Germany · the looking board
Bondage personals in Berlin
Berlin treats rope as an ordinary thing two adults might do on a Thursday, which removes most of the explaining that other boards spend their first paragraph on. The scene is large, international and unusually flat: there is little deference to anybody senior, and somebody new gets judged by how they behave rather than by who taught them. The transience is the real feature. A great many people are here for a few years, and posts say plainly whether the writer is counting on staying.
Posts come from Kreuzberg, Neukölln, Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain and the western districts. People lead with their side of the city because a rope evening has to survive the journey home.
Riggers in Berlin
Looking for somebody to tie, and saying what they want the rest of the week to look like.
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She was my practice partner for four years and I got it wrong
Wants: somebody who takes the boundary between practice and a partner seriously
We were a practice partnership for four years. Same evening every week, nothing romantic, both of us seeing other people at various points and neither of us confused about it. Or so I thought, until she told me last spring that she was moving in with somebody, and I discovered that I minded far more than a person in my position had any right to.
Rope bottoms in Berlin
Looking for somebody to be tied by, with the terms set out before anybody starts.
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Nine of us in the flat and a courtyard that carries every sound
Wants: somebody who has somewhere, or a sense of humour about not having one
There are nine people in my flat. It is an arrangement that made sense when I arrived and now has its own governance structure and a spreadsheet for the bathroom. The courtyard outside is the kind that carries a whisper from the fourth floor to the ground, and everybody in the building knows everybody's business as a matter of routine.
Switches in Berlin
Both ends of the rope, and a partner who can handle the swap without making it a subject.
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I am shouted at professionally, so I need the evening silent
Wants: somebody who is comfortable with long stretches of saying nothing
I work in a room where forty people talk at once for nine hours and then I go home and cannot bear a radio. That has consequences for this that took me years to understand, and the main one is that I do not want an evening full of talking. I want an hour where almost nothing is said and both of us are concentrating.
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My shifts arrive ten days ahead, so nothing further out is real
Wants: somebody who can work with short notice and a fixed rhythm underneath it
My rota comes out ten days in advance and it never looks like the last one. So when somebody asks whether I am free three weeks on Thursday, the honest answer is that I have no idea and will not have one for a fortnight, and I have watched that answer end several conversations.
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My grown son lives with me, so my flat is not an option
Wants: somebody with their own space and no curiosity about my household
My son is in his twenties and lives with me, and given what a flat costs here he will be living with me for a while yet. We get on. It is a perfectly good arrangement and it means that my home is not available for any of this, ever, and will not be for years.
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Eleven years here, and I have watched the room empty out three times
Wants: somebody who is also staying, for once
Three times now the room has emptied and refilled with people I did not know. Not all at once. It happens over about eighteen months, and then one evening you look around and realise you are the only person there who remembers what the place was like before, and you are forty five and being introduced to everybody as though you were a landmark.
Couples in Berlin
Two people posting together, whether they both tie or only one of them does.
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Neither of us ties, which is a strange problem to have as a couple
Wants: somebody who might want to be genuinely close to two people
Neither of us ties. We both get tied, we have both done it for about nine years, and when we got together four years ago several people pointed out the obvious arithmetic and we said it would be fine. It has been fine and it has also meant that our shared practice consists of talking about a thing neither of us can provide for the other.
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We each learned from somebody else and our habits do not match
Wants: another couple who have had to merge two ways of doing it
Each of us came into this relationship having learned everything from one previous partner, and those two people did it completely differently. Not in any way you could call right or wrong. Different order of doing things, different amount said out loud, entirely different assumptions about what happens afterwards.
The rest of the scene in Berlin
A board is one way into a local scene and the narrowest one. Most people who tie in Berlin 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 Berlin
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