Who Texted First? Lena and Matthias on Their Match and Their Play Party
Lena (40) lives in the Rhineland and has been finding her way around the BDSM community since 2020, and things have moved fast ever since. Matthias is from the Ruhr area and has been connected to the scene for much longer, though more on the fringes, and he still builds his own bondage sets to this day. In October 2024, the two matched on Deviance, and these days they organize their own play party. Deviance talked to them about their story, from the very first profile text to a checklist that ended up raising more questions than it answered.
How they found their way into the scene
How did you two actually get into the BDSM scene?
Lena: I’m from a small village. Stuff like that was just frowned upon there, and I didn’t even dare to think about what was going on in my head. Moving to the big city was the turning point: meeting people who are open, where you don’t get judged. At some point in therapy, there came a moment when I said I really wanted to try things out and see what these fantasies were actually about. That was 2020, 2021. After that, everything happened pretty quickly.
Matthias: For me, it goes back further, more than half a lifetime really, but always more on the fringes. Back then, it all felt too goth for me. These days I’m much more active, and we even organize our own event now.
The search before Deviance
Where had you already looked for like-minded people before you signed up with Deviance?
Matthias: On quite a lot of platforms. Honestly, I’m old enough that I still used personal ads. I found Sadomaso-Chat truly awful, and Joyclub wasn’t any better. What won me over at Deviance was the principle that you have to match before you can message someone. I figured: if someone writes to me, they’re genuinely interested, because they’re not getting thirty-eight other messages a day. That was a good thing. I had fewer contacts than elsewhere, but much nicer ones.
I was also on FetLife. There are those groups with thousands of members where it feels like the same guy sends the same message every other day.
Lena: Yes, Deviance was different for me too. I wasn’t flooded with messages, but the few matches I did have were really good. I’m sitting here today with one of them, and I’m still texting with another one as a friend.
The first match
What specifically appealed to you about each other’s profile?
Lena: His text was unusually deep for a dating platform. You could tell right away that this was someone writing with genuine feminist values, not some typical Dom boilerplate. That really appealed to me. And he had a beard.
Matthias: For me, it was the picture first. I thought she was pretty. Her text was on the short side but sounded okay, and the distance worked too. So I thought, why not give it a try.
On paper, though, it wasn’t an obvious match. Matthias didn’t have much use for rope, while Lena was completely into Shibari and bondage. What clicked was the personality behind the profiles rather than the individual kink checkboxes. To this day, neither of them is quite sure who wrote first, and each is convinced they sent the first message.
A bumpy start
How did things go once you started writing to each other?
Lena: I pushed him pretty quickly to switch to Telegram. I basically don’t trust guys from dating apps anymore. I’ve been stalked before.
Matthias: At first, I found it pretty strange to switch straight to another messenger. I was suspicious whether it was even real, especially since she only had one picture up. It got to the point where we almost just dropped it.
Both describe the beginning the same way: as a small conflict. Of all things, that turned out to be a good sign in hindsight. Lena says it made her realize this was a man she could actually talk to, because he didn’t block her and disappear at the first bit of friction, the way she was used to from other chats. Matthias stayed calm, listened and explained instead of simply breaking things off. That was the moment both of them thought: this is someone I want to get to know.
The first date
So how did your first meeting come about?
Lena: We met in my city, and on exactly that day, the first snow of the year fell. Pretty romantic for a first date. We spent the whole afternoon out and about in town together, and in the evening we went to a bar. At first, I thought we were just having a normal date, so I had some mulled wine too. It didn’t occur to me at all that we’d end up at my place.
Matthias: I was unsure the whole time whether she saw it the same way I did. We had great conversations, but I automatically kept taking a step back, and that was hard for her to read. I have a kid, and I simply have to choose and think these things through more carefully than others might. In the end, I walked her home, and then suddenly I was standing upstairs in her apartment.
They barely talked about kinks in the narrower sense that evening; they had already sounded that out on the phone beforehand. Instead, they talked about art, about life, about how different they actually are. Lena says it was exactly in those conversations that she fell for him.
Two cities – so far and yet so close
You don’t live in the same city. How do you handle that?
Lena: The two cities aren’t actually that far apart. By train, it’s half an hour door to door at best, forty-five minutes at worst. Still, it took some getting used to at first, especially because Matthias shares custody of his child week on, week off, so there was only time to meet every other week at all. Things have settled in by now, and these days we also see each other with his kid. But because of all that, the getting-to-know-each-other phase leading up to our second real date stretched out to about two months.
Culturally, the two describe themselves as pretty different. Lena celebrates Carnival, while Matthias can’t relate to it at all. Musically, after techno and post-rock, it took quite a bit of joint playlist work before they found common ground in Björk. What connects them, as they describe it, is more the core than the style. Both are creative and good with their hands, and both have organized their own events before, just in completely different scenes.
BDSM in everyday life
How important is BDSM in your relationship, and how do you live it out?
Lena: We’d both like to have more time for it than we do right now. The past year was packed with everyday stress, the kid and our own event, so our own play often fell by the wayside. The very hobby that brought us together is the thing we get to do least right now, while professionally and as volunteers we’re specializing more and more in exactly that.
Matthias: Our checklist is a chapter of its own. We created it about a year and a half after our first date. At first, there was only a column for Lena’s limits, until she noticed that it only asked about her no-gos and not at all about what I actually want. So we expanded the list to include my preferences, with separate columns for each person, so that neither of us would base their answers on what the other one likes.
Lena: Honestly, in the end the list raised more questions than it resolved. Something that’s green one day can feel completely different the next, depending on how deep you are in your own role at that moment. For example, I’m into breath control, so it’s green for me. For Matthias, though, it’s only green when I’m clearly in my submissive role. Otherwise, it’s red.
Matthias: That’s exactly what I sometimes find hard to judge. If the list says red, I still find myself wondering in the moment whether it might be okay right now after all, because I would never do anything that’s red for either of us. In the end, only one thing helps: talking.
Their own event
You now host your own play party. How did that come about?
Matthias: Mostly, it was frustration with what was already out there. I was always complaining that everywhere you go, you have to dress in black and wear suits. That was either too impersonal for us or simply not our thing.
Lena: At the open fetish parties, on the other hand, there were too many newcomers around for us to really let loose, and at the more classic BDSM events, the language in the announcements bothered me, since it almost exclusively assumed female subs. So we said we wanted to put on an inclusive event.
Matthias: We found a venue right around the corner from me, asked if we could use it and redecorated everything. The first time wasn’t perfect yet, but things fell into place, and in March and June we held our first two editions.
Lena: We deliberately kept it small, around 35 guests per night, with a smaller lounge area cozily furnished with cushions, and no set dress code. The first time, we still knew most of the guests personally. At the last edition, it was already roughly half familiar faces and half new ones.
Even the music selection has become a joint project. A song they both like counts as a kind of seal of approval for them, so what plays is a mix of electro, which Matthias doesn’t otherwise listen to, post-rock, which Lena doesn’t otherwise listen to, and Björk, because they both love her.
Final words
How did you actually come across Deviance in the first place?
Lena: I heard about Deviance on the podcast Kunst der Unvernunft and signed up right away.
Matthias: For me, it was actually the other way around: I found my way to Kunst der Unvernunft through Deviance. The person I had been messaging before knew about Deviance from the podcast (laughs).
Both of them only recently deleted their Deviance profiles, which had kept running for almost a year after they met. Lena has even started writing down the first months of their story in a little book of her own. You can find an excerpt here.
