The board · United Kingdom
BDSM contacts in London
London carries the deepest queue in Britain and the least patience with a vague one. Distance here is counted in changes rather than miles, so a post that does not say which part of the city it comes from gets asked in the first reply. Most people are running two apps at once and recognise the same faces on both, which is why anything that reads like a template gets skipped without a second thought.
Posts come from north of the river, the south east, the east, the west and the commuter belt. On an app that is a radius setting. Here people say it in words.
Dominant in London
Leading, and saying in the post what that actually means to them.
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I have read your profile before, under a different name, on another app
Looking for: somebody who wrote their own profile, however badly
Eleven years, three dynamics, one of them ongoing as a friendship.
There is a paragraph going around. I have now seen it, more or less word for word, on four profiles belonging to four different people, and I have seen my own opening line come back to me under somebody else's photograph. It is well written, which is why it spreads. It also means that a fair number of the people writing to me are quoting a stranger at me and hoping I have not read the original.
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If you want something permanent by autumn, I am not the person
Looking for: somebody content to spend a year finding out
Seventeen years, three dynamics, none of them shorter than three years.
About one in four of the people who write to me want something formal and permanent, and want it soon, and describe wanting it as evidence of how serious they are. I understand the impulse completely and I will not do it. Everything I have that lasted took a year to become what it eventually was, and the two that fell apart were both arrangements that were named early because naming it felt like progress.
Submissive in London
Submitting, on terms set out before anyone opens a conversation.
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One word in my bio and the account was gone for eleven days
Looking for: somebody who understands why everything here is written sideways
Seven years, two dynamics, one that lasted three years.
Something automated read my profile in February, decided one word in it was against the rules, and removed the account. Eleven days of appeals, no explanation, and when it came back every conversation I had was gone. The word was not explicit. It was a perfectly ordinary term for the sort of arrangement I want, which is apparently enough.
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I stopped writing thoughtful first messages and my replies went up
Looking for: one person who would rather have the long version
Four years, one dynamic of eight months, no complaints about it.
For two years I wrote proper opening messages. Read the whole profile, found the thing worth asking about, three or four sentences, never the same twice. My reply rate was about one in nine. In January, out of tiredness, I started sending two lines and a question, and my reply rate roughly doubled. I have thought about that a great deal and I do not like any of the conclusions.
Switch in London
Both directions, and looking for someone who can follow the change.
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Two years, one evening a week, and I never learned her surname
Looking for: the same arrangement again, with the anonymity agreed rather than assumed
Eleven years, three dynamics, one of them entirely anonymous by agreement.
We met through one of these apps, agreed at the start that neither of us wanted anything outside the arrangement, and kept to it for two years. One evening a week, a structure we both took seriously, and a deliberate wall around everything else: no surnames, no workplaces, nobody else's friends. It ended last year when her circumstances changed, and I still think it was the healthiest thing I have done.
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I removed every filter for a month, and it was the best month
Looking for: somebody I would have filtered out without ever knowing
Six years, two dynamics, one of them entirely outside my usual type.
Age off, distance wide open, everything else cleared. I did it in January out of frustration and I kept it that way for a month, and what came back was a queue full of people I had been quietly excluding for years without ever consciously deciding to. Two of them became conversations that mattered. One became an arrangement that ran five months and ended for reasons that had nothing to do with any of the boxes I had been ticking.
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Nothing on this app happens in August and I have stopped fighting it
Looking for: somebody who will still be here in September
Eight years, two dynamics, both of them started in the autumn.
Every year I forget and every year I am reminded. The whole city empties, everybody is somewhere else, and conversations that were going perfectly well in July go quiet for a month and then have to be started again from a standing position. I used to take it personally and once ended something over what turned out to be a fortnight in Greece.
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A free week of visibility, and what it taught me was grim
Looking for: one person paying attention rather than two hundred people looking
Six years, two dynamics, one of them still a friendship.
In March they gave me some sort of promotion, presumably to sell me something afterwards, and for one week my profile was shown to everybody. Around two hundred likes, a hundred and some messages, and I sat there feeling briefly magnificent. Of that entire week, one person asked me a question about something I had written. One. The other conversations were interchangeable and most of them died within four exchanges.
Curious in London
Downloaded something, has not decided yet, and is honest about it.
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Every conversation stalls at the point where I am asked to be certain
Looking for: somebody who can talk to a person who has not decided
None. Four conversations, all of them stopped at the same question.
The pattern is identical every time. A friendly start, a few days of ordinary conversation, and then a version of the same question: so what are you, then. And whatever I say next is wrong, because the honest answer is that I am not sure, and the honest answer reads as either evasive or as a person wasting somebody's time. Four conversations, four stalls, all in the same place.
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Three people have read two messages and told me what I am
Looking for: somebody who asks rather than diagnoses
None. Five months here and three unsolicited verdicts.
Each of them was confident, each of them was different, and each of them arrived after roughly two messages from me. One told me I was obviously submissive and simply frightened of the word. One told me I was clearly the other thing and had been socialised out of it. The third told me I was not really interested in any of this and was looking for therapy, which was said kindly and made me put the phone down for a week.
Before you write your own
Reading the board tells you what lands. These four decisions happen before you write a word.
- The same person, compressed into an app bio
- Honest and anonymous are two separate dials
- A handle nothing about you comes back from
- What a photo says before anybody reads the words
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Post yours in London
Reading them costs nothing. Putting your own where people near you will see it, and answering theirs, happens in the app this site connects to.