Fetlife isn't a Dating Site. You Have To Bend It To Your Will

Let’s say dating sites are like coat hangers on which to hang your dating experience. They’re expressly designed for that, so they’re good at keeping wrinkles out of your clothes. In the online dating world, Fet isn’t a coat hanger. It’s just a wire. It isn’t shaped to hold coats. If you want to find love here, you’ve got to do a lot of extra work because most women aren’t here just to find Mr. Right.

In the Asian strategy game, Go, you win territory one stone at a time. You can capture terrain by surrounding your opponent’s pieces aggressively, but there are more beautiful and strategically sound ways to win. You don’t rush to capture your opponent's stones until you’ve created a presence and occupied your own territories.

Before you start spamming for dates, you’ve got to become a Fetlife occupant. Use groups. Write posts. Do events. Become a part of the community. Make friends with us before you send roses because most active Fetlifians aren’t here to date. We do often find love while we’re doing other things, though.

I personally don't reply to messages until I check the sender's feed. Does he have male friends? Is he using groups? Is he doing events? Does he have stones on the board or is his feed just a long string of porn?

If he has a smut-heavy feed, I assume he's not here to add to the kink community as a whole, so I’m unlikely to message back. I prefer someone who’s already established in the kink scene. It makes for easy vetting and tells me you aren't just in this for the sex. It also reassures me that you might have learned a few things to keep me safe in a kink context.

Is that a lot of work? Yes, because Fetlife isn’t a dating site, so if you want to engage with humans, you have to use it for its purpose.

In an early Go game, the corners and edges are the safest spots to place your stones, and Fetlife is the same. This is a highly politicised space full of hostile people. If our culture is foreign to you, don’t rush into the middle of the board (or website) until you’ve sat on the edges getting to know our culture. Otherwise, people will obliterate you.

Even so, Go is an oddly cooperative game. You don’t end it when the king’s taken, but when you and your opponent agree to end it. The same goes for deciding which territories belong to whom. If you can’t play cooperatively with the site and your kink partners, you will be ousted before you even have time to make a toy shelf. Selfishness is bad enough in vanilla relationships, but in kink, it’s potentially deadly. People are going to vet you for your ability to form a cooperative partnership.

There are tried and trusted moves that we all learn as new Go players, but among masters, there is also the “Divine Move” – an inspired, original move powerful enough to create a turning point in the game.

So you're not a murderous stalker? Great, but I'm looking for more: Someone inspirational... Someone to get raucous with... Someone to trust. It’s not enough to avoid terrible behaviours. You’ve got to bring something to the board—a divine move that creates a turning point in the game because Fetlife isn’t a dating site.