How Experience Changes What Couples Want
Every kink category becomes more accepted with experience. But the size of the shift varies dramatically, and a few categories barely move at all.
A note on where these numbers come from: Field dates Oct 2024-Feb 2026. This is anonymised in-app activity data from roughly 11,000 self-selected couples (~25,000+ people) on BeMoreKinky, our BDSM communication app. Experience is self-reported on a 1-4 scale, which means it's measuring what people believe about their own experience as much as what they've actually done. This is not a representative population sample. These are kinky couples who actively downloaded an app to explore together. Take it as a lens, not a mirror. Full methodology →
The Full Experience Table
Users on BeMoreKinky self-report their experience on a four-point scale: Level 1 (just starting out) through Level 4 (extensive experience). The table below shows the average acceptance rate for each of the app's twelve kink categories at each experience level, sorted by the size of the shift from Level 1 to Level 4.
| Category | Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 3 | Level 4 | Change (L1→L4) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bondage | 71.9% | 73.6% | 75.6% | 85.7% | +13.7 |
| Non-monogamy | 32.4% | 30.3% | 35.8% | 46.0% | +13.5 |
| Psychological Play | 37.3% | 34.5% | 38.7% | 49.4% | +12.1 |
| Devices | 49.8% | 44.7% | 47.3% | 58.6% | +8.8 |
| Sensation Play | 65.2% | 62.0% | 68.0% | 73.2% | +8.1 |
| Femdom | 51.8% | 50.9% | 54.1% | 59.8% | +8.0 |
| Soft Domination & Praise | 75.0% | 73.7% | 76.9% | 82.2% | +7.2 |
| Sensual | 62.7% | 63.3% | 66.3% | 69.7% | +7.1 |
| Dominant Names | 38.1% | 36.7% | 38.6% | 44.8% | +6.7 |
| Fantasies | 48.5% | 46.3% | 50.9% | 54.9% | +6.4 |
| Roleplay | 46.9% | 39.7% | 45.4% | 50.4% | +3.5 |
| Submissive Names | 45.9% | 41.7% | 41.8% | 46.4% | +0.5 |
How experience changes acceptance (Level 1 → Level 4)
Sample sizes range from approximately 2,100 (Bondage at Level 1) to approximately 14,378 (Roleplay at Level 4). The larger Level 4 samples reflect that more experienced users tend to rate more activities, which makes sense. Once you know what you like, you want to catalogue all of it.
The direction is universal: every category ends higher than it starts. But there's a world of difference between a 0.5-point gain and a 13.7-point gain. One is statistical noise. The other is a genuine shift in what people want as they gain experience. Let me break down what I'm seeing.
Three Buckets
The twelve categories fall into three natural groupings when you look at both the starting point and the gradient. I've been in the kink world long enough to have intuitions about this, and the data mostly confirmed them, with a couple of exceptions that made me properly rethink.
Immediately Popular
Four categories achieve high acceptance even among beginners:
| Category | Level 1 Acceptance |
|---|---|
| Soft Domination & Praise | 75.0% |
| Bondage | 71.9% |
| Sensation Play | 65.2% |
| Sensual | 62.7% |
These are your starter kinks. The gateway drugs of BDSM, if you will, though I hate that phrase because it implies escalation is inevitable, and it isn't. Couples exploring for the first time can reasonably expect alignment here. Even at Level 1, acceptance rates sit above 60%.
If you're new to kink and wondering where to start, wondering what your partner might actually be open to rather than what you've been fantasising about alone at 2am, the data says these four categories are your strongest starting ground. They don't require prior experience to appeal, and they continue climbing through Level 4, meaning early enthusiasm isn't a phase. It's a foundation. You're not going to get bored of being praised. Trust me on that one.
Grows With Experience
Five categories show steep gradients, several starting from much lower baselines:
| Category | Level 1 | Level 4 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bondage | 71.9% | 85.7% | +13.7 |
| Non-monogamy | 32.4% | 46.0% | +13.5 |
| Psychological Play | 37.3% | 49.4% | +12.1 |
| Devices | 49.8% | 58.6% | +8.8 |
| Femdom | 51.8% | 59.8% | +8.0 |
These are the categories where experience genuinely changes things. Non-monogamy nearly doubles its relative share of acceptance between Level 1 and Level 4. At Level 1, fewer than one in three couples accept it. At Level 4, nearly half do. That's not a trivial shift, it's the difference between "absolutely not" and "actually, let's talk about it."
Psychological play, comfort with power dynamics beyond the physical, including tasks, rules, and mental challenges, appears to develop through practice rather than being an initial draw. The 12.1-point climb suggests that understanding and comfort with psychological intensity is built, not born. Couples don't typically arrive at kink already wanting structured power exchange. They grow into it. I've seen this in my own life, frankly, the mental aspects of D/s took years to develop, long after I was comfortable with the physical side.
Bondage is the beautiful outlier in this group: it starts high (71.9%) and still manages the largest absolute gain (+13.7 points), reaching 85.7% at Level 4. That makes it both a starter kink and an advanced one, accessible to beginners, and increasingly central as experience deepens. Bondage is the little black dress of kink. Works everywhere, never goes out of style, and you keep finding new ways to wear it.
And then there's femdom, climbing 8 points from 51.8% to 59.8%. I've written about how female domination sits uncomfortably in mainstream culture, and centuries of conditioning don't evaporate overnight. But this data suggests that experience erodes that conditioning. The more couples explore, the more open they become to women holding the reins.
Personality-Driven
Two categories barely move regardless of how much experience a user reports:
| Category | Level 1 | Level 4 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Submissive Names | 45.9% | 46.4% | +0.5 |
| Roleplay | 46.9% | 50.4% | +3.5 |
Whether you want to be called "pet" or "slut" or "darling" does not appear to change with experience. Whether you want to play a scenario (nurse, stranger, authority figure) also stays stubbornly flat. These preferences seem to be about identity and personality rather than exposure. You either want them or you don't, and time in the scene doesn't reliably shift that.
I find this genuinely important, and slightly uncomfortable to say out loud, because the kink community loves the narrative that exposure opens all doors. For naming and roleplay, it doesn't. Not really. A half-point shift across four experience levels is basically the data shrugging at you.
The practical implication is clear: if naming or roleplay matters to your dynamic, treat it as a personality preference to be discussed directly rather than something your partner will "grow into" with more experience. They probably won't. And waiting for them to is just patience cosplaying as pressure.
The Level 2 Dip
Right, this is the finding that made me stare at the data for a good twenty minutes. An unexpected pattern emerges when you read the table row by row rather than just comparing the endpoints. Several categories show a dip at Level 2 before climbing at Levels 3 and 4:
| Category | Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 3 | Level 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Non-monogamy | 32.4% | 30.3% | 35.8% | 46.0% |
| Devices | 49.8% | 44.7% | 47.3% | 58.6% |
| Submissive Names | 45.9% | 41.7% | 41.8% | 46.4% |
| Roleplay | 46.9% | 39.7% | 45.4% | 50.4% |
The pattern is consistent enough to note and ambiguous enough to resist a tidy explanation, which, I actually prefer. I don't trust tidy explanations. They usually mean someone's lying.
One possible reading: early experience sharpens boundaries before broader exploration expands them. People who move from Level 1 to Level 2 may become more selective about what they want, having tried a few things, they develop stronger opinions about what doesn't work for them, before eventually widening their aperture again at Levels 3 and 4. It's the "I tried it and actually no" phase. Anyone who's been in the scene for a while will recognise this. That period where you stop saying yes to everything because it's exciting and start saying no to the things that aren't your exciting.
Another possibility is compositional. Level 1 users may include a mix of genuinely curious beginners and people who underreport their experience. We've all met the person who claims to be "just curious" while owning a dungeon's worth of equipment. Level 2 may represent a more honest baseline, making the subsequent climb to Level 4 the more meaningful signal.
The experience scale is self-reported and may reflect identity as much as actual experience. Someone who calls themselves Level 1 might have years of casual exploration they don't count. Someone at Level 4 might have concentrated experience in a narrow area. The dip is real in the data. Its cause remains speculative.
What This Means for Couples
Here's what I'd tell you:
If you're new, start where acceptance is already high. Sensation play, soft domination and praise, and bondage all clear 65% acceptance at Level 1. These are the categories where a first conversation is most likely to land on shared ground. You don't need experience to find alignment here, you just need to have the conversation.
Don't treat early preferences as permanent. Every single category in the dataset shows growth with experience. What your partner says no to at Level 1 may become a maybe or a yes as they explore more broadly. The data doesn't say everyone eventually accepts everything. Level 4 acceptance for non-monogamy is still only 46%, which means more than half of experienced couples aren't interested, but it does say the direction is consistently toward greater openness.
If a partner is less experienced, be patient, properly patient. The growth curves are real, but they are a reason for patience, not pressure. Knowing that psychological play acceptance rises 12 points with experience does not license pushing a reluctant partner toward it. Full stop. It means the conversation is worth revisiting over months and years, not that the answer should be different today. I cannot stress this enough. Data about populations does not give you permission to override an individual's boundaries.
Naming preferences are unlikely to change. If titles and labels matter to your dynamic, whether dominant names, submissive names, or both, discuss them as personality, not as something to "grow into." The data shows these preferences are nearly flat across all experience levels. A partner who doesn't want to be called "Sir" at Level 1 is unlikely to want it at Level 4 either. That 0.5-point shift is the data's way of saying: this is who they are. Listen to it.
Roleplay is personal, not developmental. Similar to naming, roleplay acceptance barely shifts with experience (+3.5 points across the entire scale). If scenario play appeals to one partner but not the other, experience alone is unlikely to close that gap. It may be worth exploring specific scenarios rather than the category broadly. The flagship post shows that category-level disagreement often masks activity-level alignment. Your partner might hate "roleplay" as a concept but be completely into one very specific scenario. Ask about specifics, not categories.
More From This Research
- What 11,000 Couples Reveal About the Kinks Partners Actually Agree On - the overview of mutual-yes rates, conflict rates, and experience effects
- The Kinks Couples Agree on Fastest - the full mutual-yes ranking and the gap between fantasy and action
- The Most Divisive Kinks in Relationships - mismatch rankings, directional conflict, and what couples universally reject
- How Kinky Language Is Gendered - the Good Girl effect, demand asymmetry, and the degradation spectrum
- Methodology and Privacy - how we collected, anonymized, and analyzed this data