leashes

I’ve been asked to write a post about leashes, which are a big deal for Joscelin and…not so much for me.  He asked me to write a blog post because I am usually pretty open here, as well as thorough, and he wants to know how I feel about leashes, really, truly, all the “stuff.”

I knew leashes were big for him since nearly the beginning of the relationship, but I hardly played with them at all.  I put him on a leash a fair bit our first year at Thunder in the Mountains (though you can’t leash someone in the common areas of the hotel, out of respect for the staff), and I’ve since done it at other times.  I think there was a period of a few weeks or a month or two where I was using a leash fairly often.

So, aside from the whole “it puts Jos in headspace” thing, what I like about leashes is leading him around on one.  One moonlit night a long time ago we went on a walk in a park, and I leashed him, and he was nervous because of the whole public thing (though we saw very few people), and I enjoyed the feeling of that.  I like walking him, in other words.  It’s the same reason I’ve enjoyed using a leash at Thunder.

Everyday life does not afford many opportunities to walk your boyfriend on a leash.  I was willing to do it on that one walk because it was late at night and we were going to be in a secluded area, but we don’t walk late at night in secluded areas often at all. BDSM clubs are leash-friendly but we don’t tend to move around a lot (or go very often at all, for that matter).  The vast majority of our play happens at home, where we obviously do very little walking around.

Jos likes leashes during scenes.  Well, he likes leashes basically always.  And I don’t dislike them, but because we’re usually not moving, they don’t give me any extra practical control either, at least not that I really care about.  And they don’t hit any particular psychological target for me like they do for him.

And…they are awkward.  If he needs to go to another room, then I have to unclip him, or follow him, or something.  If I forget a leash is involved then it might hurt his feelings (in that way that your feelings can be hurt so easily when you’re in submissive headspace).  And if I am going to just beat him or whatever, then I have to do something with the leash – remove it? tie it to something? These aspects are really difficult and nervous-making in the middle of a scene.

I didn’t realize until I wrote this post how much I do like taking him around on a leash.  It’s when we’re stationary (i.e., most of the time) that using a leash feels…fake.  Forced.  Obviously purely psychological (and not my own pscyhology, so not shared particularly).  I can’t really “mean” it because there is no “it” to mean.  (Do you leash your dog to lie on the couch together watching TV?  For bed at night?  To play fetch?)

I worry that writing this post will make it sound to Joscelin like we can’t ever use a leash again except in those rare cases when I can walk him around.  And I worry that his reading it means that if I do use a leash again, he’ll be afraid that I don’t mean it, and he’ll ask me for reassurance, and I’ll have to be reassuring in some novel way that doesn’t involve a direct lie.  (“I want you to feel what this makes you feel”?)

But, I think those are the basics of how I feel about leashes.