Men's Lifestyle April 9, 2026 0 Comments

How Exploring Rope Play Post-Divorce Unlocked a New Level of Passion and Confidence I Never Expected

Ever wondered what happens when a high-powered finance exec swaps boardroom deals for midnight scrolls through dating apps? Picture this: Gianluca, a 59-year-old self-made investment guru from Dallas, finds himself tangled in a world far removed from stocks and spreadsheets—a universe where rope, restraint, and revelation reign supreme. After a late-in-life divorce shakes his carefully balanced life, he encounters a surprising common thread: women openly seeking to be tied up. But this isn’t about domination or cliché thrills; it’s about unlocking something deeper—a raw, unexpected connection that no amount of money can buy. What follows is an intimate journey into the art of shibari, the intricate dance of trust and vulnerability where control is both given and released. Ready to unravel the secrets behind the knots and discover why sometimes, letting go is the ultimate power move? Read on.

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9 min read

For this installment of the Secret Lives of Men, we spoke with Gianluca*, a 59-year-old self-made finance executive in Dallas whose decades-long career has been defined by high stakes, precision, and control. When a late-in-life divorce sent him scrolling through dating apps at midnight, he kept seeing the same thing: women who wanted to be tied up. What followed was an unexpected education in rope, restraint, and the art of creating conditions for a woman to surprise herself.

*Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the subject’s anonymity.

Gianluca, 59, Finance Executive and Private Investor

The door opens, and I don’t always know who’s on the other side.

I’ll have exchanged a photograph or two. Maybe a few messages. But the woman standing in my hallway is, more often than not, a stranger. She’s nervous, curious, and has no idea, not really, what the next two or three hours are going to look like. Neither do I, which is precisely the point.

I’m 59 years old. I run an investment portfolio—finance, private equity, and a handful of restaurants scattered across Dallas—that took me the better part of three decades to build. My parents came to this country from Italy with almost nothing: my father with a trade, my mother with a stubbornness that I now recognize in myself whenever I look in the mirror. I put myself through school. I built something. By most measures, I have everything. Or I did, until the divorce made me reckon with what I’d been trading away to get it.

I can buy my way into almost any room I want. I know that. Elite matchmakers, the kind that charge $50,000 just to get started, have offered to waive their upfront fees just to have me in their files. Apparently, I’m exactly the demographic their wealthiest female clients are looking for. I’m financially secure, experienced, old enough to be interesting, but not so old that I’m a liability.

I’ve never taken up the matchmakers’ offers. Not because I think there’s anything wrong with it but because a situation in which someone who’s been vetted and packaged and delivered to a dinner table for a fee does nothing for me. Less than nothing, honestly. What I want can’t be bought. I want to unlock it myself.

I’ve been thinking about that word for a while now. Unlock. I long for the moment when a woman walks into my home holding herself together, manages her nerves, does all the things we do when we’re in an unfamiliar space with an unfamiliar person, then suddenly lets it go. When her shoulders drop, she stops monitoring herself, and she starts inhabiting herself. I have spent the better part of my adult life learning how to create the conditions for that moment. And then, about two years ago, I found the tool that unlocks it better than anything else I’ve ever tried.

But before that came exhibitionism. That goes back 30 years, maybe more.

I was never a theater kid. I never performed in any traditional sense. But there was always something in me that needed to be seen in a way that my regular life didn’t quite accommodate.

My parents were loving. But I have a sister who struggled more visibly than I did, and when you’re the kid who doesn’t need rescuing, you don’t get rescued. The fires that parents have to fight are the ones that are burning the hottest. I was quiet and capable. I came home with report cards that impressed nobody because excellence was just expected of me. In therapy, years later, I learned there’s a name for it: the lost hero child. The one who gets so good at not needing anything that he forgets he was allowed to want something.

What came out of that, I think, is a hunger to be witnessed. Not applauded, not congratulated. Just seen in a moment. It took me a long time to find the place to explore that need. For a while, it was a woman’s living room and a good sound system.

What I want can’t be bought. I want to unlock it myself.

I had a friend, Michelle, who understood what I was after before I could articulate it myself. She’d find a woman she thought would be open to it, and the three of us would have dinner. At some point, I’d ask—always asked, never assumed—whether the other woman wanted me to dance for her. There was a night with a woman I’ll call Cara, someone Michelle described as “kind of uptight” but who she knew would love it.

Midway through my performance, I could see Cara holding herself back, so I stopped and offered to blindfold her so that she could use her hands to see me instead. Once the blindfold was on, something shifted. She started listening to my breathing and responding to it, slowing down when it got shorter. She edged me expertly, and I don’t think she’d ever done that before.

That’s what I mean when I say unlock.

Two years ago, as I was going through the divorce and scrolling through dating apps, I kept seeing the same thing across profiles: I want to be tied up. Not occasionally. Constantly. I started researching bondage and then shibari. What I found stopped me in my tracks.

Shibari, Japanese rope bondage, has an aesthetic to it that I wasn’t quite prepared for. The practice is rooted in ancient samurai prisoner-restraint techniques called hojojutsu but is now focused on intimacy, trust, and aesthetics. When it’s done right it looks like something structural and organic at the same time, like a bridge that someone also made beautiful. When I see someone at a bondage party with loose lines going in the wrong directions, I have to look away. But when it’s done correctly, with jute rope and clean knots and proper tension maintained all the way through to the untying—the untying is just as important as the tying—it’s extraordinary.

I drove out of the city to take a class for a full day. My original partner canceled at the last minute, so they paired me with an experienced model who could talk me through the technique. It was the best accident I’ve ever stumbled into. If you’re learning shibari, go with someone who already knows it, not with a partner who’s learning alongside you. You’ll absorb three times as much.

What surprised me in that class, however, had nothing to do with rope.

Though it sounds counterintuitive, the pressure of the rope calms the nervous system. The usual defenses are unnecessary because the boundaries are defined.

When you’re tying someone, your own nervous system calms all the way down. There’s no room for anything else. You’re not thinking about the deal that went sideways last week or what your lawyer said on Thursday. You are thinking about this woman, this knot, these next three inches of rope. You are so present that the past and the future essentially stop existing. I’d read about this kind of presence in a book, The Power of Now, that talks about the tiny space between memory and anticipation where actual life happens. Shibari puts you there by force—or, rather, restraint.

I’m still learning how to describe what it does to the woman being tied. You’d think restraint would produce panic. Though it sounds counterintuitive, the pressure of the rope calms the nervous system. The usual defenses are unnecessary because the boundaries are defined. Within that space, women open up in ways that still genuinely surprise me.

What I’m about to tell you happens on Sunday afternoons.

A woman arrives. We talk for 30 minutes, minimum, before the rope comes anywhere near her. I ask whether she’s nervous. The answer is always yes, and I always tell her that nervous and excited are physiologically the same thing, which helps. Then I tell her my one rule: no penetration. “Nothing like that is happening today,” I’ll say. You should see what that does to a room. The stress leaves her shoulders.

We talk about boundaries. What she does and doesn’t want, whether she sees herself as dominant or submissive, voyeur or exhibitionist. I ask about the blinds: Would she prefer them open or closed? In my penthouse, the windows look out over the city and face two other buildings in the middle distance. One hundred percent of the time, the blinds stay open. Every single woman I’ve done this with has wanted to be seen. I find that endlessly interesting.

Then the rope comes out.

I start with a chest harness, hands tied behind her back. Once she’s tied with a firm hand holding the harness in her middle back, I ask her to lean forward, and I pay close attention to how far she leans. It tells me everything about her trust level. A little lean means she’s still guarded. I go slowly, work her back up, remind her that she only has to go as far as she wants to go. Eventually, the lean becomes full, and she’s all the way forward, supported by the harness, supported by the rope, supported by me. I never get tired of that moment.

At some point, I take off my belt. I might wrap it loosely around my own neck and offer the other end to her. What she does with it tells me almost everything.

From there, hands still tied behind her back, I ask, “Would you like a spanking?” The answer to that question, in my experience, is always yes. I gently bend her over the back of the sofa. Then I transition her into a rope dress, which is a different kind of tie. It’s less restrictive, almost decorative, and women almost universally love how they look in it. I always ask to use their own phone camera for photographs, never my own. They always say yes. They always want to see.

Then I tell her there’s one more thing. I ask her if she wants me to dance for her.

When I strip, I do it in a way that can veer either dominant or submissive. It’s playful, and that’s the point. At some point, I take off my belt. I might wrap it loosely around my own neck and offer the other end to her. What she does with it tells me almost everything. Some women hold it tentatively, like they’re not sure they’re allowed. Others take it with a grip that makes clear they’ve been waiting their entire adult life for someone to hand it over.

One of the best sessions I’ve ever had was with a woman who, in our presession conversation, described herself as completely submissive. She’d never identified as anything else. When I handed her the belt, something moved across her face. Not shock, exactly. More like recognition, the way you look when you hear a word for something you’d always felt but never named. Within ten minutes, she was directing the whole scene.

I always save the last ten minutes to close out the experience. Not another long conversation, just a quiet landing. We sit together, come back to ourselves, check in. It’s where the most unguarded things tend to get said. That particular afternoon, she looked up and said quietly, “I have a lot to process.” The following morning, she texted me the names of two friends interested in being tied up.

What I’m after, in all of this, is not an orgasm. I should be clear about that. Some of the most satisfying afternoons I’ve had have ended with me getting dressed and heading to my sister’s for dinner, thoroughly unrelieved but deeply content. My kink isn’t release but the speed at which I can make a woman open up to me. I am, as I told someone recently, a connection junkie—I’ve been one my whole life. I just spent most of my adult years being too busy or too defensive to admit it.

And a connection junkie, by definition, is never fully satisfied. This isn’t a cure. Each session is more like a mini hit that whets my appetite rather than satiating it. I’ve made my peace with that. What I get out of those Sunday afternoons isn’t resolution. It’s the feeling of finishing a chapter, complete in itself and already curious about the next one.

I don’t do it for sex. I do it for the moment when the blinds are up, the city is watching, and the woman who walked in guarded walks out knowing something new about herself.

My ex-wife is a good woman. But she never understood any of it. The word pervert was used. And because I loved her, because I was so professionally consumed that I barely had bandwidth to examine my interior life, I quieted my desires. I made myself smaller. That was its own kind of loneliness. The divorce gave me back something I hadn’t realized I’d misplaced.

She wasn’t wrong about what she saw. She was wrong about what it meant. It wasn’t deviance. It was a form of release. For years, I told myself that was just the cost of building something. It wasn’t until after the divorce that I realized I’d been holding my breath the whole time.

You know those small stovetop espresso makers, the moka pots? They have a little pressure valve on the side. If the pressure inside gets too high and cannot move through the coffee, it releases through the valve so the whole thing doesn’t explode. Shibari is my valve.

I don’t do it for sex. I do it for the moment when the blinds are up, the city is watching, and the woman who walked in guarded walks out knowing something new about herself. That she’s more sensual than she thought. More dominant. More willing to be held. And more ready to be seen.

My parents came to America with nothing and built something real. I spent 30 years doing the same. But I didn’t expect to discover, at 59, that the most valuable thing I create isn’t in my portfolio. It’s the look on a woman’s face when she realizes she just did something she didn’t know she was capable of.