The Sarah Saga (F/M)

I find the idea that "in society" (not Wade and Sarah) someone can tickle another person against their will for as long as they want and nobody have a problem with it pretty icky. Especially when I'm made to feel different or perverted for liking being tickled by these same people. I don't get it.

Fired said:

I don't want to be a debbie-downer here, but are you actually a lee, Wade? And if not, and she is legitimately torturing you despite your pleas for her to stop, it raises questions around consent tbh.

Please tell me if I have this wrong.

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That's a legit question. And the answer's encased in the tangled thickets of my personal psychology -- as it collides with the even more impenetrable recesses of Sarah's psychology -- so I don't know if there's an answer that will make sense to other people. Not sure if there's an answer that makes sense to me. But fair warning, this response is probably going to run long as I try to figure it out here...

I'm genuinely very ticklish, so being tickled relentlessly -- especially by someone with an edge of sadism like Sarah -- is an intolerable experience. And yet I'm on this site reliving the experiences of being tickled by people by retelling them here, so clearly it's not straight-up trauma for me. My unruly brain derives satisfaction not from the sensation of tickling itself but rather from the experience of not being able to stand it -- and from the existence of other people who want to subject me to something I can't stand. So I'm oscillating between the suffering experience of being too ticklish to handle this, and an enjoyment of having been forced to experience that suffering. Typically the actual experience of being tickled relentlessly is something I'm desperate to escape when I'm in the moment, but then when it's over I can -- almost intellectually -- appreciate the agreeable elements of having been forced to endure that.

As for Sarah, her choice to tickle me seems to be largely opportunistic -- she knows I'm susceptible to it, so it's a convenient and entertaining way to torment me in revenge for the ways I've harassed and annoyed her in the past (and the present). I've said that if I weren't ticklish, or if there were an easier way to pester me, Sarah would go after me another way. But I'm not 100% sure about that -- there really isn't any other means of tormenting someone like tickling, with its useful combination of playfulness, intolerability, entertainment value, humiliation, and social acceptability. It's so playful and harmless and mundane a form of torture, after all, that Sarah can even enlist my wife or my sister-in-law or other people (who ostensibly like me a lot more than Sarah does) in menacing me and they'll join in without any pangs of compassion. So it's her uniquely good fortune that my weakness involves tickling, because some other form of punishment probably wouldn't be an option. Maybe some kind of teasing or verbal abuse -- though Lord knows we both engage in those kinds of things anyway -- but even those tactics can be more problematic socially than tickling.

I've also remarked in the past that if Sarah had any inkling that there was any minuscule aspect of tickling that was pleasant -- or even less than 100% torturous -- to me, she'd abandon it in a heartbeat, because for her that would ruin the punishment value of tickling me. But even that dynamic is complicated. Like everyone else in my life who tickles me or has tickled me -- my wife, my sister-in-law, exes, friends, coworkers -- I'm sure Sarah is responding on some level to the fact that my response communicates a sense that the experience of being tickled isn't genuinely harrowing for me. There's something about the way I bounce back afterwards that communicates that doing this kind of thing is ultimately fine, even though I was sincrerly pleading for it to stop only minutes before. As one of my coworkers once exulted after she tickled me for the first (and not the last) time: "You're not mad!" If I emerged from the experience of being tickled in tears, or furious, or shouting "I never want to see you again," even the heartless Sarah would feel compelled to give up her sadistic little hobby. She's twisted, but she's not a sociopath. But I don't do that -- even though it would solve some of my problems, free me from suffering at Sarah's whims, and reconfigure our power dynamic to my advantage -- because I don't feel that. Sarah, like other people in my life, senses from my responses to her vicious little stimuli that this is a safe practice.

So everything about the quirky and contradictory elements of ticklishness -- at least as I experience it -- combines into a narrow band of social and individual permissibility that makes tickling me mercilessly the ideal way for Sarah to take out her frustrations on me. It is indeed 100% non-consensual in every accepted sense of that term -- I don't explicitly invite or condone it, I try to escape and avoid it, and when I plead for it to stop I mean it -- and from my end it's frequently excruciating and puts me in a position of utter helplessness that's unfortunate from both a practical and a psychological standpoint. But both society's perception of tickling and my own complicated responses to it place the act in a zone of acceptability which gives Sarah one perfect weapon she can deploy against me at will.

Told ya I'm a tangled thicket.

Great explanation of the hate/love relationship that many of us have with extreme tickle torture.

Good stuff there Wade and thank you very much for the effort you put into that answer.

I guess in a way I am the opposite of you - I do sincerely love being tickled so so so much, but only by someone who genuinely likes me. Even if Sarah was the best tickler in the entire world, if I were in your shoes, I would positively lose my shit at her. To have such a lovely experience tainted with legitimate sadism and general unfriendliness would just ruin it completely for me.

That's not to say I object in any way to a friend tickling me for being a brat...the operative word being FRIEND there. "Funishments" are a thing, but there is a mutual understanding there.

I wonder if it's worth actually discussing these things with Sarah. Whether she does this purely for torture, or if there is any hint of affection for you in her giving you such ticklish agony. Maybe someone she legitimately doesn't like who gives her the same level of difficulty and is just as ticklish as you wouldn't receive such attention.

No, you're right. It's likely that my characterizations have exaggerated the depth of the antipathy between me and Sarah. We don't have a fantastic chemistry and we wouldn't hang out if it weren't for my wife, but at the bottom of it all I think we've come to basically like each other -- we each think the other is fundamentally a good, smart person, and sometimes we even hang out and enjoy talking about things at length like normal people (such scenes never find their way here, of course). I definitely get on her nerves with my sense of humor and my occasionally ill-conceived teases or pranks, hence my frequent comeuppance at her hands; and she can certainly grate on my nerves when she's in a particularly dour and humorless mood. But after all this time we're actually, I guess, friends.

Because you're right -- someone she actually loathed wouldn't be worth tickling into oblivion. You've got to like someone at least a little bit to put in that kind of time and effort. Somewhere buried under all her gruff impatience and hostility there's actual affection for me, and that's probably at the basis of every time she finds a way to pin me down and tickle me into hysterics. Lucky me, to have such friends (?)!

Wade said:

No, you're right. It's likely that my characterizations have exaggerated the depth of the antipathy between me and Sarah. We don't have a fantastic chemistry and we wouldn't hang out if it weren't for my wife, but at the bottom of it all I think we've come to basically like each other -- we each think the other is fundamentally a good, smart person, and sometimes we even hang out and enjoy talking about things at length like normal people (such scenes never find their way here, of course). I definitely get on her nerves with my sense of humor and my occasionally ill-conceived teases or pranks, hence my frequent comeuppance at her hands; and she can certainly grate on my nerves when she's in a particularly dour and humorless mood. But after all this time we're actually, I guess, friends.

Because you're right -- someone she actually loathed wouldn't be worth tickling into oblivion. You've got to like someone at least a little bit to put in that kind of time and effort. Somewhere buried under all her gruff impatience and hostility there's actual affection for me, and that's probably at the basis of every time she finds a way to pin me down and tickle me into hysterics. Lucky me, to have such friends (?)!

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Like I said in another post, I am both concerned for you and insanely jealous of you

Wade said:

... Lucky me, to have such friends (?)!

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Yes, lucky you!

Like I said earlier Wade, I still think deep down inside you like it, but you just won't admit it...

Apropos of this conversation, I remembered there's something Sarah said to me a little while ago when she was taunting me (it was in one of her attacks that I've yet to narrate here; I'm reeeeallllly behind!!): she said something along the lines of having read that you can't be tickled by someone you really don't like -- that if someone you just hate tries to tickle you, it won't work. "So see, Wade," she said, "the only reason I can even do this to you is because you like me a little bit! If you didn't like me just a little bit, you'd be invulnerable! But you're hopeless, because I'm! So! Likable!"

(I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of what she said. And even though she was mostly just trying to mock and taunt me, she may have had some kind of a point.)

Wade said:

Apropos of this conversation, I remembered there's something Sarah said to me a little while ago when she was taunting me (it was in one of her attacks that I've yet to narrate here; I'm reeeeallllly behind!!): she said something along the lines of having read that you can't be tickled by someone you really don't like -- that if someone you just hate tries to tickle you, it won't work. "So see, Wade," she said, "the only reason I can even do this to you is because you like me a little bit! If you didn't like me just a little bit, you'd be invulnerable! But you're hopeless, because I'm! So! Likable!"

(I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of what she said. And even though she was mostly just trying to mock and taunt me, she may have had some kind of a point.)

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The implication there is that she likes you too, 'just a little bit'.

And in fairness, the last encounter you narrated seemed far more affectionate on Sarah's part.

I think we can all agree some new stories of Wades ticklish torment are long overdue. Haven't you been teasing us for a while now that she finally discovered your ticklish feet?

beerbaron2 said:

I think we can all agree some new stories of Wades ticklish torment are long overdue. Haven't you been teasing us for a while now that she finally discovered your ticklish feet?

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Trust me, he'll hold out as long as he can....

The issue of consent that Fired brought up got me to thinking about my own reaction to all the Sarah series.

Without a doubt, my favorite story in this thread is the last one, where Amanda solicits Sarah's help to hold Wade down, but it's Amanda who's doing the tickling, not Sarah. Trying to put myself in Wade's shoes, I think my reaction would be similar to Fired's initial description - If someone with whom I didn't have an intimate relationship with tickled me to the extent that Sarah torments Wade, I think I'd be uneasy and quite possibly upset by it. But, if that same person was simply holding me down so that my significant other could tickle me, I'd certainly feel embarrassed but I wouldn't feel as, shall we say, violated by it.

So Wade, regardless of how you feel about Sarah and her tormenting of you, you sure hit the jackpot with Amanda! May we all be as lucky someday!

Thank you! Amanda is a phenomenal person and so so very out of my league.

Okay, this is going to be too long but: in some ways this conversation reminds me of the exchanges I've had with Sarah's then-therapist. I was trying to make the case -- at first indirectly, and in subsequent conversations more emphatically -- that what Sarah was doing to me was, on some level, abusive. I never used that terminology, nor felt it was applicable, because it would have been a mischaracterization and would have been an affront to people who actually have to deal with legitimately abusive relationships. But I wanted Frances to weigh in and say that Sarah was being unfair or going too far; wanted her to re-impose on Sarah the tickling embargo that left me enjoying a feeling of impunity as I teased and needled and annoyed Sarah for however many months or years it was.

But Frances refused; she said this wasn't something Sarah was doing to me -- it was a dynamic we fostered together, that I on some level encouraged her to torment me, ergo it was not an abusive relationship but rather an affectionate (if nettlesome) one; and my experience of being tickled by Sarah was not a genuine misery but a playful -- and ultimately harmless -- kind of suffering, or else I wouldn't keep encouraging, explicitly or implicitly, her to try to come after me again and again. And Frances was convinced I was encouraging Sarah, partly based on her own observations of my behavior and Sarah's descriptions of it but also because of what she knew about Sarah -- that she's a scrapper, and a bad loser, and she's got a temper and perhaps poor impulse control, but she's not vicious; she's not an abuser.

Frances cited multiple pieces of evidence for her conclusions but the main one she came back to multiple times was that, if I really wanted Sarah to stop, all I had to do was confront her seriously in a neutral moment, tell her it made me unhappy, and that I wanted her to stop. Frances was convinced that if I did that, Sarah would absolutely stop, because she isn't a monster, and this would be new information to her that I wasn't receiving the experience in the way she intended it. I wasn't 100% convinced that, if I tried it, it would work. But Frances came back and said that wasn't as important as the fact that I hadn't tried it. If I really needed Sarah to stop, Frances said, I would have that conversation with her. And if I didn't choose to have that conversation, that was evidence that this was a friendly dynamic -- an edgy, competitive, arguably twisted, friendly dynamic, but a mutual one overall -- and that I didn't want her to stop for my own well-being but just as a different path to winning against her somehow.

That doesn't mean Sarah doesn't go too far sometimes -- I believe even she thinks she does -- or that when I'm in a particularly vulnerable position or she's in a particularly aggressive mood I'm not desperate, in the moment, for her to stop. But I had to admit there was a lot about what Frances said that made sense.

I don't think the therapist should be qualifying what is and what isn't genuine misery. That is entirely subjective. Just go on Fetlife and you'll find profiles that are into brutal pain-based play but have tickling in their hard limits.

I agree that there does seem to be a dynamic where you implicitly consent to Sarah tickling you...perhaps an unstated brat (you) vs brat tamer (Sarah) dynamic. But the part I agree with the most is that if you want this to stop you have to talk to Sarah about it directly. If you don't want it to stop and enjoy the dynamic (if not the actual tickling), then there is no shaming in owning that.

Fired said:

I don't think the therapist should be qualifying what is and what isn't genuine misery. That is entirely subjective. Just go on Fetlife and you'll find profiles that are into brutal pain-based play but have tickling in their hard limits.

I agree that there does seem to be a dynamic where you implicitly consent to Sarah tickling you...perhaps an unstated brat (you) vs brat tamer (Sarah) dynamic. But the part I agree with the most is that if you want this to stop you have to talk to Sarah about it directly. If you don't want it to stop and enjoy the dynamic (if not the actual tickling), then there is no shaming in owning that.

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Well, most of my ramblings above are paraphrasing or characterizing what Frances said, not directly quoting her, so I don't want to impugn her professionalism, BUT that is indeed part of the message I took away from our communications. AND I do think there's a core element of both Frances's analysis of the situation and Sarah's behavior that stems from both of them holding to the unexamined assumption that tickling is a fundamentally frivolous and harmless activity -- like: How bad could it possibly be? Which is a blinkered perspective, but there's a part of me that gets why they think that if only based on their observations of me. Prolonged tickling is doubtless a misery for some people, but I bounce back from every encounter unharmed and undamaged.

The brat-vs-brat tamer dynamic that you articulate is dead on; I feel seen. It is 100% the case that I perpetuate and contribute that dynamic with Sarah.

This is by far the best true story thread on PFM. I'm sure there have been many encounters since the last update though and I for one would like to see a continuation here.

JustAnonymous said:

This is by far the best true story thread on PFM. I'm sure there have been many encounters since the last update though and I for one would like to see a continuation here.

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I'd have to agree with you about this thread. Wade's reactions get my attention! Makes me even want to tie him up and play head games with him before tickling him senseless!

I'm literally years behind in chronicling my occasionally frantic encounters with my wife's friend Sarah, and for that I apologize.

But I'm motivated to post because just about twenty minutes ago I was sprawled panting and ignominious on the floor of my living room, Sarah having yet again driven me to paroxysms of giddy desperation -- not as prolonged or relentless as some -- and as I watched her from behind as she strode away triumphantly with her confident, assertive, not-entirely-unmasculine gait, I had occasion to reflect on the bizarre dynamic that's evolved between us.

Sarah's pretty, with her classical bone structure and alabaster complexion and cascading dark hair -- from some angles she could be the model in a pre-Raphaelite painting -- but she's not a delicate flower or even stereotypically feminine. She's not playful or silly or flirtatious or tactile. She's reserved and standoffish with a no-bullshit posture and a solid center of gravity. So how peculiar that we've come to this place that it's her -- with her big sturdy hands and the sprightly grazings of their strong potato-pickin' fingers -- that routinely sets about sending me into helpless flailing fits of girlish giggles. It's probably just my own preconceived notions and acculturated expectations at work here but I'm periodically struck by the incongruity of the whole thing.

More to come, I semi-promise.

Wade said:

I'm literally years behind in chronicling my occasionally frantic encounters with my wife's friend Sarah, and for that I apologize.

But I'm motivated to post because just about twenty minutes ago I was sprawled panting and ignominious on the floor of my living room, Sarah having yet again driven me to paroxysms of giddy desperation -- not as prolonged or relentless as some -- and as I watched her from behind as she strode away triumphantly with her confident, assertive, not-entirely-unmasculine gait, I had occasion to reflect on the bizarre dynamic that's evolved between us.

Sarah's pretty, with her classical bone structure and alabaster complexion and cascading dark hair -- from some angles she could be the model in a pre-Raphaelite painting -- but she's not a delicate flower or even stereotypically feminine. She's not playful or silly or flirtatious or tactile. She's reserved and standoffish with a no-bullshit posture and a solid center of gravity. So how peculiar that we've come to this place that it's her -- with her big sturdy hands and their strong potato-pickin' fingers -- that routinely sets about sending me into helpless flailing fits of girlish giggles. It's probably just my own preconceived notions and acculturated expectations at work here but I'm periodically struck by the incongruity of the whole thing.

More to come, I semi-promise.

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Yes, tell us all the details.

Nice to see you posting stories again!

I know I've been promising everyone for, literally, years, to bring the Sarah story up to date with some more recent incidents, but I've had trouble finding the time. As a peace offering I asked an AI to write a version of our story for you. Not exactly heavy on the detail, but here it is in the meantime:

Sarah and Amanda had been best friends since high school, and over the years, they had shared just about everything. Sarah had always been the more serious and reserved of the two, while Amanda was more outgoing and carefree.

One thing that had always annoyed Sarah about Amanda's husband Wade was his tendency to tease and pester her. He loved nothing more than to get a rise out of her, and Sarah found it exhausting trying to keep up with his constant pranks and jokes.

But Sarah also knew that Wade had a secret weakness: he was extremely ticklish. Amanda had confided in her about this, and Sarah had always made a mental note to use it to her advantage if she ever needed to.

So, one day when Wade was getting on Sarah's nerves particularly badly, she decided to put her tickling skills to the test. She chased him around the house, tickling him mercilessly until he was practically begging for mercy.

At first, Amanda was a little concerned about what was going on, but as she saw how much Sarah was enjoying herself, she couldn't help but laugh along with her.
In the end, Sarah managed to get Wade to calm down and behave himself, and the two of them became much better friends as a result. And from then on, whenever Wade started getting a little too feisty, Sarah knew just what to do to keep him in line.

You should get the AI package to write a longer story with more details.

Yeah, I haven't spent much time with the program but it's definitely profoundly uninterested in the intricate details of my suffering at Sarah's hands -- or of anything else, presumably. That said, even though it got some details wrong, it's uncanny to see a computer program so succinctly sum up the essential truth of the interpersonal dynamic among me, my wife, and Sarah in a few broad strokes.

Meanwhile, if I nudged the AI to write a more detailed story about Sarah torturing me, I'm afraid I'd wake up the next morning in a Black Mirror episode and every detail of it would come true.

Wade said:

...
Meanwhile, if I nudged the AI to write a more detailed story about Sarah torturing me, I'm afraid I'd wake up the next morning in a Black Mirror episode and every detail of it would come true.

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And would that be a good thing?