One of the most interesting things I have learned since taking on a vocal and active role in the online BDSM community is just how many people on either side of the d/s slash or of whatever gender expression really just want exactly what I have. A long-term, committed, romantic relationship with the freak of their dreams.

Is it possible? Yes. There are some few d/s couples who get married and live happily ever-after. Is it probable? Not at all. BDSM relationships are at their core relationships. If you don’t have the tools, skills, and experience to find and maintain healthy relationships with quality partners in your vanilla life things will not suddenly become easier when you add kink to the equation.

But what is the equation exactly? Well perhaps an exercise in demographics can begin to illustrate the challenges one might face in finding a good partner. I will be using real data from my home country of Canada for this but that should be enough to illustrate my point. I live in a fairly populous city of ~750,000 people, what do you suppose the odds of finding even a mediocre partner are from this pool? This is going to get bleak for you single folks…

So let’s say you are a woman looking for a man to date, cut out a full 50% of the pool off the top to isolate men. Cut out 87% of that remaining pool to isolate men between the ages of 20-40. Chop another 7% out of the pool who are likely to be LGBT and you are left with a pool of roughly 45,000 men, this is not controlled for any other factors like ethnicity, body type, intellect, economic or even current marital status. But let’s drill down deeper. 57% of the population is already currently married or at least co-habitating with a spouse, so that pool is reduced to about 20,000 generic single men.

This is where your personal preferences are really going to drastically eliminate the potential pool. The numbers say 25 of those men will be currently imprisoned, usually a deal breaker. 3,000 will be unemployed. While fully half of the men will be of average intelligence, one quarter of them will have IQ’s that render them legally mentally disabled. Twenty percent of them will have a serious mental health condition, and half will develop cancer…

Maybe you are starting to get the picture. Finding just an average man with average intelligence, a job, and no serious health or legal issues is hard enough, the more factors you add the worse it becomes. Maybe you want him to be taller than average, cut out 50% more, maybe obesity isn’t your thing cut out another 16%. You always hear that ‘size doesn’t matter’ but if it does to you only 5% of men have a penis length that exceeds 6.3 inches, and we still haven’t even touched upon un-quantifiable factors like beauty…

But of course we still haven’t added kink to the equation which was sort of the point of this article. Even if we take the generous 10% estimate of general kinkiness in the population your personal compatibility is going to require a person of a specific alignment so we are probably looking at 3.5%. At this point that potential pool of men has been reduced to a minuscule handful of satisfactory mates, who could very well have the looks and social skills of your average basement-dwelling incel troll(or they probably would have been included in those 57% who currently have successful relationships)…

But hey maybe you will be the lucky-one and beat the odds and stumble upon someone who ticks enough boxes that you are willing to make a go of it, but I wouldn’t be so quick to throw away a perfectly good catch in the hopes of bagging that perfect trophy, because there really aren’t that many fish in the sea after all…