Delayed Post (Yet Again)

 Sorry folks, but I'm going to be delayed in posting.  Yet again.  Unfortunately, we have house guests, and I just don't have the private time to put a post together this weekend.

The Club - Meeting 362 -- Lying and Consequences

"It is wrong and immoral to seek to escape the consequences of one's acts." ― Mahatma Gandhi

Hi all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club, our weekly gathering of men and women participating or interested in Domestic Discipline.

 

Well, life continues to be quite the fucking mess here in the U.S., doesn’t it?  I retract my observation from a couple of weeks ago that 1968 was probably worse. 

 

  

And, while I am very glad that the FBI and law enforcement are rounding up the culprits so quickly, the ease with which they are doing it makes me a little, well, uneasy.

 

   

The insurrection at the Capitol was so fresh, I almost didn’t post again this week.  But, avoiding posting could quickly become a habit, and I don’t think I want it to.  Yet, anyway.  Belle suggested posting every other week, but I don’t think that would work, because I can’t really control the timing of events or interruptions that keep me from posting, so every other week probably would just result in my not posting twice as often.  I suspect that ZM hit on the real solution – not changing, or even increasing, the number of posts but making many of them shorter and perhaps not as topic focused.  At least that may be worth a try.

 

Alan suggested a possible topic, but I’m going to put it off for a week or so, because I did have something in mind.  Or, I guess a couple of things in mind that are more or less connected to the events of the last few days.  The first relates to lying.  I like the way Biden’s “Big Lie” description of Trump’s election fraud claims has really caught on.  Yes, a very substantial number of people doubt the integrity of the election – because a whole bunch of politicians and their supporters lied about it over and over and over, and did so without any real consequences. 

 

 

And, while several Trump-supporting politicians denounced the violence that ensued, I haven’t heard any of them actually apologize for the Big Lie that was at the root of it all.  If the last week illustrates anything, it is that words have consequences, and that when those words are lies, it is important for those in authority to call it out quickly and deal with it firmly.   

 

Otherwise, the lie takes on a life of its own.  Of course, one of the mains reasons we lie is to avoid facing the consequences that the truth often entails.  That, and our natural desire to avoid those truths we find too unpleasant to admit to, often because admitting the truth is embarrassing or undermines how we prefer to perceive ourselves.

 

Those were the two themes on my mind coming into this weekend.  First, lying and its insidious effect.  Second, our tendency to lie, whether affirmatively or by omission, to avoid consequences or unpleasant truths. 

 

For my part, I have lied to avoid consequences, including getting spanked.  Though, the lies in that category tend to be pretty trivial, and in most cases I know she doesn’t believe me anyway.  Like if she asks how many drinks I had at happy hour and I reply “one,” when we both know it was more like three or four.  It’s almost like a shared joke when I tell her something both of us know is not true.  But, there are other times when I really am fairly ashamed of my behavior or mad at myself for not living up to a standard or rule, whether set by her or by me.  I think my efforts at self-reporting tend to fail for that reason; it’s not that I am that concerned about avoiding a spanking but, rather, don’t like documenting failures that are embarrassing to admit, whether notable because of their severity, volume or frequency. 

 

 

This is another area where certainty and immediacy of consequences would seem to have a big role in nipping the bad behavior in the bud.  Despite the fact that we both know I’ve lied about my behavior with some regularity, and despite the many failures to carry through on any kind of self-reporting routine, I don’t think I have ever actually been spanked for the lie or for not reporting some piece of bad behavior.  Especially in light of this week’s events, that kind of seems like a mistake.  Maybe one she should think about adding to this year’s list of resolutions.

 

 

How about you?  Have you ever been spanked, or given a spanking, for lying?  Was the lie about behavior that was itself “spankable,” or about something else?  Is lying itself against an express rule in your household?  For the men, if you have lied to get out of a spanking successfully, were you happy or disappointed when it worked? If the husband gets caught in a lie, are there additional or more severe consequences than there would have been for the behavior itself?

 

I hope you all have a great week, and I hope you step in and slap down anyone you hear spreading the Big Lie. This shit has to stop.

No Post

Hi all.  I had planned on posting, but then along came the events of this fucked up week.  The funny thing is, for the first time in weeks, I had been feeling some interest in Domestic Discipline and FLR and was looking forward to getting 2021 off to a good start.  But, somehow, posting about DD seems too trivial for this moment. If the mood strikes me, maybe I'll post later in the week.  If not, see you next week if the world doesn't fall apart in the meantime.

The Club - Meeting 361 - Welcome 2021!

“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.” - Benjamin Franklin

 

Hello all.  Welcome back to the first meeting of the Disciplinary Couples Club for 2021. 

 

 

Well, what a fucking year.  We all have years that, on balance, seem to fall closer to the bad than the good end of the scale.  But, it is pretty rare that a year comes along that virtually everyone, all over the world, will agree totally sucked!

 

Though, it’s always good to keep things in perspective.  While I think that in the “big picture” 2020 was, in fact, the most wearing, exhausting, exasperating, upsetting, demoralizing, maddening year I’ve personally experienced, it probably doesn’t really set the bar even in our modern age.

 

http://extragoodshit.phlap.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/2020-Was-Bad-But-1918-And-1929-Were-Worse.html

 

And, while the political divisions in the country and corresponding doubts about the sanity and democratic leanings of about 70 million of my fellow citizens has put me back on my heels, I wonder whether 2020 qualifies as even the most politically divisive year in modern American history.  What about 1968?   The Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Dr. Martin Luther King assassinated, Senator Robert Kennedy assassinated, student protests and burning draft cards, police and National Guardsman go on violent rampage at the Democratic National Convention, student protesters shot and killed on college campuses, black athletes lifting their fists in silent protest at the Olympics in Mexico City . . .

 

Though, even with that little bit of perspective, like everyone else I did breathe a sigh of relief as 2020 passed.  Or, I would have had I been awake at 12:01 – an exhausted end to an exhausting year. Though, as I sat down to try to get the blog off to some start for 2021, I went back to last year’s New Years post, and I was a little surprised that, once again, the more things change the more they stay the same.  Part of that post quoted from the corresponding post in 2018, which read:

 

“I hope you all had a great Christmas.  Ours was good.  In some ways, it seemed like a 'smaller' holiday.  Less busyness.  Slightly less running around from party to party.  And, smaller but more personal gifts.  And, I like that. Looking back on 2018, it was a pretty good year, if I ignore the career front.  That aspect of 2018 was mediocre at best, with much more involuntary downtime than I’m usually comfortable with. While our progress stalled mid-year, on the DD and FLR front my wife really did step it up significantly in the first half of the year, and hopefully she will get back on track once kids clear out after the holidays. Our kids are all healthy and doing well on their chosen school/career paths.  From a health perspective, this time last year I was convalescing from an injury and in a chronic bad mood due to lack of sleep caused by ongoing pain from said injury.  Full recovery took way longer than I expected, but I’m finishing out 2018 stronger and healthier than I was in 2017, and slightly ahead of where I was in 2016. At my age, doing better than holding steady is itself a surprising accomplishment.  While it was not a smooth ride for everyone in our extended family, all of them are still with us as we head into 2019 and their momentary setbacks now look like blessings in disguise.”

 

Then along came 2020, magnifying all the negative aspects of 2018 and 2019 and reversing some of the good trends.  This Christmas was definitely scaled down and quieter.  It was the first in 25 years that wasn’t spent with one or both sets of in-laws, except for a couple of times that we took a family vacation over Christmas.  Same with Thanksgiving.  It’s the first time Anne and I have spent it alone, ever.  Last year I was talking about I was glad that we had consciously avoided holiday parties with co-workers and friends.  If only I had known that we might not have Christmas with those folks in 2020, and with some of them ever again, I might have thought twice about whether skipping a good time together in 2019 was such a good thing.  Like 2018, I go into this new year sore and exhausted from a procedure to fix a chronic injury, only this time the healing and recovery process is going to take a good part of the new year.  At least in 2018 and 2019 I could say that all our close relatives were relatively healthy and still with us at year-end. That wasn’t the case this year.  We lost a close relative, and I lost a close friend and mentor.  And, much like both 2018 and 2019, I had way more involuntary downtime at work than I ever thought possible.  In fact, 2020 turned into the slowest and most frustrating year I have ever had in my entire career.

 

Yet, again, everything has to be put into perspective.  While the lockdown sucked, the plain fact is that I was on a very bad trajectory in 2019 and early 2020 where both health and behavior were concerned, and I’m not sure what would have happened hand 2020 not bitch slapped me with such a dramatic and involuntary change of cadence.  Ceasing all travel and a lot of productive work gave me little choice but to rest and recuperate.  I also managed to impose some discipline on myself in the last quarter of the year on the dietary front.  As a result, I exited 2020 substantially lighter and trimmer than I entered it.  I’m pretty sure that would not have happened had 2020 not interrupted my travel and work socializing routines.  And, while recovery from my injury issue kind of sucks right now, it sets me up to get past a chronic condition that made most of 2019 and 2020 miserable.  As for work, I had planned for a long time transition into either some form of retirement or an entirely different kind of work but, truth be told, I had made similar plans as I went into 2018 but found reasons to keep grinding away for another two years. I think I would have finally taken real steps to move on even without all the churn and turmoil and involuntary downtime of 2020, but I really don’t know that for sure.  So, as shitty as it was, 2020 did play an important “forcing function,” pushing me kicking and screaming out of a life that really wasn’t serving me very well the last couple of years.  On that hopeful yet morose note . . .

 

I usually focus these New Years missives on goals and resolutions, but that’s tougher than usual this year.  For better or worse, a lot of my goal setting has always revolved around career and finances.  This year, I can’t really do that given the job transition, particularly since I am consciously blocking myself from making any decisions about whether this is going to be some real retirement or just a short pause before doing something else.  We can never predict the future with any certainty, but this year I setting aside not only prediction but also planning. Which for me, is really, really hard.  In addition to the uncertainty around work and finances, I can’t even really do the depressingly traditional resolutions around health and fitness, as right now I’m pretty strictly limited in what I can do physically, and it’s not exactly clear when I’ll be able to get back to relatively normal activity levels.

 

Interestingly, while 2020 feels so different in terms of the uncertainty it leaves me in as I enter a new year, when I look back at another part of last year’s post it becomes clear that 2020 served mainly to magnify trends that had already started the year before:

 

So, where to go in 2020?  I’m still in this post-Christmas zen place in which I don’t feel very ambitious.  On the non-DD front, I really, really need to work on getting into better physical shape and getting the daily stress under control.  I’m pretty hesitant to make any career goals for 2020, given that I did have a plan in place at the end of 2018 and then everything went totally sideways and pretty much off the rails for the entirety of 2019.  In fact, in the past I had this almost faith-like belief that there actually was a connection between my plan and list-making and the goals I hit each year.  It wasn't always linear, but there did seem to be a connection.  But, wow, did 2019 ever lead me to question that assumption. The year as it happened looked nothing like the year I planned as I wrapped up 2018.  Though, I don't think passivity and inertia is the right course either.  I do think that I need to face up to the fact that if I keep doing what I’m doing in terms of care, even if that turns out to be very lucrative financially and a least “not bad” with respect to fulfillment, just staying in that rut may keep me from doing something that actually would be better.  You can do that only so many years in a row before time runs out.

 

What about the DD/FLR/king front?  Well, it was another up and down year.  I am surprised that with all the forced “alone time,” there really was not any kind of sea change in our DD or FLR efforts.  There were times that Anne did show more inclination to take the initiative and really explore the FLR side, though as in 2019, it never became very consistent.  And, as the year ended my physical condition put pretty much everything on hold.  In fact, my interest in DD, FLR and even just plain old sex has been at the lowest of low ebbs, though it seems linked pretty directly to my physical condition and, now that I’m in the recovery phase, hopefully things will bounce back soon.  Now, had you asked me about that a few days ago, I might have given a pretty pessimistic answer, and one that might not bode well for the future of this blog.  Regarding both Domestic Discipline and blogging, my interest level as precisely zero, zilch, nada.  Then, today as I was forcing myself to try to put this post together, I caught up on some DD-related Tumblrs and blogs, and I felt a bit of stirring in the loins. Nothing dramatic, but at least a small spark of interest.  I don’t have any real resolutions in mind in this area, but what I said last year seems like a good starting point:

 

She has definitely gotten more comfortable being bossy and exercising authority.  It now just needs to become more automatic.  I have to do my part in that, primarily through finally getting on the self-reporting thing once and for all.  I’d also like to stop being so paranoid about confidentiality and, instead, open myself to more real relationships within this little community we’ve built, if others are willing.

 

I haven’t asked Anne what her resolutions might be, but here are a few she might consider:

 

How about you? If you’re on the receiving end of the paddle, do you have any specific resolutions for 2020?  Any specific bad behaviors you’d like conquer?  Any specific ways in which you’d like to see your wife take more control or crack the whip harder, literally or figuratively?  Ladies, how about you?  Are there any particular directions you want to take things in for 2021?  How about areas in which you intend to let your paddle do the talking if he doesn’t shape up?

 

I hope you have a great 2021. The bar is set awfully low for this to be a better year, but let’s all try to do our part.

 

 

 

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing but of reflection. - Winston Churchill

Hello all. Welcome back to The Disciplinary Couple’s Club.  Our weekly on-line gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, a Domestic Discipline relationship.  I hope you all had a great week.

 

 

Well, wasn’t that an interesting non-hiatus hiatus.  For once, I don’t think I can be blamed for injecting politics into everything.  Here I was, minding my own business all week, just laying around on my couch and posting Christmas-themed smut.  Then, Alan brought up some of Julie’s latest conspiracy theory nonsense.

 

 

She followed him over here, I resisted the temptation to respond for about fifteen minutes, then 150 comments later. . . .  I’m just at the end of my rope with the conspiracy theories and the questioning of anyone with credentials or expertise about the thing in question  just because . . . well, precisely because they know things and, hence, are either elites or representatives of the ever-growing Deep State (I'm sure Barr and Pompeo are its latest members according to the folks who make up Julie's new fan club).

   

And, whichever side you were on in the election, when did it become OK to pout and insist the only way you could lose is if the other guy cheated?  Would you let your kids behave that way if they pouted like a little baby after a lost baseball game or placing second in the science fair? Regardless of who you voted for, have you ever seen such a bunch of sore losers?

 

    

I know that some were annoyed that I let the kettle of fish boil even after Alan gave me the OK to delete his comment that kicked the whole thing off, but I sincerely believe that when we have innocent poll workers and honorable government officials getting death threats for just doing their jobs, it is important that each and every one of us call out these fuckers when we see it happening.  This year, if during the Christmas dinner Zoom call your Drunk Uncle starts with the borderline racist comments, or starts ranting that Obama is a Kenyan or Hillary was running a pedophile ring, kick his ass off the call.  He'll whine to all his other old geezer friends about you being a part of that “cancel culture” thing he's heard about on Fox but wouldn't be able to explain if you gave him an Urban Dictionary.  Then, raise your glass and enjoy the company of the rational and the principled of whatever party. 

 

 

Now that I have that out of my system (for a few minutes until some other bit of stupidity lights me up again), I know this will come as a great disappointment to the true spanking fetishists who so desperately want to get back to scintillating and controversial topics like “what’s your favorite implement,” but I’m not there yet when it comes to getting back to real DD posts.  This recuperation is kind of knocking me on my ass, and I think I’m going to need another week or two before any real DD spark arises.  I’ve had brief periods like this before, and some of those pauses in my DD interest level also coincided with medical procedures.  After disappearing into surgical anesthetic ether for a few weeks, the interest always returned.  I don’t doubt the same will happen this time, too.

 

Of course, looking back at past posts, I’ve almost never done a real DD topic just before Christmas.  I guess I get contemplative and introspective this time of year.  Some people measure their progress (or lack thereof) from calendar year to calendar year or from birthday.  I, on the other hand, tend to measure things from Christmas to Christmas.  This year, I guess what surprises me is that 2020 seems to be ending up a lot like 2019 for me, even though the two respective years progressed almost entirely differently.  Here is what I said in my Christmas post last year: 

It’s been a chaotic two- or three-year run, and for the most part I can’t say I’m going to be sorry to see 2019 in the rearview mirror.  It was a year that could perhaps be summed up with that phrase about “the best laid plans of mice and men.”  I ended 2018 with a fairly detailed vision of what I wanted from 2019 from a career perspective, and by mid-January virtually the whole of that plan had fallen apart and things actually went in the opposite direction. 

 

It was a year that proved to me that while many hard things are growth experiences precisely because they were so hard, some are just mistakes. There were some career decisions I made very early in 2019 that made my whole year a roller-coaster with too much travel, too little sleep, and too much bad hotel and airport food and drink.  I have to call out my wife for not only putting up with it but supporting it by, if nothing else, just going along and keeping everything semi-normal.  Though, it has become a running joke with us that perhaps I should be concerned that she has taken it so well, maybe I need to come home early from a business trip to make sure there isn’t a new boyfriend I need to kick out of my bed.  But, in all seriousness, she has put up with a lot this year.

 

Deepening relationships also applied to my anonymous blogging life.  I’ve had more regular, though mostly still anonymous, contacts with people I’ve met through blogging world.  I’ve exchanged thoughts with Tomy about how amazing it must have been that during the days when he and his wife were actively running the Disciplinary Wives Club website it seemed to almost operate as a real club in which people actually got together and got to know each other on a personal level.  I really have only one relationship from the blog that is kind of like that, but that’s a start.

 

So, that was where I was at the end of 2019 – a year for which I felt no affection. Then along came 2020 to put everything in perspective. I had planned for it to be a continuation of 2020 but also a “light at the end of the tunnel” kind of glide-path into a more relaxing, even boring, mid-life transition.  I anticipated a lot of continuing cross-country travel, with a hard push through to the end of my current work career, then a hand-off of my primary role to a protégé I’ve been grooming for years. I was really looking forward to a tough but worthwhile year, culminating in a graceful departure accompanied by the kind of socializing and commiserating with long-term colleagues and clients that one expects when it comes to “gold watch” ceremony time.. Then along came 2020.  Everything was going according to plan until March, then all of a sudden no travel, a big slowdown in my real job, turmoil around succession and transitions, and no prospect for in-person good-byes and orderly transitions anytime in the near future. Champagne good-bye toasts turned into Zoom calls from my home office.  Without warning, I went from a roller-coaster of activity to enforced stillness and social isolation. 

 

I have always bemoaned the fact that from year to year not much seems to change, all my resolutions to live a different life notwithstanding. Then, along came 2020.  But, it wasn’t just Covid and the social turmoil that came with too many black victims of police killings.  Objectively, even apart from the pandemic, social turmoil, and the profound challenges to our democratic processes concocted by our Crybaby-in-Chief, 2020 was objectively worse for us than 2019. 

 

  

At the end of last year, I tried to put 2019 in a more optimistic context than I had experienced as it was grinding along:

 

Still, as I said at the end of last year, I can give thanks for a few simple things.  All my immediate family made it through the year in one piece, as did most of our extended family.  Most of our family and the important people in our lives made it through the year in relatively good health.  None of our close friends or family suffered health or financial calamities, and one of my family members who was having a rough time on the financial and career front seemed to stabilize and improve her situation by the end of the year. And, while all the business travel truly sucked, it did lead to making some new friendships and deepening others.

 

2020 was a different story.  We did lose one very important family member.  Others bore the brunt of the pandemic even without getting Covid. One of our kids was just starting a promising career, then along came Covid furloughs that have now gone on for almost nine months. Graduation ceremonies and other important milestones went uncelebrated. Then, very recently, out of the blue someone who served as an important mentor, almost a big brother figure to me just up and died with no warning. And, of course, he was an all-around great person.  A vigorous and healthy “man’s man,” a natural leader, good friend, great father and family man, merry prankster, etc. Of course, it’s always the guys like that who leave you way too early, while the narcissistic conmen and sowers of division eat their McDonalds’ cheeseburgers by the bag-full and go on and on and on.  The suddenness of my friend’s death really put me back on my heels for a few days, and it brought home that even though he was a mentor to me, I was pretty selective in applying his lessons.  I did a good job of incorporating his lessons in leadership and integrity, but I didn’t spend nearly enough time trying to take apply his example of light-hearted exploration and just having more fun.  I naturally tend toward earnestness and intensity, and there is a downside to that.  Hopefully, I’ll do a better job of modeling him in 2021, now that he is gone, than I did in the years after I saw his example but didn’t do enough to follow it.

 

 

Still, as bad as 2020 was, I am trying to keep it in perspective as it gets closer finally to  receding into the rearview mirror.  We did lose people close to us, but we weren’t among the 300,000 families in the U.S. who lost someone to Covid, and while we know people who got the virus, none of them ended up on a ventilator.  In other health developments, a good friend of ours got a scary health diagnosis near year-end, but early detection and treatment led to a good outcome. On the economic front and extended family front, the wonders of technology meant many could continue to work without missing a beat, which wouldn’t have been the case had this pandemic come around even a few years earlier. That same technology allowed us to keep in touch with friends and family even when we couldn’t be with them in person.  And, that Covid shutdown may be the only reason I’m still here bitching about politics and the deplorables among us.  I was really wearing myself into the ground in 2019, and when my body finally had enough, it pushed back hard.  My behavior was also going in a very bad direction, culminating in some real tension with Anne in October.  Now, here we are at year-end, and prior to this little medical diversion, I had lost 15 pounds, was hitting the gym daily with strength coming back fast, I was going weeks without drinking at all, and my energy levels were slowly coming up.  I don’t think any of that would have happened if it were not for the forced, involuntary slowdown of 2020.  So, 2020 proved to be a lot like my view of Domestic Discipline – the closer it is to non-consensual imposed boundaries, the better it seems to work!

 

While 2020 wasn’t a bad year for the blog, I did seem to lose a little bit of momentum when it came to adding Disciplinary Wives to the conversation.  Carol, Cecilia and Jennifer did start dropping in (did I miss anyone else?), but our wave of new female commenters seemed to peak last year with the addition of Danielle, Cecilia, Belle, and Liz and others.  I hope we can ramp it back up in 2021.

 

So, all in all, 2020 is in a class by itself in terms of overall shittiness, even if things could always be worse.  But, before we get to the very end, let’s all take a pause to appreciate this time of year and remember what Christmas can be, even if we don’t always appreciate it as much as we should. 

In the words of Scrooge’s nephew Fred in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol:

 

"I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round--apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that--as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

 

 So, let’s appreciate the beauty of the season.

  

Keeping in mind that a smaller, simpler Christmas has its virtues. 

      

Let’s display appropriate enthusiasm Christmas morning, while appreciating those who keep us in line when our enthusiasms exceed appropriate boundaries.  

   

Hopefully Santa was in one of the priority groups for Covid vaccine, but I’ll make an exception for him and his helpers even if they violate our quarantine, don’t wear their masks, and don’t maintain appropriate social distancing.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to each and every one of you who makes this blog worth coming back to week after week, year after year.

Content Moderation

 Hi all.  I hope your week is off to a good start.  Some of you tried to post today and may have gotten a message saying your comment had to first be approved by the moderator (me).  Just to clarify, despite yesterday's heated political back and forth, I have NOT turned on comment moderation.  I've tried to avoid doing that as a general matter and have done it only when I had a temporary troll infestation.  The reason some people's comments were temporarily blocked today is I always have the moderation settings set to require approval on any comments on older posts, as trolls and commercial spammers often drop comments into older posts thinking that the moderator might not see and delete them.  Google's settings for that function is pretty binary, defining older posts as 14 days or older.  Given my recent hiatus, the most recent post was on November 30th, so today that post passed the 14 day mark.  I have checked periodically throughout the day and am trying to approve comments expeditiously.  

I may try to post something tomorrow or later this week, but probably not much beyond more holiday art.  Sorry for the lack of anything truly new and DD related.  Hoping to get back to real posting sometime soon.

Brief Hiatus and Christmas Thoughts

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships.

I hope you all had a great week.  Ours got kind of crazy, with some unanticipated housing repairs that we’re still dealing with.  Tis the season for frozen pipes and other plumbing problems in our part of the country.  In addition to that craziness, I was trying to push through a couple of home improvement projects, and we both tried to knock out most of our household Christmas decorating.  All this was in anticipation of me getting sidelined by a personal issue I’ve been needing to deal with for a while.  This has been one of those years that I find myself constantly bemoaning the fact that getting old sucks, until I remember how much better it is than the only known alternative.

Thanks to that little issue, the blog may be on hiatus for a couple of weeks.  That, plus I really can’t think of a damn thing to post about that we haven’t done to death.  If I get a burst of energy and inspiration, I will post something substantive. If not, it may just be sporadically sharing some Christmas cheer in the form of art and memes.  In that spirit . . . in honor of Belle, who admits to getting inspired by titillating Christmas art and in partial apology to Jimmy for whatever role this blog played in his becoming a disciplined husband this year . . . I hope this gives her some inspiration and him some Christmas cheer. 

   

There is something about the following picture that I find inspiring, though I doubt Anne will be modeling for such a shot herself, given that there is a direct line of sight from our tree, through a huge set of windows, to the front street.

  

I also probably won’t be seeing anything like this. It looks like it was taken in front of a mall Christmas display, and I almost certainly won’t be making any more trips to the mall before Christmas.  

 

It’s one of many things that many of us won’t be doing in 2020.  It’s been a year of adjusting our expectations, hasn’t it?  Lots of this going on, with no lube . . .

 

 

Unfortunately, there won't even be vanilla versions of this going on this year. 

 

 

Cliché as it may be, you never know what you have until it’s gone.  I distinctly remember limping into this time last year, exhausted from too much travel, too much work, and too much socializing.  We ended up dodging several holiday parties with friends that have become traditions over the last few years, because we were just worn out.  Had I known it 2020 I would be desperate for some time with other people, I might have reached a little deeper for some Christmas cheer and the energy that comes with it.

 

 

Who would have thought that there would ever be a year in which what is under the tree may actually matter more than the people around it for the simple reason that the people won’t be there this year?

 

While I don’t have a topic this week, feel free to chime in with how this crazy year is impacting your holiday plans, including sharing any thoughts on ways you are working around lockdown orders and concerns for vulnerable friends and relatives.

The Club - Meeting 320 - Changes and Transitions

“An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.” - Mae West

 

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships.

 

  

Sorry for the delayed post, and now that it is here it will be a short one. I hope you’re all off to a good start for your week and, for those in the U.S., enjoying Thanksgiving preparations. Though, I admit it’s a holiday that has never done much for me.  Apparently, many DD and kink-aficionados feel the same way.  In past years, I have spent hours looking for Thanksgiving-themed sexy/kinky art, and the pickings are always drier than an overcooked turkey.  This year, I’m not even going to try and am just moving on to Christmas!

 

   

We really are getting an earlier start on Christmas this year.  We don’t have the tree up yet but will do it this weekend.

 

 

Most of our Christmas lights and outdoor decorations are hung.  We noticed that a few others in the neighborhood also got an early start.  I guess everyone could use some early Christmas cheer and holiday spirits this screwed up year.  We also got a head start on some of the more intensive preparations because we have some personal commitments coming up that may keep me away from the blog for a couple of weeks after this posting. Right now, I’m just playing it by ear.

 

I apologize for all the delayed and missed postings.  Part of the problem really has been lots of family obligations and celebrations, home improvement projects that take on a life of their own, etc. Though, it’s also likely a function of there just hasn’t been a lot to share on the DD or FLR front.  Some of that is probably thanks to all the distractions I just mentioned.  But, it’s also a function of the fact that after hitting a real low point in terms of stress and personal behavior problems in September and part of October, I’ve been on an uncharacteristically good roll lately.  It’s been weeks since I had any over-indulgence problems on the drinking or diet front.  I’m going into the holidays several pounds lighter than I was this time last year.  I’ve been working out steadily, though that may temporarily stop soon thanks to a combination of some physical issues I need to address and gyms shutting down again thanks to Covid resurgence. Work remains much, much slower than I’d normally like, but I’m finding I really don’t care very much.  While she hasn’t said anything expressly, I get the feeling Anne isn’t in much of a domineering mood, whether for her own reasons or because there has not been much bad behavior on my end to get riled up about.

 

 

I’ve been living with myself long enough to know that trends and trajectories—good or bad—always change direction or fully reverse at some point.  I also believe that men have hormonal cycles too even if ours are less dramatic, and my kink interest and my perceived need to give up control and have boundaries imposed waxes and wanes sometimes for no apparent reason.  But, when it’s not all that often that I hit a place where everything just feels more stable and balanced. On those occasions, I do end up thinking about what would happen if “balanced” became a more ordinary state for me.

 

Now, in the past I always thought that if I suddenly found myself feeling more balanced and controlled and, hence, less in need of imposed boundaries and external controls, I might still actively seek out DD to drive better performance in other areas.  I think it is pretty rare that someone is self-disciplined in all aspects of their lives, so there is always something to work on, right?  Perhaps, but early next year I am planning to go through a big career change that right now is removing any real performance goals around work and career achievement.  Work and career-related goals and motivations have been such a dominant thing in my life for 30+ years, it’s just weird being in a place where I don’t have anything I’m aiming for in that area. 

 

None of this is to say I have some inclination to stop DD or to stop experimenting with FLR.  It’s a lot more subtle and uncertain than that.  I’ve just hit this point I’ve never really been at before where my moods and drives are pretty manageable and stable and the work-related striving and stress that created at least some of the imbalance may really be going away sometime soon.  So, it’s not that I’m giving up on DD or FLR but, rather, for the first time since we took this up, live really is moving in a different direction and who knows what impact that will have?

 

What about you? For those of you who have been through a similar transition, what impact did it have on your DD and/or FLR desires and level of activity? For those who haven’t, if you reached a point where your behavior was mostly under control, would you still need or want DD in your life?  Would you continue with spanking but take it in a more erotic direction?  For the ladies, if your men suddenly became much better behaved on every front, or if his need for DD and imposed rules were reduced, would you miss doling out the discipline?  Would you miss taking charge, to whatever extent you are in charge of certain areas now?

 

I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving. Be safe.

Once Again . . .

 I seem to have run out of weekend before I ran out of to-do list items. I forget how busy weekends are this time of year.  I will try to get something posted tomorrow.

Delayed Post Update - Impromptu Topic by Belle

After posting the below notice that I probably wouldn't be posting this week, I received the below comment from Belle:

 

“I was fascinated by the part of last week's discussion about our real roles and how they may be contradictory, how secret we keep them, who actually knows about our various roles, etc. I thought it could be a topic.

 

While I imagine that most people behave differently depending on the role they are in and the people they are with, I think maybe those of us in the DD community have more contradictory roles than the average couple: the differences when our spanked husbands are alpha in some situations and beta in others may be more pronounced, for instance.

 

Even for the disciplinary wife, there may be a more pronounced difference in our various roles. I think it was Liz who mentioned that she is basically a 50s wife who spanks, which definitely goes against that stereotype.

 

Just an idea, anyway. Maybe you have already discussed it.”

 

So, let’s run with that as this week’s topic.  I'll post more on it later after I finish up some other projects I need to get to this week.

 

******************

 

All, sorry for the continuing delay. Today was busier than anticipated, and tomorrow promises more of the same.  I'm also suffering from a lack of inspiration for topics.  So, there probably won't be a post this week.  Is it too early for Christmas and winter-themed art?  I hope not.

Have a good week.

 

The Club - Meeting 359 - Role Play

“Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women." – Nora Ephron, Commencement Address, Wellesley College 1996

 

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships.

 

Well, it’s over.  For those of you who are as into politics as I am, was that the longest fucking week of your life or what?  Anyone who has been a visitor here for a while knows I am pretty damn happy right now.  Or, at least, relieved.  I don’t claim that this is the most inspiring ticket that the country has ever elected. But, I hope that regardless of how you feel about the individual candidates, we can agree that some changes were long overdue.

 

  

As happy as I am, I’m definitely in that camp that can’t quite believe that it was this close.  And, as usual, the tribalism was on full display everywhere I turned on social media.  The hypocrisy was palpable.  “Stop the counting!  Well, except in those states where I’m behind and the gap is closing. Keep counting there!”  And, it was remarkable how quickly it was asserted without any irony whatsoever that a President who never once in four years got to a 50% approval rating could not possibly lose unless the election was “stolen.”  So, what to do about this?  Well, I woke this morning to a post from Red over at the Consensual Spanking blog entitled “Please do NOT unfriend anyone at this time.”  https://consensualspanking.blogspot.com/2020/11/please-do-not-unfriend-anyone-at-this.html.  For the most part, I agree with him and hope that we can all get back to something that seems more normal and less bat shit crazy contentious. But, I say that with a couple of caveats.  First, I am fine with getting into debates, even animated ones, with people who disagree with me politically.  I have two friends from college who I actually enjoy getting into it with on Facebook, one of them a Republican who is fairly far to the right of me, and the other a friend who was fiery right-winger in college but now openly identifies as a communist.  Arguing with them is fun because they are both intelligent, well-informed people. But, then there are the idiots who pass along every ludicrous conspiracy theory with total credulity, because they are either too dumb or too ignorant to know better. They literally think it is plausible that the US government is controlled by a cabal of Satan worshipping pedophiles who Trump was sent to take down. There apparently are so many of those people out there these days that they even managed to elect a couple of their ilk to Congress.  We have Trump supporters in Michigan hatching plots to kidnap and execute a governor, and poll workers and election commissioners getting death threats for being patriots who showed up during a pandemic to count votes.  Sorry Red, but I'm fucking done with people of those ilk and with those who try to normalize or excuse them.

 

    

I’m not going to waste five more minutes of time or burn one more calorie of mental/emotional energy with those people, even those who are friends or family. I’m also not going to give them even the smallest platform to spread their idiocy or to get rational people riled up by exposing others in my network to their idiocy. Though, somewhat in the spirit of Red’s post, I did decide that I am not going to go quite so far as “blocking” or “unfriending” them.  They are free to read anything of mine they want.  I just changed my settings so I don’t see their stuff anymore.  And, it wasn’t a very big effort, once I figured out that four or five of my social media “friends”—and only one I was ever all that close to—generate about 90% of the posts or comments that are over the line of reasonable discourse.  So, I blocked those, and I swear it was miraculous how those few small changes totally got rid of about 90% of the stuff that had been sending my blood pressure soaring. 

 

Anyhow, enough of that and enough of the last four years.  Onward. 

 

Since the shutdown, I've posted a variety of Covid-related memes. This one totally cracked me up. I can imagine one of my elderly relatives posting it with innocent intent!

Thanks to everyone for keeping the conversation going while I was watching election returns and chewing my nails.  Much of the talk centered on witnesses or the prospect of people figuring out that we are in disciplinary relationships.  ZM noted that while we are all kind of sensitized to anything that hints someone is a fellow spanking traveler, the same probably is not true of most of the people we engage with in our daily lives:  “I expect that this is the case with most vanilla people. Quite simply, they don't think about spanking all that much at all, and certainly never like we do. So consequently it is relatively easy to joke about spanking, but not too likely that most people might even consider that maybe you are being serious because the possibility just doesn't cross their mind.”  I’m always on the fence about whether that’s true.  On the one hand, I don’t think that adult disciplinary spanking is very prevalent, or at least I have never seen anything beyond pure speculation suggesting it is.  But, I don’t doubt there are many people who are into spanking in some form, and I had a discussion with someone a couple of weeks ago who I suspect was one of them.  I was getting my haircut. The stylist was a young, kind of goth dressing Texas transplant to our state.  We don’t know each other well, but I’ve had her cut my hair three or four times over the last year.  We got to talking about how her clientele were holding up during Covid.  Somehow that led to a discussion of some of her more problematic clientele and the lack of manners displayed by some of them.  She observed very casually that maybe some of them should have been spanked more as kids and talked about how prevalent it had been in Texas when she was growing up and how her own dad had “beat her ass” when she needed it.  Now, I know what she’s describing really is the way it was in Texas and similar environs not all that long ago, but the fact that she brought it up and then stayed on the subject for a while, including recounting that she herself got hard spankings and that she thought that was a good thing, made it seem like more than just reminiscing by someone for whom spanking was once but is no longer “a thing.”

 

As for this week’s topic, I’m again going with one for which my own personal experience is pretty limited.  In one context or another, multiple commenters have brought up the subject of “role play” in response to recent posts. 

 

 

The most direct comment about it was last week’s from Danielle, in which she described how a professional spanker had brought her husband to tears during a session:

 

Dan, as to how she got him to cry, I have asked Wayne lots of questions about that experience in an effort to understand why he did it and what he got out of it. Before the actual session, she interviewed him to get a sense of his needs and desires. Then they agreed on a role play scenario to make the spankings feel like real discipline. They pretended she was Wayne's new boss who had to put him in his place because he was jealous that she was promoted over him, so he had been trying to undermine her authority.

 

Alan didn’t talk expressly about role play, but he did allude to how something can happen that marks a transition from spanking as “serious kinky play to a spanked boyfriend and later husband who was very much under female control.”  And, ZM discussed a recent conversation in which his wife let her sister and a friend into a small part of their spanking lifestyle: 

 

And then there is the other friend of my wife and my wife’s sister, who she recently told about a role-play we did, and the friend immediately jumped to “so did you come in with a belt and spank him?” and my wife just went with it and said “yes, he was a bad boy” or something like that in a very joking manner, and they all laughed. But of course they don’t know how much she was just joking and so they may suspect we use spanking for play or something.

 

 

So, this week’s topic is “role play.”  Was it ever a part of your spanking relationship?  At some point, did it transition into something that was more truly disciplinary and away from “role play”? Or, have both gone on together?  If you’re willing, please share some of your favorite role play scenes and how they relate, if at all, to the more disciplinary or FLR aspects of your relationship.

 

Have a great week.