I see lots of complaints from female doms about how “submissive” men mostly aren’t, that they act like dominant women exist to make their dicks happy if they even show up for a planned meeting in the first place.

There’s a great way to avoid a lot of unhappiness: vetting!

While vetting isn’t a magic cure-all, people mostly suck at lying about who they are and they extra suck at it when they don’t realize they’re kind of terrible and probably should lie about who they are 🙂

Whether you want a long-term romantic relationship with a submissive boyfriend or you just want a play partner who will treat you like a human being, guys who can’t clear that bar are usually super obvious about it. Seriously, it is not hard to catch them. At all.

I think the hardest part of vetting people effectively is being absolutely certain you deserve better. If you don’t believe you deserve better than J. Random Douchebag, no amount of vetting advice is going to help. On the upside, being totally over manchildren’s bullshit works just about as well as high self-esteem. If you can’t love yourself (and let’s be honest, a profoundly misogynistic society makes that pretty fucking hard), you can still decide a videogame and a glass of wine is a better evening than meeting up with yet another bratty pissbaby who could not possibly give less of a shit about your feelings. Sadly, you might have to meet a bunch of dirtbags to get to that state of “oh fuck this shit”, but you’ll get there sooner or later.

So assuming you’ve got either self-love or a total lack of fucks on your side, let’s talk about what else you need.

One extremely useful trait is the willingness to believe a person when they show you who you are. Optimism is nice and all, and I’ll even grudgingly admit that sometimes people who actually do mean well express themselves badly, but if you don’t want to waste a ton of time on people who turn out to be complete dickbags, you’ve got to take what they say and do seriously and not make excuses for them.

This is pretty closely related to not having time for bullshit, because if you value yourself (or at least having a nice evening without manchild bullshit), you don’t need to talk yourself into believing that this particular little brat isn’t a total waste of time.

Another useful thing is patience. People keep saying there are tons of submissive men for every dominant woman but that’s just bullshit. Men who are a) actually submissive and b) compatible with you are rare and precious. It’s going to take some time before you meet just the right guy, especially if you’re looking for a long term relationship. If you just want a play partner it’s a lot easier because you don’t have to worry about stuff like how you each manage money or whether you want to have kids or not, but it’s still not likely to be instant.

So here’s how you vet people: basically you get in touch with your inner judgemental asshole, and in touch with exactly what you want, and you say not to everything you don’t want.

It’s totally okay to just want a little hot chat and then go about your day, you’re just going to vet people differently than you would if you were looking for a submissive boyfriend or a personal slave who is cool with being part of your stable or a play partner you can really grow to trust and explore your limits with.

My personal standards are going to be different from yours, but some examples will probably help explain what I’m talking about.

When I get a message, say on Fetlife, I start judging from the very first line. Honestly guys there’s not a fucking time limit. You can take as long as you need to not fuck it up, so yes I’m going to  judge you for it.

I’m pretty informal, as long as you greet me like I’m a human fucking being we’re cool. That means either my username or a simple “hi there”. Basically anything that would be appropriate to say to a vanilla woman works for me. For you maybe you want a certain word in the subject line that you mention at the end of your profile or to be greeted using a title you mention liking.

Anyway if they can’t even get the first line / subject line right, they can fuck right off. Greeting someone like they’re a fellow human being who does not exist to entertain you is not hard, if somebody who messages you fucks that up, delete their message and move on. I’m also a fan of blocking people who are clearly never going to be worth my time.

Almost forgot! When I get a message from a stranger I also judge the shit out of their avatar. If there’s a dick in it, that’s an instant delete or block. Even back when I was single and just looking for a little kinky sex, I had zero time for anyone who literally led with his dick. Somebody who doesn’t even care whether or not you want to see his dick will never, ever be worth your time.

This post got unreasonably long, even for me, so part two is coming next week.