The Forum - Vol. 216 - Beginnings

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Anais Nin

Hello all.  Welcome back to The Forum.  Our weekly gathering of women and men who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline or Female Led Relationships.  I hope you had a good week.  Mine was insanely busy again.  I'm really hoping to get some downtime this weekend, though it's not looking promising.

As our regulars know, I've been struggling more than usual with coming up with new ideas and also with the structure of the blog.  I do like the topical format, but it feels more than a little random.  Some of that may be inherent to the format of a blog versus a website.  The latter is more like a book, with some kind of purpose and layout, arranged into discreet sections intended to accomplish some specific thing or make some specific information available.  The former is more like a weekly column in the Lifestyle section of the newspaper.  From this blog's inception, I've struggled with which of those I want it to be.  On the one hand, I want it to be a resource for people exploring this lifestyle.  On the other, I did start it because I am a communicative person and, within bounds, I do like talking about what is going on in my own life and my own DD marriage and having a community around that.  Though, I'm not sure the blog format really works that well for community building.  The topics are constraining and I'm always the initiator of the conversation.  I recently was invited to a Facebook group for DD folks. It's mainly M/f in orientation, but I do like the give-and-take aspect of it.  Though, it has its downsides, such as Facebook making it very hard to post anonymously.  Despite that "little" impediment, I am still pondering starting a group there.  If you would be interested, shoot me an email.  Depending on the interest level, I might give it a go.

Having something more interactive and more private, like a Facebook private group, solves only part of the problem, however, as I do still want something that is a more generally available resource and, again, something a little less random.  It occurred to me that this blog has explored damn near every conceivable topic related to Domestic Discipline, but it is spread out over four years of sequential entries.  So, I think what I am going to try for the next few months is imposing a little structure.  A little logical flow.  Something more like a book and less like a journal or weekly column.  It may or may not work, but I am just kind of tired of throwing out random topics every week.  It absolutely will mean repeating past topics and repeating some older content, which may get tiring for the regulars but, as I said, we have at one point or another covered pretty much every damn thing that it is possible to explore regarding these relationships.

So, if I were writing a book about Domestic Discipline, where would I start?  Well, probably with how I got into it in the first place.

 My story is below.  I hope you will share yours as well. 

Exploring Domestic Discipline was my idea, which might surprise you if you knew me in "real life."  Like many men who feel attracted to giving up control to a strong woman and being held accountable by her, I am not "naturally" submissive.  To the contrary, in every other aspect of my life, I tend to be a leader, not a follower.  In fact, I hate being told what to do and I've never been presented with a rule that I didn't promptly set out to break.  I also tend to be hard-charging and very goal focused.  I like performing at my best and feel a lot of guilt when I don't meet the standards I set for myself.  I have been like that most of my life, though my career really brought those controlling and performance-oriented tendencies to the forefront.  After a decade or so of living that way, I was materially successful but not particularly happy. Everything felt out of balance. I was always in charge. Always the person making the decisions. Which was overwhelming sometimes.

Our marriage was similarly out of balance. My wife was raised in a very traditional, male dominated family, and she brought that habitual mindset into our marriage. It wasn't that we had consciously created a male dominated marriage, but that was just sort of where our personalities naturally took us.
 
We had dabbled in erotic spanking, so that bridge already had been crossed. That "dabbling" came relatively late in our relationship.  We had been together for about 10 years.  From what I have since gathered from the conversations on this blog, my DD journey is a bit atypical because, while it was me who introduced spanking into our bedroom repertoire, I did not have any kind of early fascination with it.  I had, in fact, never even considered engaging in it, whether giving or receiving, as an adult.  That changed when I watched a "Real Sex" episode on HBO that had a segment on erotic spanking.  It was a turn-on, and some time after that, I bought a small leather paddle and asked my wife if she would try using it on me.  She did, but it was never very hard and always erotic in nature.

We incorporated some femdom scenarios into our play,  characterizing the spankings she was giving me as “punishment” for various things I had done wrong.  That began to create problems.  Some of my behaviors really were a problem and really were pissing my wife off.  But, because the spankings were relatively mild and always part of our sex play, she began to see them as more reward than punishment, and she was right about that.  She definitely was not interested in doing anything to reinforce my bad behavior, so she stopped the spankings entirely.  I didn't really care, and it didn't feel like much of a sacrifice.  I was still somewhat interested in spanking-related subjects, but while the idea of being spanked did excite me, it was not a big deal and not remotely close to a fetish or compulsion.  If I came across spanking-related content on the internet or in a magazine, I might read it or follow a link to other content, but it didn't really bother me at all that my wife was not interested in making spanking an ongoing part of our sex life.

That all changed when I somehow came across the Disciplinary Wives Club website.   I don't really remember how that came about, but I remember the effect it had on me like it was yesterday.  Unlike our previous erotic spankings, the spankings advocated by "Aunt Kay" were intended to be real punishment to correct real misbehavior.  Many of the fictional scenes and "Real Couples" letters involved wives imposing the DD relationship, or taking it far beyond what the husband envisioned when he first asked to experiment with it.  In other words, many of the scenarios involved "consensual non-consent" or the husband asking for it but "getting more than he bargained for."  In several of the stories, the wife announced that the spanking would not end until after her misbehaving husband was in tears.  That was what really got me.   Not the spanking per se, but the idea of submitting to someone's control so fully that I might have to accept the ultimate humiliation of being brought to tears over my wife's knee. For an admitted "control freak" like me,  that kind of loss of such control was truly terrifying. But, it also was, undeniably, fascinating, though morbidly so.

I spent two or three days in a state of near obsession.  I literally could think about little else and had trouble sleeping, distracted by thoughts about this lifestyle and what it might mean.  After a few days of that, I brought it to my wife's attention, initiating the discussion almost like I was conveying a funny joke. We were laying in bed together, and I initiated the conversation in some benign way, like "I found this funny website on the internet . . . "  I explained the premise.  Women taking control of the marriages and using real corporal punishment on their husbands.  I explained that unlike the situation of "rewarding" bad behavior with fake, erotic spankings that had led her to bring our previous spanking experimentation to a halt, these were real spankings, designed to punish and correct behavior.  She asked whether I was suggesting this as something we should actually try. I told her, very hesitantly, that I didn't really know but that it had been on my mind constantly since finding the website.  The hesitation was because, I knew very well that I was suggesting something that might prove to be incredibly painful and that my ego found immensely threatening. She told me that she would take a look at it.

I was sitting at my desk at work the next day, when she called and said she had visited the DWC website.  "So, . . .?" I asked.

"Very interesting," she replied.  That was it. 

"So . . . what does that mean . . ." I probed.

"Well, I guess it means you need to go buy me a nice, high-quality wooden hairbrush.  When you get home, we can talk about how and when it is going to be used."

The rest is, as they say, history.  While she was game to give it a try, she was concerned that this could still reinforce bad behavior if the spanking became "fetishized."  Therefore, our foundational rule was that the spanking had to be "real" each and every time.   It had to be severe enough to constitute real punishment. And, that is what we have been doing ever since.

So, how did your own Domestic Discipline relationship get started? 

Have a great week.