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My friend Lunalovesbats posted recently on Fetlife her series of Underrated Red Flags in Tops. The fourth topic is speedrunning..

What I’m talking about is something I have observed some Tops doing. Multiple times, I have talked to a Top who did something like this:

–Asked about an interest I listed in my profile.

–Me: Yeah, I’m into X.

–Top: Cool. So can I (the extremest form of X imaginable)?

The lesson here is to take it slow. Get to know the person, play with them in public, then play in private, then play a few more times, and then start consensually and carefully pushing boundaries.

Unfortunately tops have learned that if they do things the “right” way they tend to miss out on someone. This has even happened to me. I’ll find someone online I’m interested in, get to know them, make plans with them, maybe even play with them, and then find out someone who did a speedrun has locked that person down. I know that makes me sound like a “nice guy”, but the difference is that I don’t immediately turn around and excoriate the other person. I just move on.

I’m thinking specifically about someone in the mid-to-late 10s who I had a massive crush on. She was married, so nothing was going to happen, but her marriage was not going well and I knew that if I waited just a little longer I might have a chance. We played more than a few times, and some sexual activity happened (this was after she and her husband separated), but I was ready to be patient. I was ready to wait not only for her to end things with her husband but also to not jump right in. I had a whole plan; I was going to be there for her, be her friend first, and then, when things settled down and she was ready to date again, I would broach the subject. I was pretty sure it would be welcome, based on the conversations the two of us had had over the 18 or so months of this process.

So of course about a week after she separated from her husband she jumped right into a relationship with one of her exes. Thankfully that relationship is still going on and seems to be pretty strong — I’m happy for her — but at the time I felt that, because I did things “right”, I missed my chance.

What’s worse is that when I did speedrun it actually paid off for me. In 2020 I met someone on OKC and we decided to go on a date — it happened to be the same day my then-wife was moving out, which was also the day the world stopped for COVID. The date went well and we ended up back at my house, where we had, quite frankly, explosively hot sex. Instead of taking it slow, we jumped right in and decided to start dating. It wasn’t a great relationship; we didn’t know a lot about each other in the beginning, and the more I learned about her the less happy I was with her, but the point is that my speedrunning was rewarded with a smart, sexy woman who wanted to sleep with me on a regular basis, and as someone who’d been in two simultaneous dead bedrooms (yay polyamory, right?) what I wanted more than anything was physical, and sexual, intimacy.

Nowadays I don’t speedrun because I’m in three happy relationships and I know that if I want to do something I just have to talk to my partners and odds are good one or more of them will be interested. And if they’re not, then I can take my time and get to know a new play partner. If someone else “wins” that person by speedrunning, then it wasn’t meant to be.