What Bondage Dating Means: Rope Inside a Relationship

Type the phrase into a search engine and most of what comes back was written to sell a membership. Underneath the advertising it has an ordinary meaning, and the ordinary meaning is not really about searching. Bondage dating describes a relationship with rope in it: two people, one of whom ties, or is tied, or both, working out what that does to the rest of their life together.

That is a duller subject than the marketing suggests and a considerably more useful one. Hardly anybody spends more than a season looking. Most of the difficulty in this corner of life sits in the years afterwards, in how a practice that needs hours and a second person fits around a job, a household, and somebody else’s Tuesday.

What people mean when they say it

The phrase does three jobs at once, which is why it slides around so much.

Sometimes it means the obvious thing, a person hoping to meet somebody who shares the interest. Sometimes it means a relationship that already exists and has rope in it, which is the sense used throughout this site. And sometimes it is shorthand for a whole rope life: the people somebody ties with, the nights they go out, the shelf in the wardrobe, whether or not any of it is romantic.

The middle meaning is where the interesting questions live and the one almost nobody writes about. How two people met is a story they will tell at parties for a decade. What rope does to them once they are together is what they will actually be dealing with, and it keeps changing for as long as the relationship lasts.

Worth saying early that a rope relationship is mostly an ordinary relationship. The bins still need doing and somebody still has to book the dentist. What rope adds is a small number of specific pressures, and they are predictable enough to be named in advance.

Rigger, rope bottom, switch

Three words carry most of the vocabulary.

• A rigger, also called a rope top, is the person who ties.
• A rope bottom is the person being tied.
• A switch does both, depending on the partner and the day.

The words describe rope roles and nothing else. They say nothing about who is louder, who earns more, or who decides anything at all outside the hour in question, and couples who let them creep outwards tend to regret it. A rope bottom can easily be the most experienced person in the room, and a good number of riggers started out being tied and still enjoy it.

Two more terms earn their keep. Negotiation is the conversation held beforehand about what will and will not happen. A scene is one session from start to finish. Both get used constantly and neither is as formal as it sounds; between people who have been together a while, negotiation is often two sentences in a kitchen.

The reason to learn the words in the first hour is that the two roles produce quite different experiences, and partners misread the other one as a matter of routine. What the person tying is carrying, most of which never gets mentioned, is set out in what a rigger is in a relationship. The view from the other chair, which looks from outside like lying still and is nothing of the kind, is in dating a rope bottom.

A skill that needs another person and a repeating hour

The first thing that makes a rope relationship different from most others is entirely practical, and it drives more of the rest than people expect.

Rope is learned slowly and it decays. Somebody who has not tied in eight months keeps the knowledge and loses the speed, and confidence goes first and comes back last. Keeping it usable requires another person who can report what they are feeling while it is happening, because that feedback is the actual content of the skill rather than a courtesy attached to it. There is no equivalent of running scales alone in a spare half hour.

Which means a rope practice puts a standing claim on the calendar, and the claim is on hours that repeat. A regular evening. A class series that runs six weeks and then stops. A monthly night that happens whether or not the two of you had plans for it. Partners who assumed the interest was reserved for special occasions get corrected inside a month, and the correction usually arrives disguised as a row about something else. Dating a rigger goes into that time arithmetic properly, because it does more quiet damage than anything else on this page.

The maintenance problem also explains why one particular mismatch is harder in rope than in most kinks. Where both people are interested, the difficulty is pace, and the standard failure is a couple converting something enjoyable into homework with a curriculum and a faster partner, which is the subject of learning rope as a couple. Where only one of them is interested, agreeing to shelve it is not the neutral compromise it sounds like on a sofa in month two. The person agreeing rarely understands at the time that they are agreeing to lose something rather than to miss it, and they find out around the eighteen-month mark. When only one of you is into rope sets out the options, including the arrangement most couples eventually land on.

A trust that is held in the body

The second difference is the one people reach for the word trust to describe, and then discover the word is doing too much work.

Being tied means giving up movement and depending on another person’s attention for as long as the rope is on. What that asks is not whether somebody is honest, or reliable, or good in a crisis. It asks whether they will notice something in real time, while occupied, while enjoying themselves, at a moment when you cannot easily interrupt them. A decade of domestic evidence says almost nothing about that. Which is why two people who trust each other completely can still find that one of them is uneasy about this specific thing and cannot explain why without it sounding like an accusation. The unease is not a verdict on the relationship. It is somebody noticing that a particular file is empty.

The effect running the other way is the one long couples talk about. A session runs on literal answers, since a vague one is useless to the person asking and useless to the person giving it, so two people who tie regularly get a great deal of practice at saying a true thing in a flat voice. That habit does not stay in the room where it was learned. Couples report finding out things about each other during an unremarkable evening that months of conversation had circled without ever reaching, and they report it often enough that it counts as a property of the activity rather than a run of coincidences. What rope does to a relationship covers both halves of that, including the version where rope becomes a way of not having the conversation.

None of which makes rope good for a relationship in the general case. It magnifies whatever is already between two people, which is a gift where there is goodwill and does the opposite where there is not.

A small community that knows both of you

The third difference is social, and it catches out couples who assumed this was a private matter between two people.

Rope comes with a scene: practice nights, classes, a monthly social, a few dozen regulars in a city of a million. Most couples touch it at some point, and once they do, part of the relationship gets conducted in front of an audience that knew one of you first and will still be there afterwards. Word travels before anybody announces anything, a breakup is semi-public, and an ex stays on the calendar for years. Dating someone from your local rope scene is about living inside that, down to the unglamorous question of who keeps the Tuesday night if it ends.

The same small world produces the question couples find hardest to discuss, which is who else your partner ties with. Practice partnerships are ordinary in rope, frequently have nothing romantic in them, and resist the categories most people inherited, because rope is unmistakably sexual for some and closer to a physical discipline for others. The feeling that arrives on the Tuesday your partner is out is usually about attention rather than about sex, and getting that diagnosis right changes what helps. Your partner’s other rope partners is about the difference, and about which agreements survive contact with a real evening.

Then there is the outward version of the same problem. A couple has to decide what the neighbours, the friends, the parents and the office know, and that is one decision belonging to two people, only one of whom is present when it gets said at Friday drinks. Telling people you do rope covers whose caution wins, what to do about photographs, and what usually happens, which is less than either of you has been rehearsing.

The shapes it actually takes

Rope relationships are not one arrangement, and the honest range is wider than the phrase implies.

Some couples both do it. One ties and one is tied, or they swap, and rope is a shared project with a shared calendar and a joint learning curve. This is the version most people picture when they hear the phrase, and it comes with the pace problem described above rather than with any of the others.

In plenty of couples only one of them does. The other has never been tied, has no intention of being tied, and is perfectly content that this exists. Those relationships are common, they are not a lesser edition of the first kind, and they generally hold up on the strength of the rope having somewhere honest to go rather than on the uninterested partner developing an interest they were never going to have.

Then there are people whose rope life and romantic life barely overlap: a practice partnership that runs for years and never becomes anything else, a partner at home who does not attend and does not want to. That separation works when it has been stated and it corrodes when it is simply a habit nobody named.

A good number of these start as one thing and turn into another. Two people tie together for a year, one of them notices they have begun looking forward to Thursday for reasons unconnected to rope, and the conversation that follows is common enough that the scene has settled habits for it, which are set out in from rope partner to relationship.

Time reshapes all four. The charge of the first year levels off somewhere in the second or third, which is ordinary rather than a warning sign, and the standard mistake is chasing the early feeling by escalating instead of shrinking the whole thing down to something a normal week can carry. When rope becomes routine is about that long middle stretch, including the years when illness or a new baby means no rope at all and the return afterwards.

What the rest of this site is for

Everything here is written for the relationship rather than for the search. Some of it is addressed to the partner who does not tie and would like to understand what their household has quietly organised itself around. Some is for couples several years in, at the point where the live questions are frequency, other people, and who outside the house knows.

There is no technique anywhere on this site, deliberately. Ties get taught in rooms by people who can see your hands, and reading about them is a poor substitute for that. What can usefully be written down is the other part, which is what having rope in a relationship asks of two people over a long stretch of time. That turns out to be a much larger subject than the knots.