(This turned out longer than I expected, sorry.)
A few years ago, I was on a summer language program in France. I was 19 at the time, now 26 so about 7 years ago. At that point, I had only been in one long term relationship which had been fairly vanilla and which had ended about a month before the program started. I’m fairly shy, so I mostly hung out with the other girls from my university at the language school there (there were lots of people from other universities as well).
Then, I got paired up with a guy, Ben, for a scavenger hunt we had to complete for an assignment. It turned out to be really fun and he asked me out and after a few dates we started going out, with the understanding that it would be only a summer thing since he went to university on the opposite end of the country from me. He introduced me to many of the kinks I love. Perhaps it was the fact that it was a short-term thing, or the disconnection from my “real” life back home, but I ended up exploring a lot sexually with him. Some of the stuff he introduced me to included hair pulling, spanking, master/slave play, and maledom/femsub in general.