The board · United States
BDSM contacts in Los Angeles
Los Angeles has plenty of people on every app and a distance filter that quietly decides most of it. A match fifteen miles out is an hour of driving at the wrong time of day, so people set a tight radius and still get stood up more than anywhere else on the board. The posts show it. Half of them are less about what somebody wants than about whether the other person will actually turn up.
Posts come from the Westside, the Valley, downtown, the South Bay and the east side. On an app that is a radius setting. Here people say it in words.
Dominant in Los Angeles
Leading, and saying in the post what that actually means to them.
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First meetings happen near me. After that I will travel gladly
Looking for: somebody who does not read a practical rule as a power move
Seven years, two dynamics, both begun exactly this way.
First meeting, my side of town, in the daytime. After that I will drive to you as often as you drive to me and I will not keep score about it. The rule exists because I have twice spent two hours in a car for a conversation that was clearly over in ten minutes, and there is a particular flavour of resentment that comes from driving home from that which I refuse to feel again.
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I open with a proposal, not a greeting, and I am not going back
Looking for: a submissive who can answer a direct question directly
Fourteen years, four dynamics, two of them several years long.
My opening message names a day, a general area and a time, roughly ten days out, along with three lines about who I am. It is not a demand and it is not a test of obedience. It is a way of finding out in one exchange whether somebody wants to meet a person or wants to be in a chat window, because those are two entirely different hobbies and this app deliberately blurs them.
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I will not meet anybody new on a Friday and I never will again
Looking for: a submissive with a free weekday morning and some patience
Ten years, three dynamics, two of them long and one very short.
Friday evening in this city is a machine for making two strangers late, tired and slightly cross with each other before either has said anything real. I have done six first meetings on a Friday and five of them started with an apology about the roads. So I do weekday mornings now, or the early part of a Sunday, and the difference in the quality of the conversation is not subtle.
Submissive in Los Angeles
Submitting, on terms set out before anyone opens a conversation.
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The app thinks I live at my office, and it has ruined my queue
Looking for: somebody near where I sleep rather than near where I earn
Two years, one dynamic that never got past the logistics.
I only ever open it at lunch, so the last place it recorded me is a building I leave at seven. My whole queue is therefore people who are convenient to a desk I do not live at. I have matched with a dozen people who are eleven minutes from my keyboard and an hour and a half from my bed, and I did not understand for months why every conversation ran aground at the point of arranging anything.
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I am the person who cancels, and here is the honest reason
Looking for: somebody who can hold a plan loosely without holding me cheaply
Three years, one dynamic of a year, ended kindly.
Every third post on this board is somebody complaining about people who do not turn up. I am one of those people, so I am going to answer it. I have a condition that decides, at about four in the afternoon, whether I am a functioning adult that evening. I cannot tell you at the weekend what Thursday will look like. When I cancel it is not indifference, it is that the alternative is arriving somewhere and being no use to anybody.
Switch in Los Angeles
Both directions, and looking for someone who can follow the change.
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This app has shown me people I would never have met otherwise
Looking for: somebody with nothing at all in common with my last three
Six years, three dynamics, all of them with the same kind of person.
Everybody on this board complains about this place and most of the complaints are fair, so let me put the other side. Before any of this was on a phone I met people through a very small number of channels, and the result was that all three of my arrangements were with more or less the same person: same age, same work, same way of talking. Then I started reading a queue of strangers who had nothing to do with my life, and I found out how narrow I had been.
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An update wiped every conversation I had, and it was a relief
Looking for: a small number of conversations that are actually going somewhere
Four years, one dynamic of a year, ended well and stayed friendly.
In March something went wrong with an update and I lost the lot. Sixty odd conversations, a year and a half of them, some going back to before I had any idea what I was doing. I was upset for about two days and then I noticed that of the sixty, four were things I actually missed. The other fifty six were a kind of low grade obligation I had been carrying around without ever deciding to.
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Leading, I will drive an hour. Submitting, I want collecting
Looking for: somebody who finds an honest asymmetry easier than a polite lie
Eight years, two dynamics, one in each direction.
Here is something about myself I only worked out by looking at my own calendar. When I am the one leading, distance is nothing to me. I will do the hour, twice a week, cheerfully, and I will organise everything. When I am the one submitting, I need to arrive somewhere with nothing left to give and I want somebody else to have handled the getting there. Same person, same city, two completely different relationships with a freeway.
Curious in Los Angeles
Downloaded something, has not decided yet, and is honest about it.
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I can list five certainties, and not one of them is something I want
Looking for: somebody who can work forwards from a list of nos
None. A year of reading and two conversations that went nowhere.
Ask me what I want and I go blank. Ask me what I do not want and I can give you five, immediately, in order: nothing that leaves a mark, nothing in front of other people, nothing involving being called names, nothing that has to be sexual to count, and nothing that requires me to pretend to be more experienced than I am. That is the entire contents of my head after a year of reading, and every profile form I have filled in wants the opposite list.
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 Los Angeles
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