What Couples Do Between Sessions: Proposals, Tasks, and AI Scenes

How couples use structured tools to communicate desire, from play proposals to power-exchange tasks to AI-generated fantasy scenes.

A note on these numbers: This data covers October 2024 to February 2026, drawn from anonymised in-app interaction data from roughly 11,000 self-selected couples on BeMoreKinky, my app, which I built with my partner specifically for this kind of structured kink communication. These are not a representative sample of the general population. These are people who downloaded a BDSM app and actually used it, which already puts them several standard deviations from "average." Take the numbers for what they are: a genuinely fascinating window into what kinky couples do when given the right tools, not a census. Full methodology →

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How Couples Propose Play

Here's the thing about asking for what you want in bed: most people would rather gnaw their own arm off. The play proposal system in BeMoreKinky exists precisely because of this. It lets couples suggest activities to each other without the white-knuckle terror of a face-to-face ask. You type what you'd like to try. Your partner sees it. They accept, or they don't. No one has to watch anyone's face fall in real time.

The timing patterns alone are worth the price of admission.

Saturday pulls in the most proposals, 17.2% of all submissions land on that day, which makes intuitive sense. Weekend energy. Possibility. Time stretching out ahead of you. But the highest acceptance rate? That belongs to Wednesday, at 43.3%, despite Wednesday producing the fewest proposals of any day. The pattern inverts completely: the day with the most asking is not the day with the most yes.

I find this quietly devastating and completely unsurprising. Saturday-you is horny and optimistic. Wednesday-you is realistic about what's actually going to happen.

Partners respond faster on workdays, 6.9 hours average versus 11.0 hours on weekends, but accept more often on weekends (40.3% vs 37.3%). The weekday speed is just phone-checking habits: commutes, lunch breaks, the reflexive scroll. The weekend acceptance bump reflects something more meaningful, having the actual time and headspace to follow through.

And here's the detail that made me sit up: declined proposals are rare. Under 4% of all proposals receive an explicit no. The vast majority of non-acceptances are expirations, proposals that just quietly lapse into nothing. Partners let them die in silence rather than saying no directly. This is textbook rejection avoidance behaviour, and if you've ever been in any kind of intimate relationship, you already know why. Given an exit that doesn't require confrontation, most people will take it every single time. The proposal system makes silence a valid response by design. Whether that's a feature or a limitation depends entirely on the couple, and probably on which side of the silence you're sitting on.

The most-proposed activities mirror the concordance data from the flagship post: blindfolding and anticipation-building top the list. "Be called good girl" appears in 234 proposals, the most-proposed naming activity by a country mile, consistent with the cultural dominance of that title I documented in the language post. Some things are just baked into the collective erotic unconscious at this point.

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Power Exchange in Practice - The Task System

The task system is the most explicitly power-exchange feature in BeMoreKinky. One partner assigns recurring tasks to the other. On paper, it's straightforward D/s infrastructure. In practice, as with everything in this dataset, the reality is more complicated and more interesting than the assumption.

Yes, the expected dom-to-sub assignment pattern exists and accounts for the majority of tasks. But sub-to-sub self-assignment is the second-largest category, representing 11.3% of all daily tasks. I didn't expect this when we built the feature, and I find it genuinely compelling. Many submissives are using the task system for self-discipline and personal growth (journaling prompts, fitness routines, mindfulness exercises) rather than partner-directed obedience. Submission, for this subset, includes a relationship with oneself. That reframes what power exchange can look like when no one else is in the room.

Task engagement is brutally bimodal, and I mean brutally.

Among users with active tasks, 60.5% complete them perfectly, averaging 5.76 completions each across the observation period. The remaining 39.5% show zero activity, tasks accepted but never once acted on. There is no middle ground. No gentle drift. No gradual decay. People either commit fully or not at all. They don't slowly lose interest; they either engage from day one or they never start. As someone who has spent years writing about commitment in BDSM dynamics, this all-or-nothing pattern feels painfully on-brand for the kink community. We don't do half measures, or apparently, we do nothing at all.

The reward-and-consequence structure reveals how couples calibrate their reinforcement.

Rewards outnumber consequences 1.3 to 1. The average reward grants +5 points; the average consequence deducts -3.5. On the surface, couples lean toward positive reinforcement.

But the extremes tell a very different story. The maximum consequence in the dataset is -60 points, dramatically more severe than the maximum reward of +14. This creates what I'd call a "rare but severe" penalty structure: most interactions are encouraging, warm, affirming, and then somewhere out there, one couple has a nuclear option in their back pocket. The ceiling for punishment is four times higher than the ceiling for reward. Whether this reflects thoughtful dynamic design or a single couple who got very creative one evening is impossible to determine from aggregate data. But the asymmetry is striking, and honestly, rather hot.

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What Couples Ask AI to Imagine

BeMoreKinky's AI scene generator creates custom fantasy scenarios from activities the user selects. It's a third layer of desire, beyond what people rate (interest), beyond what they propose to a partner (intent), and into what they want to imagine (fantasy). This is where people go when they're alone with their thoughts and a text box.

The activities people choose for AI scenes differ noticeably from what they rate or propose. And that gap is where it gets interesting.

Tickling. Tickling is the number one AI scene activity (124 scenes generated) despite an acceptance rate of only 52.0% when proposed between partners. I'll be honest, I did not have "tickling" on my bingo card for top fantasy activity. But it sits at this fascinating intersection of playfulness, power, and physical sensation that clearly resonates with people in ways they're not fully comfortable requesting out loud. The gap between AI scene frequency and proposal acceptance suggests tickling occupies a very specific psychological niche: something people want to explore in fantasy before, or instead of, negotiating in reality. It's the desire equivalent of peering over the edge of a cliff before deciding whether to jump.

Eye contact rules rank second, and this one I find genuinely thrilling as a data point. Unlike most activities on the list, eye contact rules involve no physical setup, no equipment, no choreography. They are purely psychological, and they generate more AI scenes than activities involving actual ropes or collars. The desire to be controlled through gaze, to have when and how you look at someone dictated by another person, is a recurring thread in everything I see in this dataset. Power doesn't need props. Sometimes it just needs eyes.

The list as a whole reveals something I keep coming back to in this research: people don't ask for exclusively gentle or exclusively intense scenes. They mix registers. A single AI scene request might combine wrist bondage with gentle hair touching, control and tenderness in the same breath. This is consistent with the concordance data, which shows that couples who agree on bondage also agree on praise at high rates. The categories that kink culture treats as separate (soft and hard, gentle and controlling) co-occur constantly in practice. The binary is a lie. It always has been.

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The Journey Inward - Quizzes and Identity

BeMoreKinky offers 22 quick quizzes and 34 personality tests. The completion rates reveal a progression in how people explore identity that I find almost unbearably human.

The funnel is steep enough to make a mountaineer nervous. Everyone starts with safety, 100%, because the app requires it. Three-quarters explore the giver/receiver axis. Then engagement falls off a cliff: fewer than one in ten proceed to personality tests, and fewer than one in a hundred reach the Sadism Profile. People start with the questions that feel safe, move to identity, and gradually approach their edges, or stop. This isn't disinterest. It's the natural pace of self-exploration: start where it's comfortable, stop where it isn't. Yet.

The quiz with the lowest average score and widest spread is "Are you a giver or receiver?", 70.95 average with a standard deviation of 26.47. Every other quiz produces tighter clusters. This one scatters all over the map. The question of whether you're oriented toward giving or receiving sensation, control, and attention is, apparently, the hardest to answer with confidence. Which makes sense if you think about it for more than thirty seconds, it's asking you to locate yourself on an axis that most people have never been explicitly asked to define. No wonder the answers are all over the place.

The Submissive TPE (Total Power Exchange) personality profiles add a layer of nuance that I think is genuinely important. Submissives score highest on "Emotional Tone & Meaning" (3.99 out of 5) and lowest on "Directive Style" (2.88 out of 5). The gap is more than a full point. Submissives in this dataset prioritise emotional connection from power exchange (feeling held, feeling seen, feeling valued in their role) over being told what to do. The emotional dimension of submission outranks the instructional one.

This challenges the popular image of TPE as primarily about obedience and orders. For the submissives who completed this profile, the core of the experience is meaning, not compliance. I've written about this dynamic for years on my blog, and seeing it confirmed in actual data from my own app is, I won't lie, deeply satisfying. The leather-and-barking-orders fantasy has its place, but it's not where most submissives actually live.

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What This Tells Us

Taken together, these four systems (proposals, tasks, AI scenes, and quizzes) show couples using structured tools to bridge the gap between desire and conversation. And having built these tools, watching how people actually use them has been one of the most illuminating experiences of my career.

• The proposal system reveals that timing matters. Wednesday beats Saturday for acceptance rate, even though Saturday gets the most proposals. Asking when your partner has space to consider, not just when you feel the urge, produces better outcomes. Your Saturday-night enthusiasm is not your partner's Saturday-night priority.

• Self-assigned tasks suggest submission includes self-discipline, not just obedience. The 11.3% of tasks that submissives assign to themselves reframe what power exchange can look like outside the dynamic between two people. Submission doesn't always need a dominant in the room.

• AI scenes reveal a third layer of desire beyond ratings and proposals. What people want to imagine (tickling, eye contact rules, collars) doesn't perfectly match what they rate or propose. Fantasy has its own logic, and it may point toward desires that haven't yet found language in conversation. The things we ask a machine to describe for us are sometimes the things we can't yet ask a person to do with us.

• Quiz progression shows people approaching identity in stages. The steep drop-off from safety quizzes to personality profiles isn't a failure of engagement. It's the natural pace of self-exploration: start where it's comfortable, stop where it isn't. Yet. The "yet" matters.

These tools don't replace conversation. Nothing does. But they create structured entry points for conversations that might not otherwise happen. A proposal is easier than an ask. A quiz is easier than a confession. And an AI scene is easier than admitting what you want before you're sure you want it.

I can tell you: most people aren't short on desire. They're short on ways to say it out loud. That's what this data keeps showing me, over and over, in eleven thousand different ways.

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More From This Research

• Back to the flagship: What 11,000 Couples Reveal - the overview of mutual-yes rates, conflict patterns, and experience effects
• The Kinks Couples Agree on Fastest - full mutual-yes ranking, five myths the data challenges, and the fantasy-vs-action gap
• The Most Divisive Kinks in Relationships - mismatch rankings, directional conflict, and what couples universally reject
• How Kinky Language Is Gendered - the "Good Girl" effect, naming conflict rates, and the gender asymmetry
• How Experience Changes What Couples Want - starter kinks, advanced kinks, and the categories that stay flat
• Methodology and Privacy - how we collected, anonymised, and analysed this data