People are famously uncomfortable with extreme romantic and sexual neediness: it is the polar opposite of an aphrodisiac.

Is your hunger for a dominant something that radiates from you? Is your desire to find one something you can’t help but talk about in fetish venues? On your blog and in your emails and IMs?

That - more than anything else - may be sabotaging your search.

If you are a single submissive person your desires are a given: they don’t need to be spoken of. Try to relax and keep your inner-nagging out of sight.

Being bisexual the site of a phallus induces no discomfort. But the first time a stranger sent me a photograph of his resting on his keyboard was still a bit of a surprise.

I’ve never known anybody to say they were thrilled to get a picture of some unknown person’s penis. Billions of people have one so they aren’t special. If you are trying to meet people online you may want to offer something more distinctive. Besides good manners should tell you to wait until you think the other person expresses an interest.

And submissive straight guys – do you really think that is what dominant women spend their nights thinking about? Actually it normally makes lists like The Five Most Annoying Things Men Do When Writing Dommes. Sending her one just about guarantees her only response will be to hit the delete key.

On gay sites - where enthusiasm for penises is a given - such photos don’t appear.

There you are cheerfully wanking away to images of yourself scrubbing the bathroom floor clean with a toothbrush or locked in a cast iron chastity device or …

(If you are me the top is engaged in a close study of whether you whimper more entertainingly when hit with a single tail or a quirt.)

So you write a profile bragging about how happy you will be to clean floors or have orgasm only on February 29th (or advance research into the effect of cowhide on human flesh).

OK. We do meet to experience these sorts of things. But they only take up so much of the day. There are lots of hours to be filled with ordinary things.

My recent scanning of profiles shows that it is the top who is most likely to mention pleasure in horseback riding, baseball, jazz, entomology, theoretical physics and baking pies.

Bottoms are forever offering themselves as servants and targets. Tops look for that and a bit more.

Your own profile shouldn’t neglect to share your passions, enthusiasm and hobbies. I’ve lost count of how many kinky relationships began with a shared pleasure that had nothing to do with BDSM.

People generally meet for coffee or a meal. And it is more fun to think of spending time with someone who has more in them than the commonplace yearnings of the average submissive masochist.

Really many D/s couples have started with shared pleasure in an author or musician. Then progressed on to who is the finest maker of floggers.

I’ve posted a fair amount of BDSM dating advice elsewhere, no reason to stop now.

Do not work on your profiles and personal ads when you are sexually aroused. Seriously. If you are feeling horny go masturbate before writing. Otherwise you are apt to make promises you can’t keep and get caught up in stressing specific fetishes more than you mean to. To write a good personal advertisement you need to find a happy medium between being aware of your needs and almost clinical detachment from them.

You want to let your passion shine through but with enough impartiality to show you are capable of coping with those passions with some degree of reason.

Neither neediness nor mania is attractive.

Be honest and balanced.