More Expectations

Tuesday night I cashed in my “Good Lion” reward: non-orgasmic play of my choice. I asked to be spanked and teased. I got a good, long spanking that was wonderful and left me with a red bottom. The teasing was equally spectacular. It’s very rewarding to be a good lion.

I don’t get many of those coupons and only one naughty lion one as well. I’ve been thinking about why there aren’t more. I think that the reason is both simple and difficult: Mrs. Lion tends not to have expectations. She has told me many times that over her life she trained herself not to expect things. She said she did this to avoid disappointment. If you don’t expect something, you won’t feel badly if you don’t get it.

I can’t argue with that logic, but I think it does remove some of the fun life can hold. Me? Well, I am always full of expectations. I just can’t help myself. Over the years I have learned to accept with some grace when I don’t get what I expect. But, I have to admit that I have a long way to go in that department.

Here we go again. Mrs. Lion and I are opposites in the expectation department. Both positions create problems. In my case, it hurts a lot when I find out that Mrs. Lion had wanted something but never let me know she did. Every time I discover that I feel like a shit. Why didn’t I realize she wanted it so badly? She never intends for me to feel guilty. She does a wonderful job trying to make it clear it “doesn’t matter”.

My expectations hurt Mrs. Lion when she feels she can’t meet them. She tries hard to make my every dream come true. Of course she can’t do everything, but I can see it bothers her that she believes I am sad because she couldn’t do something I want.

We both overcompensate. I look for the tiniest clues that Mrs. Lion would like something. When I think I find something, I pounce on it with all four paws. I think that when I do this, she can feel guilty. Mrs. Lion reacts to my expectations in two ways. Sometimes she kills herself trying to be that magic genie. If she feels I didn’t get exactly what I want, she feels terrible. Other times, she simply withdraws. I don’t know why she does one or the other.

These behaviors challenge our enforced chastity. In the first place, Mrs. Lion is working very hard to make my wish come true. Over the last year we have documented the good and the bad and used this blog to help work out compromises. I love the results. We have made our marriage stronger and happier in the sex department. We both feel so good about that we are planning to continue my lockup indefinitely.

The one area of my expectations for enforced chastity that has been very difficult to try is around good lion / bad lion. Part of the problem is that we truly love each other just the way we are. I don’t have any behaviors, other than interrupting, that Mrs. Lion has cited as needing correction. I think the biggest part of the reason we can’t seem to work this area out is that old expectation issue.

Look at it this way: I have discipline expectations (typical of me) that are based on the quality of things I do for Mrs. Lion. Mrs. Lion doesn’t have expectations, so she needs to invent reasons to monitor my “behavior”. Same issue that we always have. I feel guilty that I am not doing enough. Mrs. Lion sees this as a failure on her part so she schedules her own orgasms to give me the chance to have the fun of giving them to her; not because she wants them. She makes up rules and then tries her best to enforce them. She has trouble doing that because they are artificial and are purely to satisfy my expectation.

Enforced Chastity solved one problem very nicely. It gave us a framework around which we have built increasing physical intimacy. It works for both of us, albeit in very different ways. But it works and we both think it makes us happier. It works so well for me, that I could go on with just this and be very happy.

There are some procedural issues with enforced chastity that hit every couple at some point: rationalizing the wait times. What does the keyholder use to determine them? However, that isn’t the real question at all. I think the real one is, Why does the keyholder decide how long to make him wait?

More than just holding a key
Holding the key to my ability to get sexual satisfaction implies that our relationship is unequal in some respects. My keyholder has considerable power over me. She controls my favorite toy. Knowingly or not, accepting the key was also accepting control over me.

The problem is that it wasn’t clear that this control extended beyond sexual release. In the most basic sense, having the key means making my releases  more or less frequent; controlling how long I have to wait. This is where non-sexual control creeps in. Should my orgasms become a form of currency that my keyholder uses to “train” me? I like that idea because it makes my waits something that I can understand. I like to understand things. If they are essentially random, the enforced chastity still works.

All this is a fairly new challenge for us. As we have grown accustomed to me being caged and Mrs. Lion teasing and eventually giving me orgasms, the more subtle issues are easier to see. Mrs. Lion has arbitrarily set a series of orgasm dates for me. None of the waits are terribly long. That is her wish. I have to say that this will work and work well for us. Nothing needs to change. She is doing exactly the right thing.

I have to consider my expectations. After all, just because I want her to be in charge, at least of some areas of my life, doesn’t mean she wants to do it. Nor does it mean she can realistically do it. We need to consider what each of us wants, and yes Mrs. Lion, expects. If these wants and expectations will benefit from more keyholder control, then we should go after them just the way we did with sex. If they don’t, then we should consider how we can make them happen.

We have learned one very important lesson from enforced chastity: If we work together and communicate constantly, we can solve any problem. Let’s start sharing expectations and work on making them come true.