Hello all. Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples
Club. Our weekly gathering of men and
women who are in, or interested in being in, Domestic Discipline relationships.
I hope you had a good week.
Mine was tough. We had something happen in the family last
week that I won’t go into, but it left us all stressed, depressed and
unsettled.
And, then there was that Game
of Thrones finale. What a letdown. As if
I wasn’t depressed enough, I can now think about what I could have done with
the 80-plus hours that I devoted to watching and re-watching episodes of that
series. What am I going to do
now to mindlessly waste my time? And, while I appreciated the generous serving of gratuitous T&A, I did find myself identifying a bit too much with one of the characters.
During last week’s discussion,
Darren brought up the topic of how life changes after we become empty
nesters. I realize this topic won’t
resonate with every reader, as some won’t be at that stage of life. But, based on past polling, many of us
are. It’s a topic we have touched on
before, a little less than a year ago, but we do have some new participants, so
why not do it again? Moreover, going
back and reading my last empty nesting post (post 255) forced me to confront a somewhat painful reality –
sometimes things just don’t change very much even when you think they will and
even when you say you want them to.
It seems perfectly logical
that having kids in the house would put some hard limits on fully exploring DD
and FLR lifestyles. And, for us, they
did. Like almost all couples who get
into this lifestyle with kids in the house, we had to work around their little
ears and eyes, which made things like instantaneous discipline difficult to
pull off. Lots of bad behavior went unpunished
entirely. When issues were addressed,
sometimes it was so many days after the bad act that much of the emotional
connection between the crime and the punishment was lost. Logistically, the two things that changed the
most over time were location and timing.
When we first began the kids were pretty young, and we could often get
away with spanking sessions in the basement after they had gone to bed. Though, who knows whether one or more of them overheard something despite our best efforts?
As they became teenagers, late evening spankings were less of an
option, because the kids started staying up later than we do! So, spanking tended to happen on weekends
when they were out of the house, which alleviated some of the constraints on where spankings happened. Now, they almost always happen in our bedroom. But, our kids kind of
liked hanging out with us and visited regularly. So, there were many times that even Saturdays and
Sundays proved difficult to find “alone time” for Anne to take care of business. And, we have never even thought about simply being totally open about the power exchange in the house, let alone the spanking piece. Though, as we talked about last week, I do find the prospect of more open shows of authority morbidly attractive in the same way DD itself is morbidly attractive. And, if Alan is right about there being a DD gene (I still have my doubts), for all I know one or more of the kids have discovered this thing we do and may not be repulsed by it at all.
But, we have always operated from the premise that this is something we keep to ourselves and have mostly acted accordingly. So, having more time alone would theoretically lead to more freedom to explore this side of our relationship. Everything changes. Kids graduate from high school, go on to have
their own lives, and mom and dad are then left to move on and take their own
lives in different directions, right? Well,
sort of. I first took on this empty
nesting topic back in 2016 when we seemed to be on the verge going into
that new stage when we would have much more freedom. I assumed that would mean big changes in the
DD and FLR aspects of our relationship.
What I didn’t quite get at that time is that for this generation of kids,
leaving the nest is a “process” not an “event.”
They move out the door and into the real world slowly and in spurts. I didn’t really anticipate just how much they
would still be around, visiting on weekends, holidays, summer vacations,
etc. And, when ours “left” for college
they initially were within easy driving distance, so it turned out there were lots
of nights when a hot meal at home seemed more attractive than ramen in a
college apartment.
Last year, we thought that
things finally were moving in a direction in which there really would be big
blocks of time when we truly were empty nesting. We talked expressly about what that meant
for the Domestic Discipline and FLR aspects of our relationship. As I said in Post 255:
She wants to take over, I want her to do that, and now
there is just the little matter of execution.
Of making a hard left turn into a very different style of dealing with
each other and trying to make much more real something that has been more of a
goal than a reality. Not that the DD
aspects of our relationship have not been real, but they have been confined and
departmentalized, bounded on all sides by a life that revolved around kids and,
frankly, keeping kids from discovering much about this aspect of how their
parents relate to each other.
That is what is really changing -- her ability or at
least willingness to really step into a 24/7 role as Head of Household has
always been met with the roadblock of observant little eyes and ears. Which wouldn't be a problem if, like a small
number of people who visit here, we were "out" about this aspect of
our relationship, or at least not actively hiding it even in the privacy of our
own home. But, we always have been. So,
with no one but us and the pets around, it really is a brave new world.
(I also included in that post
some honest reflection about just how prepared I really was to move into a relationship
that was more FLR-oriented and the extent to which that might entail getting
much more than I asked for. More on that
in a later post.)
So, here we are, a year
later. The house is more empty than it
has ever been. We have the place to
ourselves most nights and most weekends.
And, we’ve spent a couple of years talking about how much we want to put
her more firmly in charge. So, how much
has changed? Honestly, not that
much. In terms of frequency of spankings,
it’s about the same. In terms of more
open expressions of her authority, also about the same. My submission to her authority? Very spotty and, if anything, the past month
has showed some disturbing moves in the wrong direction. What accounts for this lack of progress
despite our new empty nest status? I don’t
really know, but here are some thoughts:
· Circumstances change quickly but personalities and
habits do so only slowly and with effort.
She wants to be more assertive but struggles to really internalize any
sense of her own power. I want to behave
better, but I also have a fierce anti-authoritarian streak and some bad habits
that have been such a part of me for 40 years that they have become a part of how
I see myself. Those things are hard to
unwire. You don’t just become a new
person, whether more authoritarian or more compliant, based on good intentions. And, frankly, neither one of us has really committed fully and completely to going down this path and doing what it takes.
· Despite being together for a quarter of a century, I
think we both are still kind of embarrassed about moving into new roles with each
other. In fact, it may be that we’ve
been together so long that moving in a different direction feels less like a
real change in the relationship and more like fantasy role playing.
· Life is busy.
While the house may be more empty, we too are out of it a lot, especially
me. Business travel now generally takes
me away from home several days a week.
One other angle on empty nesting that I am starting to
suspect may be in play is that while it may present more opportunities for discipline it also may lead to more reasons for it. I’m really starting to wonder whether my
behavior is slipping because I don’t have to worry as much about being a poor role
model. While it is subtle, I do feel
like in the last year I’ve lost some hard-won maturity and drifted back toward
more of the guy I was right out of college and graduate school. Now that I am no longer running my life around other
people’s school, sports and social activities, life is more free, and I’m
kind of acting out in response to the drop in family-related
responsibilities. Or, is this all just
another spin on the classic mid-life crisis?
One is almost perfectly timed.
So, for those of you who have
faced the empty nest in the context of a Domestic Discipline relationship, what
changed? And, what did not? Did it, in fact, lead to her stepping more
firmly and confidently into the role? If
so, did that happen gradually, or was there a moment when it seemed to all come
together? Or, is change harder and less
dependent on the presence of others than we like to think?
