Page 11 of Dear Daddy, Please Want Me

He opened a few incognito windows, which let him stay logged in to all of the different user accounts at the same time. First there was an existing couple looking for a third. The sub had written a cute letter describing how her Dom had told her she could invite someone else to play with them as a Christmas present.

Levi flicked between their two profiles. The sorting algorithm at Cuffd was supposed to take everything into account, including their checked interests like hard-core BDSM and an open relationship, as well as geography and sexual identity and preferences. He skimmed quickly down their kink lists and the two of them should have been a perfect match. When he searched for the Dom’s name from the sub’s account, indeed they were, with a 92% compatibility rating. But when he logged into the Dom’s account, the sub wasn’t showing up in his list at all. Weird.

He clicked on the next support ticket and looked up the profiles. He usually didn’t notice much about what people entered, but this match was just too adorable. The profile picture of ArmyBratBoy showed two sweet young boys with tousled hair and dark eyes, looking exactly how Levi always thought boys should look. He found himself getting sucked into ArmyBratBoy’s profile and messaging history.

Judging from his app history, ArmyBratBoy was a player. He’d contacted guys in several states, from the West Coast to the East over the past few months. Then, the night he’d written the letter to Santa, he’d changed his profile picture to the photo of him and the other boy and said he was looking for a Daddy with a heart big enough to love them both, so that they could stay together. Levi wondered what had changed in his life to switch from looking for “right now” to “relationship.”

Because apparently they’d found someone. EnglishDaddyInNY certainly looked the part, stern and affectionate in equal measure. He said he was looking for a boy to spoil and care for, and apparently he was open to having two.

EnglishDaddyInNY had contacted the helpdesk after they’d met up, when ArmyBratBoy had apparently looked back at his profile to show the other boy, and it hadn’t appeared in the match list.

Jealousy hit Levi something fierce. He never knew what happened to people after they met, but wanted it to work out for the trio.

More than that, he wanted it for himself. That dream of sending a few sentences out into cyberspace and having a Daddy come and swoop him up. Or at least that was how he imagined it.

He tried again with the other two pairs. There were two sets of friends who knew each other well enough that they’d expected to see each others’ profiles in their lists. When he searched by their usernames, the other person came up with a high compatibility level. But that should have sent them to the top of the match results. Now that was really bizarre.

He couldn’t see anything that was common across the profiles. One pair was in L.A. where it was easy to be flooded with compatible matches, but one pair was in rural Tennessee, where they’d set their geographic search range to a hundred miles. One sub had checked off nearly every kink, interest, identity, and compatibility on the list, and another was only into rope play with other gay men.

Ugh. This was going to take a long time. The matching algorithm was a behemoth, with hundreds of little quirks from so many people tinkering with it over time as they refined the weights that were placed on different components of the user profiles.

In addition, there was a learning algorithm that watched people’s patterns of what they clicked on, who they wrote to, and who responded back. The learning algorithm spit out its own compatibility values that went into the larger algorithm, but what happened inside was a black box. The error could be on either side.

Or, of course, not in the algorithm at all.

So, first things first, Levi needed to replicate the problem. Still thinking of Saul leaning against his desk, he called the first profile PerfectDaddy. It wasn’t like anyone else was going to see it anyway, and since he’d likely be spending most of the weekend at work he might as well amuse himself.

He filled it out fancifully, drawing on a mixture of knowledge about his boss and his own fantasies. Saul had brown hair and dark eyes, but there was nowhere on the form to mark the way that he made Levi feel all melty inside when his eyes crinkled up in a smile. He was short, maybe 5’7”, though Levi gave him a generous 5’8”. Though that didn’t capture the way that he commanded the room during meetings, explaining requirements and giving motivational affirmations in a way that was unconsciously dominant.

During those meetings Levi hung on his every word to make sure he wasn’t missing anything, but sometimes later he’d remember that tone of voice and imagine very different commands. And very different praise.

Then he started clicking interests. PerfectDaddy needed to be attracted to men, of course. He had to like spankings, because how else could he keep his boy in line? He needed to take their play out of the bedroom, at least some of the time, well maybe a lot of the time, when Levi was feeling needy and submissive. But he shouldn’t be 24/7. Bondage, edging, role play, exhibitionism, sensory deprivation, chastity, definitely impact and pain play and… where was orgasm denial? He’d missed it and had to scroll back up.

Just checking all of them under PerfectDaddy’s profile made Levi feel all shivery inside.

He skimmed back through the list and considered adding a few more. Maybe CBT? He loved watching it in porn, but he wasn’t sure he was ready. Ooh… and sounding. He really wanted to try that. But it seemed like a lot to just click it, as if he knew what he was doing, so he left it off. The app didn’t leave spaces for “soft limits” or “just curious.” That was a constant back-and-forth conversation with the design team, but usually users found it too overwhelming.

There were a bunch of text boxes that he could fill out, but the matching algorithm just looked for keywords. He tossed in a couple for each box. Daddy kink. Snuggles. Wandering around the city. That one was a bit of an inside joke for the company because the algorithm liked to pick it up in people’s profiles. He had no idea why.

He skipped to the next box. Mexican food. Cooking. Talmud. He snickered to himself at that one. Levi actually loved studying Torah, but he was mostly throwing that in there because of their conversation. It should also be rare enough to get him a quick match.

He knew now that Saul was more culturally than religiously Jewish, but that was fine with him. He’d dated non-Jews as well, so dating someone who was actually Jewish would be a nice bonus. Not that they were going to date or anything. This was just his fantasy played out as a tester account.

Next Levi started to make his own profile. Well, not his profile, of course. A generic sub’s profile.

As soon as he clicked the “sub” designation, though, a window popped up with an obnoxious Santa head. Ah, right. That Dear Santa thing. He knew it was all over their advertising, but he’d kind of ignored it because a) Jewish, b) not his monkeys, and c) he wasn’t quite desperate enough to use his own company’s app and deal with Christy’s teasing. He skimmed over the text.

Wishing for a Dominant of your own this Christmas?

Send a letter to Santa with a wish list describing your perfect match, and we’ll share it with our Santa Doms and Dommes here at Cuffd. If one of them fits your list, they’ll message you back with a simple question: Have you been naughty or nice this year?

It’s up to you how you want to answer…

OK, it was kind of gimmicky and the overt Christmas theme made him cringe, but it was still a cute idea. Smirking, he called his profile JewBoy1. Then he started writing his letter.

Dear Santa,

It’s hard to be a Jew on Christmas. Just like in that song that Cartman sings in South Park.