Meeting safely

Everything on the vetting page depends on judging a stranger correctly. This page does not. These are the arrangements that keep working even if you have completely misread someone, which is why I think it is the more important of the two.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

None of this is dramatic and none of it requires you to be suspicious of anybody. It is roughly what a sensible person does on a first date with a stranger from an app, with two or three additions that matter because of what might be happening later.

I hold myself to all of it, whichever side of the arrangement I am on. The first meeting is in a pub, somebody else knows where it is, and both people have their own way home. Anyone who finds that insulting has told you something useful about themselves, and that would include me.

The first meeting is public, and nothing happens

A pub, a café, somewhere with staff and other customers and a door onto a street. An hour, maybe two. No play, no going back to anyone's flat, no "since we are getting on so well". You are there to find out whether the person from the messages is the same person in the room.

Decide before you go that you are not going to play that day, and hold to it even if you like him enormously. This is the single most useful rule on the page precisely because it is the one you will most want to break. If he is good, he will still be good in a fortnight. If the pressure to bring it forward is coming from him, you have learned the thing you came to learn.

Use the hour. Ask what happens if you use a safe word. Ask what he does about aftercare. Ask about his last partner and listen to how he talks about her. People who talk about their exes with contempt are describing their future behaviour, not their past bad luck.

Tell a friend, and tell them properly

Not "I am seeing someone tonight". Send one person you trust the whole file:

• His name, or the name he has given you, and his handle on whatever site you met on.
• A screenshot of his profile and at least one photograph of his face.
• His phone number, and the address if you have one.
• Where you are meeting, and when.
• When you expect to be home, and when you will check in.

That is a safe call. Choose someone who will actually act rather than someone who will be polite about it, and if you do not have anyone you feel you can tell, that is a real problem worth solving before you meet anyone, not a reason to skip the step.

If you would rather not explain the kink part, you do not have to. "I am meeting a man from the internet and I want you to have his details" is a complete sentence and most friends will take it at that.

The check-in, and a plan for missing it

Agree a time. Ten o'clock, midnight, whenever. Then agree what your friend does if the message does not arrive, because a check-in without a plan is just somebody at home wondering whether they are being nosy.

Something like: if I have not messaged by eleven, ring me. If I do not answer, ring twice more. If I still do not answer by half past, ring the number I sent you, and if that gets nowhere, ring 101 with the address, or 999 straight away if anything at all suggests I am in danger. Write it down. It sounds excessive right up until the evening it does not.

A code phrase is worth having as well. Something you would never say by accident and that reads as ordinary to anyone glancing at your screen. "How did Mum get on at the doctor?" means come and get me, or ring me with an emergency, and your friend knows that in advance. Being able to summon an exit without announcing it is a small thing that removes a lot of awkwardness.

Your own transport, your own money

Get yourself there and get yourself back. Not picked up from home, which also hands over your address before you have decided to give it. Not dependent on a lift at the end of the night, which quietly converts leaving into a negotiation with the person you might want to leave.

Have the fare home in a form he cannot affect. Cash in a pocket, or a taxi app on your own account with a card that works. If you are far from home, know what the last train is and set an alarm for it. The point of all this is that at any moment, without warning and without a reason, you can stand up and go.

Drink

One, if you want one, for the nerves. Not more, not on a first meeting, and not at all before a first session.

I am not being prim about this. Judgement is the entire safety mechanism when you are with someone new, and alcohol takes it apart from exactly the direction you cannot see. It also does something specific here: it makes people less able to tell the difference between pain they want and pain they do not, and less likely to say anything about it. Watch your glass, and go home if you have had more than you meant to.

The first session: somewhere you can leave

Best is a hotel room you booked and paid for, in your name. You have the key, the desk staff are a phone call away, and the person leaving at the end is him.

Second best is a play party, a dungeon or a club, where there are other people in the building and usually someone whose job it is to notice. That also has the advantage that he is behaving in front of witnesses, and you will have seen the public version and the private version by the end of the night.

If it is his place, look at the practicalities on arrival. Where is the front door, does it need a key from the inside, and where is that key. Keep your clothes, shoes, phone and bag in one place in the room you are in, not in a hallway. Do not let your things end up somewhere you would have to ask permission to retrieve them from.

Trust has to run both ways

Most of this page protects the person being spanked, and rightly. That is the person taking the physical risk, usually alone in a room with somebody new. Most often it is a woman meeting a man, though none of what follows changes if the roles or the genders are the other way round.

The person doing the spanking carries a different risk. If nothing explicit was agreed, two people can leave the same evening with honestly different accounts of it, and the one who held the implement may later be accused of abuse.

Sometimes that is because a line really was crossed, and then it is not a misunderstanding and should not be treated as one. Sometimes it is a genuine misunderstanding about what was agreed, or an evening remembered differently once a relationship has ended badly. Only occasionally is it bad faith. Clarity beforehand helps in every one of those cases, and suspicion helps in none. The fuller version is on trust, both ways.

What protects both of you:

• Agree it explicitly beforehand, in writing. Messages are fine.
• Keep those messages, both of you. I keep mine and expect the other person to keep theirs.
• Confirm it on the day, in a sentence, before anything starts.
• Do not play if either of you has been drinking. See drink, drugs and why not.
• Look for a clear yes. An absence of no is not agreement.

The same record protects the person being spanked, because it shows what she did not agree to. If a limit is ever crossed, it is the clearest evidence of that.

A written agreement is not a legal shield, and it binds nobody: you can each withdraw on the night, whatever the messages say. In England and Wales, after R v Brown, consent is not a defence to actual bodily harm, so the messages are evidence of what you both intended and do nothing to make an injury lawful. See is it legal in the UK and if the law gets involved.

Location sharing and the phone

Turn on live location sharing with your friend for the evening, in WhatsApp or Find My or whatever you both use, and set it to expire the next morning so you do not have to remember. It costs nothing and it means somebody can find the building.

Charge your phone before you go and take a battery pack. Keep it on you and within reach rather than in a bag on the far side of the room. A phone in another room is not a phone, and I have watched people hand theirs over without noticing because someone asked pleasantly at the right moment.