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Fetlife is the perfect dating website because it’s not a dating website
🕑 Added 2024-10-25 12:54:16 +0000 UTCI’ve never used Tinder because I don’t have it in me to swipe through photographs as though I’m shopping for wallpaper on eBay. I have a friend who’s harnessed the site for what it was first intended: to find sex right now, at the bar on the corner. That’s never been my thing.
I once spent three boring weeks on OkCupid before I forgot my password. By then, I’d realised that I needed my relationships to evolve organically. Shopping for romance among strangers made me feel as though I was turning love into a series of job interviews. In the real world, we meet as friends and evolve without pressure and expectations. Dating sites obliterate that. If we meet, it’s to find out if we’re compatible, and if we aren’t, bye, Felicia. It was good meeting you, but your relevance in my life has expired.
There are thousands of people who feel comfortable with that, and I am not one of them. OkCupid also made finding kinky people well-nigh impossible. I had to find all kinds of obscure ways to display my BDSM interests without getting outted and page through endless messages from men who were too vanilla to fuck.
Enter: Fetlife. There, you and I fly our freak flags proudly. The site is Twitter-ish enough to kill that online dating pressure, so I can connect with people on a platonic level before I consider more. It even comes with events so I can meet people in groups—an invaluable bonus.
Fetlife is the perfect dating website because it’s not a dating website. I know I’m not supposed to use it as such because that makes the BDSM gods weep and gnash their teeth, but I do. No animals were harmed during the planning of my last date with the sexy, greying guy with the spectacles. That’s because I don’t step on the toes of people who are there for platonic connection.
I fit into the culture of the site, and I don’t assume others are reaching out to me because they’re shopping for true love. The Common Dudebro of the Toddler Genus isn’t quite so sensitive. He’s going to plough through your boundaries in under 10 seconds because he has no fucks to give about anyone but himself. He is entitled to send leery messages, and that’s all you need to know about him.
Love is one of life’s greatest pleasures. There’s no sin in finding it on Fetlife, at last week’s cooking class, or the dog park. When women complain about this issue, it’s not because someone was hunting for sex or romance, but because they behaved like assholes in the process.
Every website has its culture. At Tinder, it’s quick and dirty. At OkCupid, it’s all business. On Fetlife, it’s mostly platonic. I don’t wreck Tinder hook-up culture with my hunt for friendly rope buddies or share my bloodiest fantasies in public on OkCupid. In the same way, I hope you won’t bring your Tinder hook-up efforts or Chaturbate wank fests to my Fetlife inbox. Few things are sexier than respect, and few as ugly as entitlement.
Comments
WiseAxe
Always a pleasure to read your heartfelt thoughts on your experiences. Being in my age bracket and my cisgender heterosexual male-ness, and hitting a completely negligible amount of cultural diversity markers, I admit the privilege of not experiencing the atrocities known as dick (or vulva or breast) pics, being voraciously attacked by an anonymous and faceless “person” (a term I use loosely) for not returning an attraction, or of even being on the receiving end of attraction at all. I do enjoy solid writing though lack the follow-through of my own. And an incredible intellect inside the few of this decade’s great communicators will hold my attention as much as a Taylor Swift tour stop. And the communicator won’t have to work nearly as hard to hold my attention - no costume changes (to TS’s 16) and no song or dance (to Swift’s 46 to 48 per show). I’m here, as was often said 30-40 years ago, “for the articles”. Only, I mean it.
Leonard Metcalf
I was bought to Fetlife from OkCupid when I met a fellow lens based artist on there. She introduced me to a world that I didn’t know existed. I knew I was queer, kinky and poly. But I hadn’t identified in any communities as such. So I dated here there and everywhere. Including Fetlife. Lately it’s been an app again. Feeld. Where I have met my kinky partners. It’s interesting it’s bought some old friends back into my life again too. People turn up when they do is the creed I say to myself to remind me that nowhere is perfect and everywhere is a possibility.
