Netherlands · the looking board
Bondage personals in Amsterdam
Nothing in Amsterdam is far enough away to be a reason, so the obstacle every other board leans on is simply not available and people arrive at the actual question much faster. The scene is small, open and heavily international, with a turnover couples build into their plans rather than resent. Housing is the real constraint. Sublets, shared flats and short leases mean a lot of people cannot tie where they live, and they say so before anything else.
Posts come from the west, the east, Noord, the south and outside the ring. People lead with their side of the city because a rope evening has to survive the journey home.
Riggers in Amsterdam
Looking for somebody to tie, and saying what they want the rest of the week to look like.
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Arrived in January, and I can count everyone I know on one hand
Wants: one partnership rather than an introduction to a scene
I can name four people in this city and two of them are colleagues. I arrived in January, on my own, for a job, and the thing nobody tells you about moving somewhere at twenty seven is that you can be perfectly happy and completely unattached at the same time, and not notice the second part for months.
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One person for years, which I know reads oddly here
Wants: somebody who is also not looking to add me to anything
One person, for years. In most places that sentence needs no explanation at all. Here it seems to require a paragraph, because a great deal of what happens in this city runs on being open about everything, and asking for a single long partnership can read as either naive or as a criticism of everybody else.
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I started at fifty two and I would rather not be congratulated
Wants: a partnership with somebody who is neither impressed nor assuming
Two years in, at fifty four, and the compliments have become the most tiring part of it. People tell me it is wonderful that I started. They say it warmly and they mean it, and each time it puts me back in the position of being a remarkable beginner rather than a man who has been doing something steadily for two years.
Rope bottoms in Amsterdam
Looking for somebody to be tied by, with the terms set out before anybody starts.
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My knee decided something and my partner had to hear it from me
Wants: somebody who takes a stated limit as information rather than a puzzle
My knee has been through one operation and will not be going through another. There is a category of thing I used to do routinely and simply do not now, and the hard part was never the knee. It was saying it to somebody who had known me for four years and remembered exactly what I had been able to do.
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My contract ends and nobody blinks, which is its own problem
Wants: two years of the real thing rather than the discounted version
Nobody here has ever once been surprised by my end date. In two years of saying it I have not had a single flinch, which sounds like a relief and is actually the problem. People are so used to it that they apply the discount immediately, and I can watch them doing it across a table.
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Seven hours a week, and I would rather put the number at the top
Wants: somebody for whom seven hours is obvious rather than a lot
Two evenings a week, about three hours each, plus the hour afterwards where we work out what that was. Call it seven hours. That is what I am asking for and I would rather say the number now than find out in month three that you had been imagining something fortnightly.
Switches in Amsterdam
Both ends of the rope, and a partner who can handle the swap without making it a subject.
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Eleven years of doing both, and everyone remembers half
Wants: a partnership where both directions are ordinary rather than an occasion
People remember whichever half of me they met first, and eleven years has not shifted that once. If the first evening went one way round, that is who I am to them permanently, and the other half becomes something I have to reintroduce every few months like a hobby I have recently taken up.
Couples in Amsterdam
Two people posting together, whether they both tie or only one of them does.
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Five years learning side by side, and the slow cost of it
Wants: other couples who did it the same way and are further along
Five years, side by side, and nobody has ever shown us anything. That is not a boast. It has cost us an enormous amount of time, and there are things we spent two years being clumsy about that we suspect one conversation with somebody experienced would have sorted out in an afternoon.
The rest of the scene in Amsterdam
A board is one way into a local scene and the narrowest one. Most people who tie in Amsterdam met somebody in a room, not on a page like this.
- What a rope workshop evening is actually like
- Dating inside an online rope community
- The rules nobody posts on the door
- What dating inside a small scene costs you
The other boards
A scene is a different size in every city, and the board runs in 21 of them.
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Pin yours in Amsterdam
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