What 11,000 Couples Reveal About the Kinks Partners Actually Agree On

Anonymous app data suggests kinky couples align most around blindfolds, anticipation, and praise, while roleplay, naming, and non-monogamy create the most mismatch.

A word on how we got these numbers, because I know you'll ask. Field dates: Oct 2024-Feb 2026. Source: anonymized in-app activity ratings from roughly 11,000 self-selected couples on BeMoreKinky, that's my app, a BDSM communication tool. "Mutual yes" means both partners independently rated the complementary activity as yes. Nobody saw each other's answers. This is not a representative population sample. These are people who actively sought out a kink app, which makes them more exploratory than your colleague Dave who thinks "adventurous" means leaving the lights on. Full methodology →

Blindfolds Beat Everything

I have tried hundreds of sex toys over the years. Vibrators with more settings than a washing machine. Bondage kits that arrive in packaging the size of a small coffin. And yet the single strongest point of agreement in our entire dataset (11,000 couples, thousands of rated activities) is a piece of fabric over someone's eyes.

When one partner rates "Blindfold them" and the other rates "Be blindfolded," 88.2% say yes to both. The conflict rate is a laughable 3.2%. Blindfolding has a higher agreement rate than any sex position we track.

Look at that top tier. It's dominated by sensory and anticipation-based activities, not pain, not power exchange, not humiliation. The kinks couples most enthusiastically share are about creating psychological tension through what you take away (sight, predictability, control of what happens next) rather than what you add.

There's something almost poetic about it, and I say that as someone who's deeply suspicious of poetry. The most universally desired kinky experience isn't being flogged or called filthy names. It's having your senses narrowed until every touch becomes an event. It's the not-knowing.

That said, and I'll keep banging this drum, these are people who downloaded a kink communication app and rated hundreds of activities. They're more communicative and exploratory than the general population by definition. This is the top of the list for these couples. Your mileage may vary.

Roleplay Is Where Couples Diverge

Here's where it gets interesting. Not all categories produce the same warm fuzzy mutual enthusiasm. When we look at how often one partner says yes while the other says no, the conflict rate, very clear patterns emerge.

Roleplay sits at the top with a 16.9% conflict rate. Nearly one in six roleplay activity pairs results in one partner saying yes please and the other saying absolutely not. And honestly? This makes perfect sense. Agreeing that roleplay sounds fun in the abstract doesn't mean you both want to play Stern Headmistress & Naughty Pupil. The category is broad; the fantasies within it are deeply specific. You might be envisioning a power-suit interrogation scenario while your partner is picturing something involving a maid's outfit and a feather duster. The devil, as ever, is in the details.

At the individual activity level, naming produces the sharpest disagreements. "Call them a naughty one" has an 18.5% conflict rate (n=1,118 couples), nearly one in five couples can't agree on it. Even "Call them a good girl," which has that lovely 72.1% mutual yes rate, still generates 13.3% conflict. That's the highest conflict rate among the most popular activities. Let that sink in: the thing lots of people want is also the thing that starts arguments.

Bondage, by contrast, has the lowest conflict of any category at just 6.3%. When couples agree on bondage, they agree strongly: 67.2% mutual yes, only 2.4% mutual no. There's something reassuringly straightforward about rope, either you want to be tied up or you don't. Less ambiguity than "so, which specific roleplay scenario did you have in mind?"

We'll go deeper into what divides couples and which direction the mismatch runs in a companion piece later this week.

Experience Changes the Map

Users self-report their experience level on a 1-4 scale when they set up the app. And here's the headline: across every single category, openness increases with experience. Every one. But, and this is the bit that kept me up at night staring at spreadsheets, the size of that shift varies dramatically.

Three categories show particularly steep gradients:

• Bondage climbs 13.7 points to reach the highest absolute acceptance of any category at Level 4, a whopping 85.7% (n=5,877). If you've been doing this a while, the odds are overwhelming that bondage is on your menu.
• Non-monogamy rises 13.5 points, the largest relative shift. At Level 1, fewer than one in three accept it (32.4%, n=3,330). At Level 4, nearly half do (46.0%, n=13,881). Still not a majority, mind you, but the movement is striking.
• Psychological Play jumps 12.1 points, which suggests that comfort with the headfuck side of power dynamics, the mind games, the controlled uncertainty, develops through doing rather than just thinking about it. You don't wake up one morning fancying psychological play; you arrive there through experience.

One category barely moves at all: Submissive Names shifts only 0.5 points from Level 1 to Level 4. Whether you want to be called "good girl" or "dirty slut" appears to be a personality trait, not something experience teaches you. You either light up when someone calls you a name, or you don't, and no amount of kink experience changes that.

The full 12-category breakdown with starter-kink and advanced-kink groupings is coming in a companion piece later this week.

The Language Gap Nobody Expects

This one genuinely surprised me, and I don't surprise easily.

"Good Girl" is the most-rated title in the entire dataset. 77.2% of those giving the title accept it; 66.2% of those receiving it do. "Good Boy" is accepted at a nearly identical rate, 75.8%. The desire is there. The enthusiasm is comparable.

But "Good Boy" has approximately 27 times fewer ratings.

Twenty-seven times. Let that sit for a moment. The acceptance rates are almost the same, but almost nobody is asking for it. Kink communication is overwhelmingly structured around feminine-coded submissive language, and masculine or non-binary submissive language is catastrophically underserved relative to the interest that actually exists. There are submissive men and non-binary people out there who would love to hear "good boy", and almost nobody's saying it.

The 10-point gap between giving and receiving "good girl" (77.2% vs 66.2%) matters too. The desire to bestow the title is stronger than the desire to receive it. Which means there are couples out there where one partner is dying to say it and the other would rather they didn't, and if they haven't actually discussed it, they're flying blind. Pun intended, given the blindfold data.

The full analysis of naming, gendered demand, and the degradation-to-endearment spectrum is coming in a dedicated piece later this week.

What Couples Can Take From This

I'm not going to wrap this up with a tidy bow, that's not my style, and the data doesn't warrant one. But here's what I'd say after staring at these numbers for months:

Start with blindfolds and anticipation. Seriously. If you and your partner are standing at the threshold of kink looking nervous, this is your safest bet. Highest agreement rate, lowest conflict rate. Buy a sleep mask for two quid from Boots and take turns. You can thank me later.

Discuss naming explicitly. I know it feels awkward. I know "so, would you like me to call you a good girl?" is not exactly pillow talk that rolls off the tongue. But titles like "good girl" are among the most popular activities in the dataset and they produce above-average conflict. Don't assume your partner wants to hear what you want to say, or vice versa. Have the conversation. Use the app. That's literally why we built it.

Don't assume alignment. Even bondage, the category with the lowest conflict rate in the entire dataset, still has 6.3% disagreement. If you and your partner disagree on something, you're not broken. You're not incompatible. You're having the conversation that the data says most couples need to have.

More From This Research

This is the first in a series. Over the coming days we'll publish deep dives into mutual agreement rankings, what divides couples, how language is gendered, how experience shifts preferences, and what couples do between sessions.

• Methodology and Privacy - how we collected, anonymized, and analyzed this data