What a Rigger Is Looking For in a Partner

Most pages about riggers are written for people trying to locate one. This page runs the other way and asks what a rigger is looking for in a partner, which is something riggers discuss among themselves constantly and mention to the person concerned almost never. If you are dating somebody who ties, or heading in that direction, it is the more useful question by a distance.

The answers are less flattering to the imagination than you might hope. Nobody is looking for a muse.

Reliability, in the least romantic sense available

Ask a rigger with a few years behind them what they value in a partner and reliability comes up before anything else, usually with a slightly apologetic laugh, because it sounds like a quality you would list about a plumber.

It matters because rope evenings are planned. A session takes setup, a window of time, and a particular kind of concentration that does not survive being switched on at short notice. A partner who cancels at seven for something that was knowable at two has not just moved an evening. They have spent the attention their partner had been holding in reserve all day.

Reliability also means saying yes when you mean yes. A soft yes is worse than a no, and riggers learn to hear the difference, at which point they start declining things you actually wanted, because they can no longer tell. Most of the people reading this have given a soft yes to a partner about something entirely ordinary. In rope it compounds faster, because the person tying is making a running series of decisions on the strength of what you told them.

Somebody who is legible

The part that surprises people is how much of the session the rigger spends reading. Breathing, temperature, the quality of a silence, whether a stillness is contentment or somebody going quietly somewhere unpleasant. Being easy to read is a real thing you can offer, and it has nothing to do with being expressive or dramatic.

What it means in practice is small. Saying you are cold. Saying you are hungry, or distracted, or that today the whole thing feels wrong for reasons you cannot name. Saying that a thing you liked last month is not doing anything tonight. None of that is complaint and none of it needs justifying. It is information, and a partner who supplies it freely makes the whole enterprise lighter to carry.

The opposite is the partner who is unfailingly fine. Fine before, fine during, fine afterwards, fine when they are plainly not. Riggers find this much harder than they find someone difficult, because a difficult partner is at least giving them something to work with.

Somebody who says it at the time

This is the one riggers name with the most feeling, and it extends well past rope.

The pattern goes like this. Something is slightly off during an evening. The person it is happening to decides not to make a thing of it, gets through, says it was good, and mentions it three days later or not at all. From the rigger’s side, the entire evening they thought they were having was inaccurate, retroactively. They then have to reconstruct which of the last dozen evenings were also inaccurate.

Saying it at the time is not a rope skill. It is the same trait that makes somebody easy to live with, and couples where it is absent have the same argument in the kitchen that they have in the rope room, about the same thing, in different vocabulary. The person who ties is simply in a position where the cost of not having it is unusually visible.

There is a version of this that gets mistaken for devotion, where a partner endures things silently as a kind of offering. It reads as the opposite of what it is meant to. It tells the rigger their judgement cannot be trusted, and it makes them cautious with somebody they were hoping to be free with.

What they are not looking for

Awe, mostly. New partners often arrive with a great deal of it, and it is pleasant for about a month before it becomes isolating. Being treated as the competent one who has no needs is a lonely position, and it is the reason a fair number of riggers end up in relationships that feel oddly one-directional.

They are also not looking for someone who has surrendered the ordinary parts of the relationship. Authority inside a session has no bearing on who books the dentist, and confusion on that point causes more damage than almost anything else, as dating a rigger sets out at greater length.

And they are not, generally, looking for a partner who is more invested in the rope than in them. It happens. Somebody wants the practice and takes the relationship as the price of admission, and the rigger works out what has happened around month eight.

Being wanted, rather than being useful

There is a particular loneliness available to people who are good at something other people want, and riggers are exposed to it more than most.

The version they run into looks like keen interest and is not quite that. Somebody wants the activity, wants it badly, and has landed on this person as a competent source of it. Everything they say is warm and none of it is really about the individual saying it to. A rigger can usually tell within a few weeks, because the questions are all about what will happen and none of them are about who they are.

This is not the same as somebody being excited about rope, which is welcome and normal. The distinction is whether you would still be interested in this person if they stopped tying tomorrow. Riggers do occasionally ask themselves that question on your behalf, and if the answer looks like no, they will usually stay pleasant and quietly stop suggesting things.

Which is worth knowing if you are early in something and cannot work out why it has cooled. The fix is not more enthusiasm. It is asking them about their week.

The part riggers rarely say out loud

Responsibility is heavy and mostly invisible. The person tying is the one who has to notice things, decide things, and carry whatever happens. Nobody asks them how that is going, partly because the role is coded as the strong one and partly because their partners assume the enjoyment is uncomplicated. Where that load surfaces at home is usually nowhere near the rope, and what a rigger is in a relationship describes what it looks like from the other side of a kitchen.

What a lot of riggers quietly want is somebody who asks. Not with concern, which is its own burden, but ordinarily: how was that for you, was there a bit you did not enjoy, are you tired. A partner who occasionally takes the weight of the evening off them is doing something more valuable than any amount of enthusiasm about the rope itself.

The same asymmetry runs the other way, and the equivalent case from the other chair is in what a rope bottom needs from a partner.

None of this is about rope

Read the list back. Turns up when they said they would. Says what they think while it is happening. Easy to read. Interested in the other person as a person. Those are the qualities that make anybody a good partner in anything, and rope is simply an activity that makes their absence obvious quickly.

Which is worth knowing in both directions. If you are wondering whether you would be good at this, the honest test has nothing to do with flexibility or nerve. And if you are already with somebody who ties, most of the work of being a good partner to them is work you would be doing anyway. The trust that gets built on top of it is covered in trusting someone you are dating with rope.