BeMoreKinky research
Do people get kinkier over time?
People's play plans became more varied over time, but they did not steadily move towards ideas we rated as more intense.
People's play plans got broader, not steadily more intense. The fifth play proposal contained more activities than the first, but movement towards ideas we rated as more intense was almost perfectly matched by movement towards ideas we rated as less intense. People returning to our harder packs were not keener on them either.
The better image is exploring a room. Over time, people find more corners worth playing in. They do not all head for the same far wall.
From the data
Plans moved towards ideas we rated as more or less intense at nearly the same rate
Changes from one play proposal to the next
Among people making repeated play proposals across several weeks: Moved towards ideas we rated as more intense, 24%; Moved towards ideas we rated as less intense, 23%. The fifth proposal contained roughly 40% more activities than the first.
From the data
People said yes less often when they returned to our harder packs
The same returning members, comparing their first day with later days
Among long-standing app members who returned to the harder packs: First day with these packs, 40% average yes share; Later days with these packs, 35% average yes share.
Later play plans included more activities without getting more intense
"Kinkier" is a slippery little word. It can mean wanting more kinds of play, doing them more often or becoming more open about an interest that was already there. It can also mean choosing ideas that we rated as more intense. Those changes can travel together. They can also head in entirely different directions.
By the fifth proposal, people were putting far more activities into the plan than they had in the first. Yet a new proposal was no more likely to move towards ideas we rated as more intense than towards ideas we rated as less intense.
That is growth in breadth. A couple starts with the obvious favourites, then remembers the blindfold, the particular name they like being called, the position they have not tried for months and the bit of role play they keep threatening to do properly. The plan becomes fuller without having to climb our rating.
A single scale from vanilla to extreme gets this wrong. It mistakes a large, playful repertoire for a march towards some dramatic endpoint. A fuller plan may simply mean someone has stopped treating every scene like it needs the same handful of ingredients.
People were less likely to say yes to harder kinks when they returned later
People who came back to the app's harder packs were slightly less likely to say yes than they had been on their first visit.
Novelty has a kick. Browsing can be its own pleasure. Once somebody has seen the whole shelf, they may become more selective about which ideas belong in their actual play.
That lower yes rate is easy to mistake for retreat if kink is imagined as a staircase. A person can become more experienced and have fewer automatic yesses because they know the difference between something that sounds hot in the abstract and something that works beautifully for them.
Experience can sharpen taste. It does not have to keep pushing somebody towards ideas we rated as more intense.
Trying something new can excite a couple without making sex more intense
This difference between novelty and intensity appears in relationship research too. In controlled experiments, Arthur Aron and his colleagues found that couples who shared novel, arousing activities experienced better relationship quality than couples assigned mundane activities. Novelty can matter without meaning greater sexual intensity.
Cheryl Harasymchuk and her colleagues also found that people with stronger approach-oriented relationship goals planned more exciting dates and experienced more self-expansion and closeness. Planning something fresh can wake a couple up while leaving intensity where it was.
A new ritual, a role reversal or finally giving an old fantasy enough time can feel like a large erotic expansion. None of them needs to sit higher on our intensity rating than what came before.
Variety also lets people move sideways. Someone who has spent months focused on impact play might become fascinated by service, then return to impact with a better sense of what they enjoy about it. On a single intensity scale, that looks like no progress at all. The person may feel that their entire erotic vocabulary has changed.
Getting kinkier doesn't have to mean going harder
The ladder idea carries a strange assumption: once you begin, the serious destination must be whatever somebody has labelled "harder". That makes one idea of intensity sound like expertise and treats familiar pleasures as somewhere a person ought to graduate from.
Erotic development is less tidy. People add interests, drop others, come back to old favourites and discover that one small detail matters more than a supposedly bigger activity. A seasoned kinkster can have a vast repertoire and still build tonight's scene around a blindfold and a few well-chosen words.
Repeated planning brought more onto the menu without steadily shifting people's plans towards ideas we rated as more intense. The change was horizontal.
People can get kinkier over time if kinkier means building a wider language for what turns them on. If it means an automatic drift towards ideas we rated as more intense, our proposals are having none of it. The fifth plan is fuller. It is not trying to win a medal.