Why Finding a Kinky Partner is Hard

A lot of kinksters complain that they have a hard time finding a partner for serious, long-term power exchange. Sites like Fetlife are filled with subs saying that they want to be owned, and they often complain that they aren’t having much luck. So I wanted to point out something about the basic math of things that kinksters need to understand. I’m specifically talking about gay men here, but much of what I have to say is true for straight people as well and other segments of the LGBT community.

Gay men make up a relatively small segment of the total population of the US. The actual figure is probably 2-3%, but let’s be ultra-generous and say that perhaps 10% of the population is available to partner with. That still means that only 1 out of 10 possible people are a potential match.

Out of that 10% of the population, only half of them are going to be guys.* So now we’re down to 5% of the total population.

Out of that 5% of the population, we need to find the kinky ones. There aren’t really hard numbers on this, but the few estimates I’ve seen suggest that maybe 1 out of 10 people in the population are kink or potentially kinky. But acceptance of kink seems to run a bit higher in the gay community, so let’s be generous and round up to 2 out of 10. Since we’re only working with 5% of the population, that means we’re only looking at 1% of the total population that might work for us.

But it get worse. It’s not enough to find someone kinky. They have to be interested in the opposite role. If you’re a sub, finding another sub is less than ideal. If the kink community is split 50/50 into doms and subs (and almost everyone says that it’s somewhere closer to 10/90 than 50/50) that means we’re down to .5% of the population.

Not only that, but you need to find someone with a compatible fetish. If you’re into flogging, it doesn’t help you to find a bondage top. But obviously people have multiple fetishes. Let’s be generous and say that 50% of the guys you meet share enough fetishes with you to be a decent partner. That means we’re looking at .25% of the total population.

Now, you need to find someone who is within your acceptable age range. If you want a daddy, finding a 20-something isn’t going to work very well. This gets trickier because I don’t think there’s an easy way to calculate percentages on this, but let’s again say that half the guys you share fetishes with are in the age range you would like to play with and vice versa. Now we’re down to about .12%.

They also have to be available to partner with. Open relationships, polyamorous guys, and the like are fairly common in the gay community, but there are also a lot of monogamous guys, and even the poly guys might have their dance card full. So let’s again ball-park it at 1 out of 2. We are now looking at something approaching .05% or so.

Then they need to be someone you find attractive and who finds you attractive in return. They need to have compatible interests and political views, want the same level of kink as you do, and just generally be someone you could practically be in a relationship with. Again, there’s no real way to calculate that, but let’s say that it’s half the potential mates you meet. Now we’re down to .025% of the population.

If the US has a population of 350 million people, that means that there are perhaps around 200,000 who are potential matches for any given gay kinkster. And those 200,000 guys are spread across the entire country. If you’re in Tulsa, your best matches might be in Seattle. (Historically, this is one of the reasons gay men tended to migrate to large cities–it just increased their chances of finding a partner.)

My point here is not to make your search seem hopeless. 200,000 possible matches is a lot (even allowing for all the ball-park estimates I’m making here). My point is that finding a master or a slave or whatever you’re seeking is a numbers game. The odds of any one person being a good match for you are small. So the way you solve the problem is by trying to meet as many guys as possible. This means posting profiles on different dating apps and sites like Fetlife. It means going to kink events and joining kink organizations and participating. Drive up the number of guys you are meeting and the odds of finding your ideal partner go up substantially.

But this takes time. Don’t decide you’re kinky, jump on the internet and complain a few weeks later that you haven’t found your Prince of Darkness or your forever Pup. And the more extreme or specialized your kinks, the fewer possible partners you have. If you’re a dom looking for a sub, you have a lot more potential partners than if you’re dom looking for a 24/7 slave. Expect your search to take years. Just make sure that you’re having fun along the way!

*I’m trying to keep this math super-simple, so I’m not going to address the whole question of people who are non-binary, gender-fluid, and so on. It certainly does expand the potential range of partners to factor that in, but that’s balanced out by the fact that some guys may not be willing to consider partners who don’t have a conventional gender identity.