Hello all. Welcome back to The Disciplinary Couple’s Club. Our (more or less) 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.
It wasn’t a great week, but it certainly was a momentous week in world events. As anyone who has read this blog for a while knows, I’m a political and world affairs junkie. I started the day on Thursday very down that it appeared the worlds democracies were once again going to roll over and play dead in the face of totalitarian aggression. Yet, over the course of the next few days and as a result of watching millions of Ukrainians put their lives on the line to stand up the neighborhood bully, the rest of the world somehow managed to find its balls.
Inspiring stuff. Though, I’m fascinated by the collective amnesia of the politicians and pundits who are criticizing the current U.S. administration for not being strong enough in supporting Ukraine, after those same politicians and pundits argued left and right that it was no big deal for Trump to get caught on a “perfect” phone call trying to extort Ukraine by delaying military aid until they coughed up dirt on his political opponent. No, no big deal at all. Shameful.
Anyway. On to this week’s post. It’s kind of an update on recent developments and an extension of last week’s discussion. As I’ve related on here a couple of times, one of my resolutions for the new year was to do a better job self-reporting any behavioral problems. Unlike most of my resolutions, I’ve actually done pretty well on this one. Not perfect by any means; but, not too bad. However, I’m finding that for every action there is, indeed, an equal and opposite reaction. Although I’m acting to be tougher on myself on the reporting front, the perhaps inevitable reaction is I’m working harder to delay the anticipated consequences of that reporting. And, unfortunately, February proved to be chockful of events that allowed me to wriggle out of those consequences. There were visitors and a couple of physical health issues, holidays (Valentines Day) and personal events that (a) interfered with her ability to deliver a spanking immediately; (b) allowed me to display some offsetting good behavior that warmed her heart, i.e. gifts given to her on a couple of meaningful occasions; or (c) gave me an excuse to argue for a short delay, i.e. “Ah honey, it’s Valentines Day. How about tomorrow?”
Now, as I’ve related a few times here, I’ve always been kind of bad about trying to get out of what I know I have coming, or at least very actively hoping that something would come along and interfere. But, I do feel like that reaction intensified after I started reporting more. I don’t really try to avoid it entirely. Indeed, if that were the overt aim, the best means would probably be to just “forget” to self-report. Yet, I haven’t been doing that. Instead, my reluctance to get spanked manifests as various subtle and not-so-subtle suggestions that maybe she could just put it off a day or two.
The problem is, justice delayed very often turns into justice denied. I’ve talked before about the trade-offs between immediacy and anticipation. I do believe that allowing a misbehaving husband to stew about it for a while does have its place. But, so does immediacy, not least because the big problem with providing a lot of time for anticipation also lays the groundwork for it not happening at all. As ZM noted:
When things get postponed, it is almost never because my wife wants to keep me anxious about it. Rather, things get in the way, or maybe sometimes she just doesn't feel like punishing me at the time. When things get postponed - for whatever reason - they become less and less likely to happen with each passing day.
I couldn’t agree more. Alan offered further support for the value of immediacy and the problems with lengthy delays:
This discussion about delayed or postponed spankings remind me about the relatively few “on the spot” spankings I have received. But I remember every one of them, even those that occurred years ago – and with few exceptions I either never repeated the behavior that caused the spanking -- or didn’t repeat it for a very long time. What I am saying is that spanking in real time is probably much more natural and more effective than delay.
Those who have studied the factors that make a correction effective tell us that it should be “certain”, “severe” and “swift”. In the real adult world we all live in, these are challenging conditions to achieve. But for those who believe spankings can’t achieve real behavior modification, I say: try certain, severe and swift for a while and see if you still think spanking doesn’t work.
I agree that “certain, severe, and swift” is almost certainly the right recipe for effective correction. Throughout our fifteen-plus years of doing DD, however, we’ve almost always been a mere one out of three. Anne’s spankings have always been plenty severe. However, “certain” and “swift” are ongoing problems.
I’m being honest when I say that my resolve around self-reporting was an effort to build more certainty into our disciplinary endeavors. What I am finding, however, is that in the context of Domestic Discipline, certainty and swiftness are not wholly independent variables. Without swiftness, certainty becomes far less . . . certain.
In thinking through what to do about my efforts to self-sabotage the painful discipline I know I deserve, it did occur to me even before Alan’s comment that reducing the time between a self-report and her taking up the paddle and doing something about it is probably a necessary first step. I’m not sure it would even require a major adjustment. What I see happening time and again is I self-report, then we aren’t around each other for a while, then as soon as we are, I go into my subtle and not-so-subtle efforts to delay. Over the course of even a few hours, I can find arguments to delay the proceedings, or often things really will happen on her end to interfere. So, what if she started eliminating some of the time that I have to maneuver and that events have to intercede?
As so often happens, I got to think about some of the inspiration we got early on from the Disciplinary Wives Club stories. As I’ve said before, one of my favorites has always been the story Even More, written by our contributor Al. It occurred that in that story, the wife calls the husband when she is on her way home from work and tells him to be ready for his spanking as soon as she gets home, after telling him earlier in the day that he was in for one. That seems to me to be about the perfect amount of “anticipation” time. He knows for a few hours that he is going to get one, then there is a short but powerful period in which he knows it is coming very soon. In our case, there simply wouldn’t be much time for me to argue or maneuver if she were to call me on her way home from work to tell me I was getting my spanking as soon as she gets home. It could also work in situations in which the husband is at work or otherwise away from the home. She could call and order that he be home by a certain time and tell him to expect a spanking as soon as he gets home.
The other thing about anticipation is I think wives may over-estimate its power. I have a pretty short attention span, and I suspect other husbands do too. If I know I have a spanking coming in the next hour, I will think of little else. However, if the “anticipation” period is longer or more indeterminate, other thoughts naturally intercede. Moreover, while soon after an offense I may feel a lot of contrition and a strong desire to be held accountable, those feelings have a pretty short half-life.
Finally, as Alan alluded to, when the delay becomes substantial, additional acts of bad behavior or “acting out” seem to become inevitable:
[F]or us there is a certain self-correcting mechanism that never lets her paddle gather too much dust. If it goes too long or she lets my behavior slip I begin to act out, in effect challenging her authority –and then she reminds me both of her authority and that I don’t want to challenge it.
Please let me know your thoughts about any of this. I hope you all have a great week.
