How I actually relate to people
This is the honest, personal part of my site: the way I love, the way I'm cared for, and the shapes my relationships take instead of the ones a template says they should. It's non-explicit, I wrote it in good faith, and I keep names off it on purpose. If you're here, read it like a person, not a specimen.
Quick orientation. This page is the overview. Three parts of me have their own deeper pages linked from here: the non-sexual caregiver/little side, the relationship-anarchy and polyamory side, and, kept deliberately separate from both, the adult BDSM & kink side. Each one has a quick consent step in front of it. Everything on here involves consenting adults only, and the non-sexual and sexual sides are never blurred together.
How I do relationships: polyamory and relationship anarchy
Starting here because it shapes everything else on this page. I'm ethically non-monogamous, and I sit closer to relationship anarchy than to traditional "primary and secondary" polyamory. Ethical non-monogamy means having more than one romantic or intimate relationship with everybody's full knowledge and agreement. That's the whole definition. Relationship anarchy takes it one step further and drops the ranking system entirely.
In practice that means I don't sort the people I love into tiers before I know them, and I don't treat love as a scarce resource that runs out when it gets shared. Every relationship gets built around what fits the people in it, instead of being pushed onto society's default escalator of dating, moving in, marrying, and so on. That escalator is a config file somebody else shipped, and I've never once left a default config alone. I'm a bit of a free bird about it. That isn't the same as having no responsibilities to anyone. It just means no template I didn't choose for myself.
The part people find hardest to believe is how boring it is. Isn't that exhausting, keeping track of all those people? Not really. Most of it is scheduling, saying what you mean out loud, and noticing when someone needs something they haven't asked for yet. Jealousy still happens, of course it does. When it shows up I read it as information about what somebody needs. It isn't proof that something has broken.
It also isn't a stage on the way to something else, and it isn't a workaround for a relationship that wasn't working. It's the shape that has consistently made sense to me, and the people in my life know exactly where they stand. If I had to say why the ranked version never fit: deciding up front who matters most is also deciding up front whose needs get dropped first, and I never wanted to be the one holding that list.
There's a full page on this covering what the vocabulary means, why the non-hierarchical version works for me, honest answers to the usual misconceptions, and real resources if any of it's new to you. Read the polyamory & relationship-anarchy page →
The Mama / little dynamic, plainly
One of the ways I keep myself okay is a caregiver/little dynamic. The plain version: it's a relationship where someone I deeply trust (my "Mama") helps carry some of the day-to-day mental load of being a functioning adult, and where I let myself settle into a younger, softer headspace sometimes instead of white-knuckling through everything on my own.
In practice it's emotional support and structure, full stop. Check-ins, reminders, encouragement, and someone who notices when I've gone quiet for longer than usual. It's not a power trip, it isn't infantilization, and there's nothing sexual in it. The reason it exists is simple. It works. A brain that runs out of energy for small decisions gets a lot further when it isn't the only thing keeping track.
Being "little" is a real mental and emotional state, not a costume and not a performance. I'm still an adult, with adult responsibilities and adult judgment. Littlespace changes how I'm feeling and relating in a given moment, not who I fundamentally am. On good days it's playful and soft. On hard days it's just letting myself be looked after instead of insisting I'm fine when I'm clearly not. Both of those count equally.
There's a much longer, more personal version of all of this on its own page: how the dynamic works day to day, what healthy discipline means, the boundaries that keep it safe, and the different shapes regression takes. The caregiver/little deep-dive is here → (a quick consent step comes first, but there's no password).
CG/L vs. MD/lg: what's actually different
People lump a lot of very different things together under "caregiver stuff," so let me pull apart the two that get confused most often. Two acronyms do most of the work. CG/L means caregiver and little, and it's the broad, gender-neutral umbrella. MD/lg means Mommy Dom and little girl, and it's a specific pairing that sits inside the kink side of the same family. So which one am I in? The CG/L side, and I'll say why underneath.
Neither is better or worse than the other. They're two different things, and each one is valid for the people it fits. The line between them is whether the relationship is built around support or around a Dominant and submissive power exchange, meaning one person consensually taking a leading role while the other hands some authority over. That power exchange is often, though not always, kink or sexual.
CG/L: caregiver / little
- Built around care, comfort, and structure
- "Caregiver" is a supportive role, not an authority figure
- Frequently non-sexual, and plenty of it's platonic
- The point is feeling safe and supported, not power
- This is the umbrella my own dynamic sits under
MD/lg: Mommy Dom / little girl
- Centres a Dominant and submissive power exchange
- The Mommy Dom is a caregiver who's also Dominant
- For most people who practice it, it's kink or sexual
- It can overlap with caregiving, but D/s is the core
- Completely valid, and not the dynamic I'm in
Worth saying clearly: MD/lg is completely legitimate for the adults who practice it, and plenty of people run those dynamics beautifully and healthily. What makes my own caregiver/little dynamic different is narrower than people assume. There's no Dom/sub power exchange in it and nothing sexual attached to it. It's the caregiving, without the D/s part.
Two related terms come up constantly and are worth defining while we're here. ABDL stands for Adult Baby / Diaper Lover, and it's a separate community again, non-sexual for a good number of the people in it. Age play means deliberately acting out a younger role, and that one can be kink. Neither of them is the same as age regression. Regression is a coping headspace and not a kink, and it's the thing I write about here.
The adult side of all this lives on its own page, kept deliberately separate from the non-sexual little side. That page covers what BDSM is, the caregiver-flavored dynamics done as kink, consent and safety culture, plain-language definitions, and the community tools people use. The BDSM & kink page is here → (adults only, non-explicit).
Everything in this section
The kink page above is the overview. A lot of individual subjects come up often enough, and carry enough real safety or vocabulary weight, that each one got a whole page instead of a paragraph. Every one is educational and non-explicit, every one sits behind the same quick consent step, and every one is about consenting adults. If you're only going to read one, read the rope page. It's the subject where not knowing the safety information can hurt somebody. If you want to know why any of this is written down at all, that's here.
A quick cheat-sheet of terms
The CG/L world runs on shorthand, which makes it hard to read about from the outside. So: a plain-language reference, in my own words. Some of these terms are non-sexual and belong to the little and caregiver support side; others are kink. I've flagged which is which wherever it matters. Any ages attached to "little" and "middle" are loose guides, not fixed rules, and nobody is measuring.
- Little
- Someone whose headspace sometimes feels younger than their real age, loosely in a young-child range. It describes a state, not a claim to be a child. Littles are adults.
- Middle
- The same idea with an older headspace, roughly pre-teen or teen. It sits on the same spectrum as little, just a bit further along it.
- Caregiver (CG)
- The gender-neutral term for the person supporting a little. It can be entirely non-sexual, as mine is, or it can be part of a kink dynamic.
- Mommy Dom (MD) / Daddy Dom (DD)
- Gendered caregiver titles that usually imply a Dominant role as well as a caring one. Both belong mostly to the kink side. Mommy Dom is sometimes spelled "Mommy Domme."
- Big
- Another gender-neutral word for the caregiving or older-role partner in the dynamic.
- Littlespace / Middlespace
- The regressed headspace itself. Some people spend most of their time there; others slip in and out of it depending on the day.
- CG/L, LG, LB, LO
- Caregiver/Little; little girl; little boy; little one, which is the gender-neutral option.
- MDlg · MDlb · DDlg · DDlb
- The pairings: a Mommy Dom or Daddy Dom with a little girl or little boy. DDlg is the acronym you'll see most often online. These usually sit on the kink side, so the BDSM page covers them properly, and they aren't what my own dynamic is.
- ABDL · AB · DL
- Adult Baby/Diaper Lover; Adult Baby, meaning the baby role without diapers; Diaper Lover, meaning diapers without the baby role. It's a separate community, and non-sexual for a lot of the people in it.
- LDR · SO
- Long-Distance Relationship; Significant Other.
- NSFW / SFW
- Not Safe For Work (adult) and Safe For Work (clean). It's a quick label for whether something is adult content.
- BDSM · D/s · SSC · RACK
- The kink umbrella and the consent frameworks built around it. All of these are explained properly on the BDSM page.
- Age regression vs. age play
- Regression is a headspace, either chosen as a way of coping or arriving involuntarily under stress. That's the non-sexual thing I do. Age play means deliberately acting out a younger role, and it can be kink. Two different things.
Comfort items, and why littles actually need them
A comfort item is anything that helps someone settle into a regressed or anxious headspace and feel safe once they're there. For most people it's an object: a stuffed animal, a particular blanket, a pacifier, a coloring book. It can just as easily be a specific show or a familiar song. Mine is Wolfie, a stuffed wolf who has been with me for years.
Comfort items sound trivial from the outside. They really aren't. For a lot of neurodivergent and trauma-affected brains, a comfort object works as a genuine self-regulation tool: a consistent, predictable, safe anchor that helps the nervous system shift down out of panic or overwhelm. It's the same mechanism therapists describe when they talk about grounding objects and transitional objects. The community just uses a warmer name for it.
The reason it works is simple enough. When everything feels uncertain, something familiar in your hands gives your brain one piece of information it can trust completely, and that's often enough to interrupt a spiral. Holding something soft takes the edge off in a way that being told to "just calm down" does not.
Not everyone uses them, and the ones that help are different for every person. There's no correct comfort item and there's no age you're supposed to grow out of needing one. Wanting something soft to hold when the world gets loud isn't childish. It's a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do.
The through-line
If one thing ties all of this together: I want relationships built around what's true for the people in them, not inherited from a script nobody sat down and chose. Same instinct whether it's letting someone help carry the load on a hard day, refusing to rank the people I love, or keeping a stuffed wolf within reach when the world gets loud.
None of it is complicated, and none of it is new. Be honest about what you need, make sure everyone involved actually agreed to it, and build from there. Everything else on these pages is just detail hanging off those two ideas.