Do you have a partner NOT into tickling?

tickle_daemon;4686757 said:

Zeezil;4686332 said:

For the record I am long-term married to someone withOUT this kink, and I am extremely happy and satisfied.

I just did some quick math here:

102,000,000 American adults are on the internet constantly (31% of population)
1% of population considers themselves asexual, so that's 3.3 million people, so take them out. Everyone else, if they have this fetish, would have at some point found TMF.
There are "100,000" members of TMF but only about 40,000 of us though have accounts and are active. But let's round it up to 100,000 people.

100,000 divided by 99,000,000 sexual Americans who are online is .00101

That means that if you're in a room with 1000 random US adults, you are the only person in the room with a tickle fetish. And that's people of all adults ages. What about those who are dating age? Minuscule. You'd need to be in a room of about 10,000 people to just be in the same room with another single person turned on by tickling. More in the real world, you could go on 1,000 dates over 10 years, 100 a year (8 dates a month), and meet exactly one date who has been to this website. In 10 years. And what if you don't like them? What if you're not compatible in, you know, EVERYTHING ELSE?

There are various other numerical factors I'm not even considering, this is back of napkin math, both the unavoidable and objective truth is that we are a teeny tiny teeny tiny minority of the US population.

My subjective advice: Marry/date for love. Marry/date for compatibility. Marry/date for respect and companionship and values and goals and all those things that make life worth sharing with someone else. Don't marry or date someone for this fetish. The right person will love you and indulge you so long as you love and indulge them. Build your relationship on solid foundations, not a kink.

I know other disagree but that's my two cents. It's certainly worked for me!

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I completely disagree with this entire framing of the question. Yes, there's a relatively small number of people who, on their own, have a clear and distinct tickle fetish. Obviously if you decide "I'm only ever going to date people who already have a tickling fetish," you're going to seriously limit the pool of available people, and there's no guarantee you're going to be otherwise compatible.

But that's far too narrow a way to look at the issue. The question isn't "does my partner independently have a tickling fetish?" It's "can my partner enjoy my tickling fetish with me?" And the universe of people who are compersive enough to take pleasure in their partner's pleasure is vastly larger than the universe of people who independently enjoy one particular kink. Indeed, no matter what your particular kink is, having a partner who's willing to explore and share your kinks with you is a really important part of relationship compatibility generally! After all, if you had a partner into something completely random -- let's say, having balloons rubbed all over their body -- wouldn't you be into sharing that with them? If rubbing balloons on your partner got them incredibly horny and excited and flustered, wouldn't you love doing that, even if you weren't into balloons yourself?

Now of course, when it comes to tickling -- especially being tickled -- it may be that some people are just so inherently uncomfortable with it that there's no way they can get it into it with you. And obviously you should never uncomfortably pressure someone to take part in something that's genuinely distressing and unpleasant for them. But I don't think it's the least bit obvious that this describes most people with respect to tickling.

To provide a different set of numbers, I've dated and/or repeatedly hooked up with something like 20 people. Of those, there was only one who independently into tickling before we met (we met through Tumblr), but there were two who subsequently realized they were really into it, and have told me that they now are into tickling for their own sake. Two of them absolutely hated being tickled and never let me tickle them. Another two were really, really unbearably ticklish, and would only let me tickle them briefly sometimes (but they also liked teasing me about how ticklish they were, which was really hot too). And the rest -- about a dozen different women -- weren't into tickling for their own sake, but enjoyed the reaction they got from me when I tickled them, and so tickling was a regular and enjoyable part of our sex life. Obviously this is all anecdotal, and I'm probably screening to some extent up front for women who are more sexually adventurous and compersive than the median person. But still, I think it reflects that "capable of enjoying tickling with a partner who's into it" is not some incredibly rare trait.

In short, yes, obviously you should marry/date for love, compatibility, respect, companionship, and shared values and goals. But for most people -- including and especially people with distinct kinks -- sexual compatibility is a huge aspect of that bundle of very important things! And if your partner is entirely closed off to a kink that's a huge aspect of your sexuality, well, that's probably going to make sexual compatibility pretty challenging. Of course, everyone has to make their own tradeoffs, and I'm not saying that anyone's wrong to stay in a relationship with someone who doesn't enjoy tickling, if you're otherwise happy. But I think that it's terrible advice to tell people not to take sexual compatibility into account when looking for a partner. It's an eminently reasonable and achievable goal, and you're going to be much happier in your relationship if this is something you can share with your partner.

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