Submissives sometimes wonder whether a dominant without profound control needs of his own can learn to control them, simply to meet their needs for extreme control because he loves them.

Many dominants are capable of exerting much greater control than what would ordinarily please them to have--for a while. They will do this because they love their submissive and want to meet her needs. But for someone who is not deriving extreme pleasure from exerting control, whose life does not revolve around it, doing so is equivalent to working at a full-time job without getting paid for it. He can do this by making a concerted effort, but it wears him out rather than re-energizes him. After a few months or a year of being committed to providing much greater control than what naturally pleases him, he begins to tire of it and to "call in sick" to his new unpaid job. And when he does that, his submissive begins to "call in wild".

A typical scenario is that dominants without profound control needs will exert a fair to high amount of control in the first few months of a new relationship. It appears to his submissive that he is happily meeting her needs for control. He is eagerly training her to perform tasks that he wants her to do, the way he wants her to do them. He is motivated to train her because she's new and doesn't know how to please him yet. Everyone's very happy.

Then invariably comes a time when she is considered fully trained. She knows how many ice cubes he likes in his water, she knows what pleases him sexually, she has been taught all his rules and expectations. "Congratulations," he says, "your training is over. From now on you are expected to perform your tasks according to how I've trained you, by your own volition." The submissive agrees to do this, of course, because it is her duty. But something is wrong. Her master still expects her to obey him in everything, but he gives fewer and fewer orders for her to follow. Why should he give her more orders when she is already doing everything he wants her to do?

What she is missing is the intense sensation of control that she had while he was still training her. The loss of intense control deeply unsettles her and makes her feel desperately unhappy and lost. She may go to her master and ask him what has changed, and he may explain to her that she is just as controlled today as she was previously, or even more so. He can list the ways in which she has to obey him. She will see that it is true, she is controlled in many ways, and will begin to doubt her own feelings about what has happened.

Despite her telling herself that everything is alright, she will begin to find ways to act defiant and disobedient. She craves the sensation of being brought up short and hard, and she begins seeking it in the only way left to her: by deliberately testing boundaries. Even if her dominant does bring her up short and hard for crossing boundaries, and even if she is reassured that he is indeed in control, she still feels uncontrolled. She continues to behave in a wild manner, desperate for more control, and she doesn't even understand why she is behaving this way. Punishments become more frequent, and the dominant is getting exasperated with her misbehavior. She begins to feel like a terrible submissive. Her logical mind is at war with her emotions.

Eventually, the frustrated and confused dominant usually decides that either she is a terrible submissive, or not a submissive at all but a brat, or that she has changed personality between when they first met and the present time. She is very likely to agree with him. What has happened in reality is that she is too submissive for him. Her control needs are too extreme for her to be allowed to finish training and carry on with her daily tasks. What she really needs isconstant training that never ends.

For a dominant who has a profound control fetish, constant and never-ending training is both a natural thing to do and a pleasurable and fun thing to do. When he's got her trained to his specifications, he'll still deliberately go out of his way to find her more things to do, more rules to follow, more challenges to test her, more orders and more difficult orders to obey. He will do all this for the rest of their lives without her urging him to, because it is his instinct to do so. He'd rather go to his grave than decide that training is over.

This is why, paradoxically, many submissive women who have been told they are not submissive enough are in fact much too submissive for the dom they were with.