"The way to get
started is to quit talking and start doing." — Walt Disney
Hello all. Welcome back to
The Disciplinary Wives Club – Tribute blog.
Our weekly on-line gathering of women and men who are in, or would like
to be in, a Domestic Discipline relationship of the type advocated by the
former Disciplinary Wives Club (archived copy in the “Links I Like” list, below
right).
I hope you all had a good
week. Mine wasn’t too bad. We’re in that part of the transition to
autumn in which it’s 50 degrees one day, 80 the next, and at our place in the mountains
it feels downright wintery in the mornings.
We spent some time putting up Halloween decorations, which put us ahead
of most in our neighborhood. I get the sense that hot weather has stuck around so
long this year that people haven’t made the mental jump to the new season yet.
Which, of course, didn’t mean
that Home Depot hadn’t already replaced all their Halloween decorations with
Christmas stuff. Seriously??
The one thing I’m feeling a
little unsatisfied with is getting the Domestic Discipline aspects of our
relationship started again after our lengthy injury-related hiatus. I talked a couple of weeks ago about introducing
it back in, with a short experimental session with some short canes bundled up
like the switches used for a birching. It was a start, but it didn’t really go anywhere
after that.
Part of the problem is a good
one, in that I haven’t done a lot that was obviously punishment-worthy. At least, nothing very serious. Although that’s
a good thing for the most part, I feel like it is, in fact, a problem, because
both of us really do want to get our dynamic going again, yet it seems harder
to get started when there’s not some big, dramatic behavior or attitude failure
to be addressed.
And, it's not like there haven't been issues around carelessness and attitude, though those are the kind of things that require self-reporting, which seems harder than it should be at a time when I really do want to get things started again. Given that it’s been almost
six months since we were in anything like a real DD routine, it feels almost
like starting over from scratch, with all the hesitation and embarrassment that
asking for DD entailed the first time, but this time with full knowledge of what a real disciplinary spanking entails.
So, my first question for the
group this week is, have you experienced a long pause in your DD relationship
and, if so, how did you get things started again?
Was it simply a matter of asking for it, or
did it take something more than that?
I’ve been thinking about this
issue of getting started again in the context of what we’ve both said we want going
forward. We’ve talked about it several
times, and in some ways it’s pretty simple: We both want her to be more in
charge, more in control, more strict, more assertive, such that DD and FLR feel more like our day-to-day reality, instead of like dynamics whose presence wax and wane.
And, while it’s more about
the structure of the relationship as a whole and not simply about being spanked
more, I do feel like if the power shift is real it is going to express
itself, at least in part, in spankings that are both more certain and more frequent. How frequent?
I’m not really sure. Two or three
times a week seems unrealistic. But, perhaps weekly?
The easy way to get there
would be by committing to a maintenance spanking routine, but neither of us
seems interested in that. For us, setting
the bar lower than it has been in the past seems like the better approach.
Former commenter KOJ went
through a process that seemed closer to what I envision for us. Here are some
snippets from a few of his comments:
“Did
spankings decline as she "trained" me? Yes, but not as much as one
might imagine, because she kept setting the bar for my behavior higher and
higher. Plus, she both needed to and enjoyed asserting her female authority,
and nothing did so as directly and dramatically as ordering me to take down my
pants.
“We
didn't do maintenance, but there were times when I noticed her getting antsy
and I knew she would soon be finding a (good enough) reason to put me over her
knee. Sort of a gender reversal from the more typical situation of the
disciplined husband needing a reset. It was her demonstrating that "I'm in
charge here, and don't you forget it!
“We
definitely had a set of rules, all of which she established and enforced with
spanking. But she also was very much into spanking for "disrespect"
and ungentlemanly conduct," and that could take almost any form.
Occasionally I would be surprised by her reasoning, but usually she was spot
on.
“My
wife also quickly morphed from misbehaviors in her presence to any misbehavior.
She would question me about my driving, my drinking, my attitude to customer
service people, my respect level for female co-workers, etc., and punish me
accordingly.”
For me the goal isn’t about
being spanked more often, but it is about being more subject to her control and
her discipline, which almost certainly would be expressed through more frequent
spankings.
When we’ve talked about it,
Anne seems genuinely in favor of the idea.
Maybe back when we were in the busiest phases of married life, managing
kids and careers, stepping up to be the real power in the household might have
felt burdensome.
But, now that we’re in
a much more relaxed phase, I get the sense that she’s genuinely into the idea
of being more consistently and more openly in control.
Another of our former commenters,
Marisa, talked about both consistency and openness and the relationship between
the two:
“It
is definitely easier to be consistent in applying discipline, much like it is
easier to form a habit and stick with it. I really believe discipline has to be
a priority, or why do it? One way to
make it a priority is to make it a habit.
If
you spank him sometimes but not others, both of you will be frustrated, and
your influence on your husband’s behavior will be reduced. This isn’t easy, but
much in life isn’t, and if you believe in what you are doing and want real
change, there has to be a commitment to it.
But
there is also the real world I live in. I know absolutely that a spanking
administered as soon as possible is much more efficient than waiting. But
sometimes I have to wait. We don’t have children, but family and friends are
often around and, so far, we have kept private the spanking part of our life
(although nobody around doubts who wears the pants in the family).
So,
sometimes he goes a day or longer before paying the piper. Is that
inconsistent? I don’t think so. I always deliver eventually, and he knows that.
In some ideal future, I hope to open up more with close friends and I will be
able to discipline on the spot when he misbehaves. Some of us will live to see
the day when a wife doing that doesn’t bring gasps of horror from friends.
Meanwhile, I do practice consistency best as I can and try to make it a habit.”
KOJ had a similar take on the
value of openness, though in his case, it was an openness that was more or less
imposed whether he liked it or not:
“It
was shockingly abrupt with my wife, with no explanation. She must have been
thinking about it for a long time. She had been hiding her authority over me
due to concern about both of our careers. I had no idea that she wanted to
display her authority, or at least not hide it. But suddenly she was making the
same demands and comments in public that she did in private. I was taken aback.
Eventually we talked about it. She was her matter-of-fact self. "You'll
just have to accept it like you do your spankings," she said. I came to realize that power is more powerful
the more people know about it!”
There is something that I
find incredibly powerful about that "You'll just have to accept it like
you do your spankings," line.
I’m confident it would seem more challenging
than titillating as it was happening, yet I can’t help wanting to be taken in a
direction in which she decides on her own that there are certain challenging
things I “just have to accept” like I do my spankings.
And, the underlying reality
is that consistency and openness are both within the scope of authority I have
consensually handed over to her. I've asked her to hold me accountable. I've asked her to be diligent in doing that. I've told her that part of me wants her to be more open about her authority.
Although being the spanker in
a DD relationship undoubtedly involves real commitment in terms of time and energy,
I do feel like once established, being firmly in charge
must be easier
than always feeling like you’re negotiating the boundaries of that part of the
relationship.
The decision fatigue that
comes with inconsistency seems
so much harder than applying a simple “earn
one – get one” approach.
And, while I genuinely don’t
look forward to my bottom paying the prices for such consistency, the benefit
it has for the spanker is another issue KOJ addressed:
“My
wife was a very consistent spanker. For instance, I was expected home at 6 pm
unless I had called ahead. I got one swat for every minute late without calling
-- and she let nothing go; even if it was 6:01 I got the one swat, pants down
and bent over the kitchen island, bare bottom with the bread board (and even
one swat could sting!). That may seem harsh and micromanaging, but to her it
was all training. For me, I appreciated the consistent enforcement of rules.
There was no room for error, nor should there be. If I didn't want paddled, all
I had to do was call ahead!”
That element of certainty
seems to me to be the most important element of consistency, and there is, in
fact, something oddly comforting about knowing that, while you’ve given up significant
control to your wife, in the end if you don’t want a hard spanking, that’s
mostly within your control via improving your conduct or meeting agreed-upon
expectations.
Over the years I’ve had this
blog, lack of consistency is unquestionably the number one complaint I’ve heard
from disciplined husbands. I don’t want to make this post an exercise in airing
that problem, though there probably will be a fair amount of that. What I’d
really like instead though is to hear the advice of those who have achieved
some level of consistency that they are satisfied, or close to satisfied with.
For those folks, what does consistency
look like in terms of frequency? Is it
something you judge in relation to some limited set of agreed-upon rules?
Or is it more about her
exercising more fully a broader grant of “any time, for any reason”
authority? If her authority is that
unbounded, what does consistency mean for you in that context?
Where you and your wife have
achieved consistency, was it about systems and specific communication tactics,
like periodic check-ins, journaling, etc.?
Or, was it more about the
wife adopting or developing a certain attitude, perhaps displaying the kind of
enthusiasm for wielding and displaying power that KOJ’s wife got to? Did getting to that level of commitment and
enthusiasm entail the kind of openness to others knowing about or intuiting the
nature of the relationship that KOJ’s wife told him he would just have to
accept and that Marisa aspired to?
I hope you have a great week.