I’m writing this as a quick hot take assuming a hetero audience, and likely a lot of nodding along from the femdom side. I know that there’s no shortage of complain lists in kink, so with each point, when it comes to adding chastity to your relationship, I tried to add some alternative DOs as well. Negativity might drive clicks, but ultimately BDSM is supposed to be fun.
Nag
Nobody likes a nag, and coercion through persistence is going to deliver the least fun experience for all of you. Unless she’s specifically into grudging acquisition, nagging to be locked, or after you get locked, nagging for release, are both going to give her a headache.
Instead, take the time to understand her turn ons. She’s more likely to want you out again if she’s horny, than if you pester. Additionally, approach the topic of adding chastity to your relationship with honesty about how much of a deal breaker or not chastity is for you. This will be super hard, but wearing her down to a yes won’t be any better than getting a no up front. Do try to make a difference between understanding her reservations about the activity and pushing past her consent.
Promise her it will make you a better partner
This one is the keyholder bribe-to-play standard. Forums, porn and how to sites are full of people talking about how you will be a better partner in bed or emotionally when you are caged. I cannot stress how much this is a bad idea. Everyone wants to be a better partner, so I can understand how it can make you feel warm and fuzzy to think about being extra motivated. Nonetheless, all she is going to hear is that she needs to bribe you to get her needs met.
Instead, think about your pitch in terms of how it makes you feel. Communicate your arousal or sense of being loved. This has the additional dividend that your partner is more likely to develop the feelings along with it, than if they think this is how you will do the dishes reliably or whatever.
Dive in too fast/heavy
So she said yes! Awesome, as much as we write about this as a fantasy men provide to women, maybe she’s super into it. Maybe it’s even her idea! The mistake you can make here is huge commitments, like long term locking when you have never done it before. Chastity is an acclimation that favours you both building endurance and familiarity.
(So yes, maybe don’t so the full, hard denial Locktober if you have never done this before.)
Ignore custom fit
Not just fitting the device to you, avoid off the shelf fantasies. Don’t assume everything in chastity porn is a fait accompli. Adding chastity to your relationship isn’t a rigid, one true way activity, so assuming you are absolutely obligated to do everything in the porn is doing yourselves both a disservice.
You already know you are supposed to ease into it. While you are doing so, focus particularly on the parts that work for both of you. Porn tends to both cram every fetish it can together to maximize audience size, while depicting the fetishes as rigidly as possible
Unlike a chastity story or porn clip, your relationship only needs to appeal to the people in it. Discard or add anything that works for you.
Assume she hates your penis (or sex)
One of the biggest fuckups would be locked subs make is uncritically buying into the idea that no normal woman wants a guy’s dick. Yes, we probably grew up with the stereotype of the horny man and the frigid woman who needed wooing. This also is a perfectly valid fetish, in its own right. But, and here’s the big caveat, you don’t have to do it if you don’t need that part. By leaning only on humiliation/rejection framing, you reject a whole avenue of being possessed.
I call this stereotype out more than anything else. Along with the chastity for better relationship treatment bribe, chastity because the person finds sex with you appalling is probably the biggest sales pitch barrier.
Sometimes getting her on board is more about getting across that it’s a game of cock on demand and on her terms, not deprivation for her.
You don’t let her develop her own relationship with chastity
I mentioned the problems of assuming she doesn’t like sex, or bribing her by being a good partner. I also talked about avoiding approaching it with the assumption she finds your penis repugnant. With the practical dominance of male voices in communities dedicated to the subject, even though adding chastity to your relationship might be something you are trying to make all about her, beware of accidentally giving her an equally cramped emotional and psychological cage.
Try to be patient if she goes off script from your fantasies, but still seems into it. Be extremely mindful of resources that assume her feelings and make space for her to experiment and tell you what she feels about it. Your keyholder may very well surprise you with plans and fantasies of her own.
Fucking up your framing/introduction
Explain cock cages to the average woman and she might laugh uncomfortably and say no. This isn’t because the idea is inherently worthy of contempt, but because the information is seldom presented in pop culture or porn in a way that makes it approachable.
Your partner is a unique person with her own hopes, dreams, and so forth. You almost certainly know her better than any how to article could. But, what you can bring in common is that first opener.
Telling her that you like a physical reminder of her, and your desire for her via a cage won’t work for everyone, but it’s a definite step up over going straight to talking about your own degradation, if that wasn’t part of your dynamic already. Pitching being submissive to her is similarly more positively done by talking not about what she lacks “could you be more dominant?” but via those traditional I statements “I feel I can trust you and share my fantasy. I like that I can be vulnerable with you.”
In conclusion…
This is not the last word on the subject, and I definitely encourage you to look at other resources. If you get one take away from all this, the paradox of selling chastity is simultaneously to give her room to have her own feelings and desires about it, but also to examine your own desires intimately enough to translate them into the terms that work for her.