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.

Not having given alt.com a dime I haven’t done more than browse the locals and read my LoveDog mismatch reports.

Imagine going to a news site and reading a headline proclaiming Something Happened or Today Isn’t Yesterday.

So many profiles just say “looking for something new.” Or “want to try something different.” Really grabs your interest doesn’t it?

Some profile headlines are so badly constructed that someone who sounds like a top proves to really be a bottom who hasn’t the tiniest ability at self-expression.

This vagueness is frustrating. And it seems to apply to the majority of profiles.

I understand that part of it is timidity. Having never dared speak their desires aloud to anyone they are nervous when they sit at their keyboard.

These folks can easily be dismissed as not worth the time. But, you know, I bet many of them are. Or would be if we had a clue as to what they want.

Rather a sad loss.

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.

When I first used the web to meet people I remember being startled by how incoherent they often were.

Instant messages looked like automobile license plates. And getting past the opening “how are you” seemed like moving glaciers.

And my few recent test experiences show no sign that the increased popularity of using the internet for finding partners for doing BDSM has made things any better.

If you are looking to bring some fantasies to life why not go ahead and say what those latent longings consist of?

Sometimes it is if you have to pry one word at a time out of someone who has written you. I’ve listed as both top and bottom and I’m long past worrying about grammar. (Not that ellipsis abuse doesn’t continue to annoy me.) Getting a concrete sentiment, specific desire is tough enough.

It is extra baffling when a top is both unable to spell and unwilling to say what he wants. I wouldn’t mind trying to gently top from the bottom for a novice dominant but I can’t do anything for them is they are hidden behind a verbal fog. A pity. There may be more potential with someone like that than a character that insists on capitalization protocol.

Suddenly a submissive male or female that you’ve been playing with fails to show up for a scheduled visit, doesn’t answer emails or phone or text messages. Why?

People outside of D/s are just as baffled when those things happen to them.

It took me far too many years to catch on the psychology of this kind of behavior. People often won’t tell you why they are dissatisfied with a relationship. They may not even tell you that they aren’t happy and fulfilled. They’d rather just retreat and hide.

Despite all the social aggression we witness most people are reluctant - afraid - to cause a fuss, endure friction or be thought a ‘negative’ person. They’d rather hide in silence, retreat behind walls.

Have you ever applied for a job only to find it nearly impossible to discover whether or not you’ve been hired? You haven’t but the person who chose someone else gets his or her stomach in a knot at the prospect of telling you. So they hide behind their secretary.

Many years back the stress that bosses felt when firing employees caused ‘dehiring’ consultants to do the dirty work for them. Corporations paid fat fees so managers wouldn’t have to look a discarded employee in the face.

It is the same weird timidity at work.

Similarly in the most conventional romance people will suddenly become unable for a date. They claim to be too busy with work or school. They’d rather invest huge amounts of time contorting themselves than admitting that something about the relationship hasn’t worked for them. And rather let it end than cope with the emotional risks of being open enough to discover if there is a solution.

Some fear appearing in a bad light. Others just want to move on if the thrill they expected wasn’t found.

A bottom may have found what he or she was experiencing boring. Boring in a way that left them without any desire to continue. While enduring ennui can be a part of submission it can just be tedious and nothing more.

Or the bottom may find some experiences uncomfortable and unsatisfying. But be trapped by that. Emotional state that leaves a bottom unwilling or unable to complain and explain. So they just give up.

Tops may feel that their authority or competence has been challenged. There are tops that feel confused or guilty about this. The ability to negotiate vanishes and they lapse into silence. While tops are mere mortals like the rest of it some find admitting that unendurable.

Unconfident, playmates and lovers would rather let a relationship die than undergo the demands of honest discussion, the challenge of emotionally naked conversation.

This is sad. The shy man or woman, rendered unwilling o speak loses a valued friend in fearful silence. And as those who can push past these fears can attest many of the best relationships are built on foundations that looked rocky at first.

It hurts to be shut out. Equally it hurts to be the one closing the door.

Female tops ( - it probably happens to male tops and submissive persons as well - ) recount stories of the man who never show up for a scheduled first date, Other dominant women express empathetic chagrin and submissive males wonder how anyone can be so foolish.

Dominant women often employ extensive vetting and screening in selecting guys to meet. Any sane person who uses the web to search for hookups and romance does likewise. That will never prove completely foolproof. Flakes and fools will always manage to slip past the most carefully conceived filters.

Why would a man invest time and energy in currying the interest of a dominant woman, achieve it and then fail to meet her.

He’s married or partnered or whatever the right term is for someone in a committed relationship with another person. That he not be is probably the first criterion: on the web nobody knows you are phony At least until.

Fears of being caught cheating or the lack of resources with which to cheat successfully stop many men from taking the final step. In a way the women are lucky. Becoming involved with him and then discovering his falsity would be worse than sipping coffee alone.

Just plain fear: this I suspect covers the majority of no shows. Fear of:

• Exposure: of blackmail maybe but mostly of by some mysterious means that others will learn of their submissive sexuality. They fear being laughed at or damaging their career.
• Fear of you, the woman. Whatever they may have written in the back of their minds an image of dominant women as pitiless, cruel creatures. They cultivate horrific fantasies that no one could really endure.
• Fear of being found inadequate. Like so much to do with fetish and kink this is universal to all social-sexual interaction. Even though they may dream of a top mocking them as worthless that isn’t the same as meeting someone and being found literally and objectively not worth knowing.

There may also be men for whom negotiating and making the date is all they ‘need.’ Those acts are sufficiently sexually gratifying. Cynically they never plan to meet. But I think them rare.

How many men I wonder make the date, approach the location only to freeze and retreat. Maybe they watch for you across the street. Or just as they start to open the door to the restaurant selected for the appointed rendezvous stop and run away.

This isn’t to excuse their incivility. At the very least they could follow-up with an email admitting that they don’t want it takes to translate their desires into reality.

If a man has pissed you off by making a date and failing to arrive for it perhaps you can find vengeful comfort in this thought:

For perhaps the rest of his life the guy will regret that he wasn’t brave enough to meet you. And he’ll spend many nights wondering what might have been.