One of the questions I get asked most often is: How do you manage intimacy, friendships, lovers, and private life when your professional life looks the way it does?
To answer that, here’s the rough outline: six months on tour, teaching every weekend in a new city; three months of vacation split between Stockholm and Berlin; three months of solitude in either Tokyo or Brazil. In the course of my work, I meet roughly two thousand people a year.
The space I work in is alive with contact. Vulnerability, intimacy, creativity, personal growth through hardship and triumph — these unfold daily, both between me and others and among the people around me. And it distorts my world. I come to expect this level of attunement as the norm. So it shocks my system when people are bogged down in everyday chores, stuck as cogs in an abused machine—the realization that most of life is not very conscious, consensual, or caring. On the contrary, the people who attend my events I experience as emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually attuned. This cognitive dissonance haunts me.
My professional world is saturated with erotic intensity, yet I experience it not through my own body but through empathy—or through noise-cancelling headphones when I go to bed early with my books and a cup of camomile tea because the play party turned orgy is still rocking wild downstairs in the big countryside house in yet another country. My work isn’t for my pleasure; it’s for others to feel and explore. Physical interaction with clients is rare, strictly bounded, and always in service of their experience. Which is kind of boring when you are dom at heart.
What I long for in my private life is something different. I want to feel, to play, to explore in my body in ways that delight my intellect and spirit. The basics I’ve done countless times—I still enjoy them—but what truly ignites me is venturing into the unknown. And my nomadic life makes traditional relationships impossible. I cannot be anyone’s boyfriend or the father of a child. You might see me two or three times a year in your city—unless you live in Stockholm, Berlin, Tokyo, or Brazil. If we want more, you must travel. And when we meet, I want depth. I want presence. We must be brave together.
This lifestyle comes with limits—but it also opens doors. In 2025, the intimate relationships I’ve pursued have been almost entirely dom–sub dynamics. Some dates insist on “getting to know me as a person” before exploring power dynamics. But the social me is not always who they will interact with. They need to know if I’m a competent dom. And I need to know whether I can trust them as a sub. I learn this through play—preferably first in public or semi-public spaces, or by observing them with someone I trust, or by reading in depth how they express or portray themselves.
To go deeper, there must be a future—an intention to see each other, to reconnect a few times a year. Play and preparation unfold in the spaces between. Distance is not a limitation; it is a prerequisite. A power dynamic cannot exist 24/7. Space—measured in time and kilometres—creates the conditions for intensity when we meet.
Given this intensity, in both work and play, I usually have little appetite for social interaction—a combination of choice and introversion. When I do, I would rather have a beer with someone inspiring in the city of the day. So I rarely check in socially at a distance; it requires too much effort when everyday life already delivers its own overwhelming and alluring richness. I sometimes wonder how many people who stimulate one’s passion are reasonable to meet per week. Daily? Twice, three times per day? Are there even any break days—of solitude? That’s why Japan is so important. A few traditional friendships remain—one, two, maybe three—untouched by power dynamics. They are about companionship, not erotic exploration.
Instead, in between work and play, I dedicate myself to high-effort, high-reward exploration of power dynamics at a distance. It works. Each interaction, each pause, each reunion builds deeper, richer play—through repeated rituals, little challenges of submission, musings to be written, prayers to be said. A trend emerging this year has been having them interact with each other under my guidance—sometimes together with me, sometimes independently. Sending each other handwritten letters reflecting on past play, or voice memos on how to masturbate for the next night, or observing each other behaving appropriately at the museum. I am eager to see where this continues in 2026.
This is the intimate life of Andy in 2025: one and a half handfuls of subs spread across countries and continents, all hopefully devoted to seeing how far the rabbit hole goes. And in the end, this makes me hard to date—because I want something so darn specific, because my life is so out of the box. Luckily, the world is my playground.