help with that.

Final thought, the way that people react to your use of a safeword says a lot about them. I’ve heard advice from people in the kink scene that if you’re playing with a new partner it can be a good idea to test the safeword out in a low-stakes situation just to make sure they respect it. My girlfriend immediately responded to my safeword even though we were outside of any scene, and even though the cause must’ve seemed ridiculous to her. (It felt ridiculous to me, I wasn’t expecting to respond like that!) I feel even more safe around her now, and I love her even more than I did before.