Great Expectations

Unfulfilled expectations always cause problems. Having expectations for relationships in our culture is expected. We are brought up that way. Having great expectations sounds great however when the expectation is unfulfilled, we bitch, we moan, we become disappointed. That is a problem for many people.

For example, if I expect my Mistress to dominate me in a certain way and she doesn’t do that I will most likely be disappointed. If she expects me to submit in a certain way and I fail to do so, then she will in the same way feel disappointment. A better way for a submissive to experience the fulfillment of the need to feel dominated might be to simply allow the dominant to dominate in the unique style she dominates with. My own opinions about how I “need” to be dominated in a certain way may not be a healthy need and possibly is fraught with unrealistic expectations that inevitably lead down the road of disappointment. A dominant’s need to feel submitted to in a certain way is in a similar vein. If she doesn’t for example dictate exactly what she wants and establish concrete rules for the submissive to follow that will allow her to feel submitted to and honored in a meaningful way then she really should not feel disappointed or neglected when the submissive fails.

Needs and expectations must be communicated between partners. To me the single biggest cause for disappointment when it comes to expectations is the fact that those expectations were never communicated. Careful thought to what needs must be fulfilled for you to and then presenting those needs to your partner is the only way that a healthy D/s relationship can exist. Otherwise you set the other person up for failure by expecting them to be a mind reader and then holding them accountable when they fail to live up to your expectations.

We often expect our partner to make the best choices for themselves and our relationship and when they fail in our estimation to do so we often get angry or disappointed or both. We create this problem by our non-communicated expectations.

Once we learn to identify our own individual, healthy needs, we must also learn not to be attached to the expectation of how those needs get fulfilled unless we are willing to communicate our expectations to our partner in an open and honest way. My Mistress actually gave me very few rules to observe for our trial relationship period. Actually I think she chose this because she didn’t want to burden a new submissive with an overwhelming number of rules to be held accountable for. Yet the downside of this is that I am sometimes left in the dark about what her expectations for me are within the realm of our relationship or what I might do to serve her in ways she will find meaningful. It is almost inevitable that I will as a result fail to please her in certain areas and cause her to feel disappointment.

Certainly this is far from a one-sided issue but doing my own part in the relationship, as I do a bit of introspection; I conclude that I haven’t been as open in communicating my expectations to her as I should be. It is only her natural flair for dominance I think that has enabled our relationship to be such a completely positive experience for me thus far. So today, in the interest of making my expectations known, I have decided to offer some of them here…

To feel your dominance and control I need;

• Black and white rules that spell out for me what you expect from me so that your needs as my dominant are met and that spell out for me the exact areas of my life where you want to exercise control and domination.


• Regular tasks and assignments that make me push my limits and learn to submit to you on increasingly deeper levels and that help me learn to overcome my inhibitions.


• Rules and rituals that emasculate me in the sense of requiring me to perform activities that help me to learn how to distance myself from the patriarchal definition of maleness and move closer to the true matriarchal definition inherent in the submissive man role within the context of a female led relationship.


• The experience of you trusting me to a degree commensurate with the trust I have in you. Otherwise I may feel kind of “out there” and vulnerable beyond my comfort level.


• Strict control over my orgasms and access to self pleasure. This is an area where I most acutely feel your authority and control and without it I feel adrift and dissatisfied in my submission. Denial serves to make me feel my submissive nature in a most pronounced and meaningful way.
  
  I am not attempting to top from the bottom or presuming to instruct my Mistress on how she should go about dominating me. I am only honestly sharing a few of my expectations to bring them out into the open and to offer examples of things which would meet my self-perceived needs within a D/s relationship. Hopefully this contributes to making my expectations more realistic rather than unrealistic.