Out This Week

 Hi folks. We are out enjoying the long weekend and the remainder of this week.  I doubt I'll get around to posting before next weekend.  For those in the U.S., enjoy your Monday off.  For those outside the U.S. . . . sorry.  Enjoy your regular Monday.

The Club - Meeting 400 - Conversations

Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it. -- Maya Angelou

 

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.

 

 Our has been a little cloistered, thanks to the weather.  While areas around us are burning down, here it’s been cold and wet. Which kind of sucks.  I’d really like to get out on the motorcycle, but I’m kind of a fair weather rider.  Hopefully things will warm up soon.

 

 

Anne and I went out to dinner last night, and something related to Domestic Discipline sort of came up.  I say “sort of” because it didn’t get a chance to get off the ground.  We went to a relatively fancy restaurant to celebrate an event.  After a glass of wine, Anne told me she had planned to talk about something related to . . . then she pantomimed the movement of a hand delivering swats.  She left it at that, because we were seated uncomfortably close to another couple who had kids at their table.  We were both quite sure they would have been able to overhear anything we said, because we could hear pretty much every word of their conversation.  So, she dropped it and we didn’t take up the topic again after we left.  

 

It seems a little odd, but we do seem to have our most open and exhaustive talks about discipline and spanking when we are out to dinner.  Or, in bed.  But, the bedtime conversations are always a part of foreplay, and that colors the conversation.  When the talk is about DD’s role in the relationship and it is a genuine conversation, it almost always seems to happen over dinner.  I honestly don’t know why, given that we now have an empty house and plenty of time together to discuss such things.

 

It got me thinking about conversations around DD and their ability to get things started or take things in a different direction.

 

I’ve talked multiple times about how Anne and I got started in DD, but for the benefit of any newcomers, it began with a very candid conversation.  We had played a little bit with erotic spankings, but she put the brakes on after she decided that giving me “play” spankings for real offenses was rewarding bad behavior. 

 

A few months later, I found the Disciplinary Wives Club website and became more than a little obsessed with it.  I kept the obsession to myself for two or three days, but I literally couldn’t get the whole thing out of my head.  I finally felt like I had no choice but to raise the prospect with Anne, even though I had no idea how she would react.

 

Once I finally got my nerve up, I broached the subject when we were in bed, with the lights out, on the verge of going to sleep.  That setting was no accident. I was so nervous, I didn’t want her to be able to see my face, which I’m sure was a deep shade of red. I think I began with some very innocuous lead in, like, “So, I found this interesting website a couple of days ago.  . . ."   But, I moved very quickly into a high level overview of what the DWC was about. Given her concerns that our erotic spanking activity had reinforced bad behavior, I emphasized that what distinguished DD from erotic spankings was, in essence, that the DD spankings were “for real.”  There was no playacting. According to the stories, the spankings often ended with real tears. 

 

I think I emphasized several times that the spankings depicted on the DWC website left the husbands chastened, reddened, very sore and possibly in tears.  The goal was to make the paddling bad enough that I would really, really want to avoid another at all costs.  I also told her that I recognized that my behavior was often hurtful or inconsiderate but, because of the way we were both raised, she did not feel she could do very much about it other than pout and engage in other passive-aggressive behaviors.  The conversation was very much about us consciously deciding to empower her and dis-empower me, in order to bring a sense of balance to the relationship.  

 

At some point, she asked me whether I was suggesting this as something we should actually do. I think I gulped a little, then after a long pause admitted that I felt like it was something I’d like us to try. I told her I felt like I was drifting and really did want some help behaving better, and I also reiterated that I thought it would be good for both of if she had more control and I had less. Or, at least it was worth giving the power exchange a try.

She didn’t say much. In fact, it was a very one-sided conversation and, as I said, the whole thing took place in bed, in a darkened room, which meant I could not see her face or otherwise judge her reaction.  The conversation ended with her rolling over to go to sleep, after telling me to send her the website and she’d try to take a look at it.

 

I did so, leaving a note on the counter in the bathroom with the url for the Disciplinary Wives Club website.  Honestly, I didn’t think she would even look at it.  Mentally, I predicted—with perhaps more than a little hope and wishful thinking—that she would just forget about the whole thing or reject it out of hand as being too close to the erotic spankings that she’d already banned.  I was still in that frame of mind when she called me at work later that day and said she had looked at the website.  My heart jumped up into my throat, as I nervously asked what she thought.  She said very simply, “Well, if you want to try this, I guess you better go buy me a heavier hair brush.”

 

Here we are, close to 20 years later, and that conversation is still burned into my brain in a way that eclipses any other discussion we’ve had about DD.

 

What are the most impactful or memorable conversations you’ve had about spanking and domestic discipline?  Perhaps it is an origin story, similar to mine.  Or, perhaps it was a time you suggested spanking to someone and they didn’t take you up on it.  Or, maybe it was one of those rare situations in which the other party initiated things.  Maybe someone suggested you needed to be spanked but it wasn’t in the context of an actual relationship.

 

As you can see, I’m trying to leave this more open-ended than some of our previous discussions along these lines, which almost always centered on origin stories.  Instead, lets open it up to any conversation you’ve had about domestic discipline that was especially meaningful or consequential.

 

Note: We seem to be getting more anonymous commenters than usual, without any name used.  Even if posting anonymously, please add a name to your comment so we all can keep track of who we are responding to.

 

I hope you have a great week.

 

The Club - Meeting 399 - Retirement and Empty-Nesting

You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences. - W. Somerset Maugham

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 a little disheartening.  I got results back from my annual physical, and some of those age-sensitive numbers are creeping in the wrong direction.  I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do about it.  Honestly, I feel like I’ve given up about everything in life that I’m willing to give up at this point. 

 

The situation had me thinking more about aging, which is sort of the topic of today’s post.  However, before I get to that, I wanted to call out for special attention a comment that BW left on a previous thread in response to a comment by ZM:

 

As for me there was never an issue with my wife taking the reins. My wife was the one to take the reins, authority and whatever else she needed to rein me in. She's taught (or maybe trained me) that I'm better off not resisting her. If she's using corporal punishment she's not playing around and I dread it. My wife's strength or authority that she exhibits is exciting but at the same time I tend to feel very childish when I'm going to be spanked or if she warns me to stop something or I'm going to get a spanking. That's due to the severity of a spanking from her which I don't get that often. If she tells me stop or else I'm getting a spanking will stop whatever I was doing. When she spanks I'm usually using a pillow or cushioned chairs for at least a couple of days. So in the end my wife has the reins and is not letting go at this point.

 

Doesn’t that more or less perfectly sum up what so many of us are looking for in these relationships?

 

Now, on to this week’s topic.  It’s one we’ve covered before, and I realize it won’t appeal to everyone, but like I said, issues around aging and life transitions have been on my mind.

 

For the first several years of our DD relationship, I had a lot of excuses for why stayed intermittent and inconsistent. The primary ones were “the kids are always around” and “real life, especially our jobs, always get in the way.” 

 

The thing is, we’ve been empty nesters for a few years now, and I launched my early retirement experiment a year ago.  Yet, in terms of frequency of spankings or the intensity of the FLR aspects of our relationship, not that much has changed.  If anything, the frequency of spankings has gone down. 

 

Now, part of the reason for that is early in the retirement experiment, my behavior improved a lot once the workplace socializing temptations were no longer as much of an issue.  I say “as much of an issue,” because the workplace socializing didn’t stop entirely. My former crew still invite me to happy-hour gatherings, and it still seems to lead to trouble more often than it should.

 

The other reason that frequency may not have increased is that initially she did not join me in this retirement experiment.  So, while my life may have gotten more flexible, hers did not. But, that is about to change, and I’m curious to find out whether this time, with no kids around and with both of us having infinitely flexible schedules, will things on the DD and FLR front actually ramp up?

 

 

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, or observed, 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 did!  So, spanking tended to happen on weekends when they were out of the house, which alleviated some of the constraints on where spankings happened.  

 

Even after the kids moved out, for a long time they lived close by and visited regularly, particularly on the weekends.  So, there were many times that even Saturdays and Sundays proved difficult to find “alone time” for Anne to take care of business. Theoretically, weekdays were more flexible once empty-nester status came along, but we both got up absurdly early for work, and I was traveling constantly, so we never really took advantage of having the house to ourselves because we were either tired or not together much of the week.

 

As far as the FLR goes, I do find the prospect of more open shows of authority morbidly attractive in the same way DD itself is morbidly attractive. Yet, we’ve never really explored being more open about her authority, even though things I formerly saw as big impediments—like my professional reputation—really aren’t issues anymore.  Being more open would probably mean our adult kids figuring things out, but I don’t know for a fact that they haven’t already figured things out. They are pretty smart cookies.

 

So, what accounts for this lack of progress despite our empty-nester and partial retirement status? 

 

I suspect a lot of it is just inertia.  Also, despite the fact we’ve been together for over a quarter of a century—and perhaps because we have—I think we both get embarrassed about moving into new roles.  Neither of us have been into role playing, and that’s kind of increasing the level of power exchange feels like.

 

ZM offered what I thought was a very interesting spin on this last week:

 

Oh how true about timing and frequency. For us, the frequency definitely went down. Ironically, I am pretty sure because we are now so flexible on timing that if there is even the slightest reason to delay it (and believe me, I can ALWAYS find some reason to delay it), it gets pushed out to the next day. Before, when we had kids around, she was much more likely to take advantage of rare opportunities.

 

So, for those of you who have crossed over into retirement and/or those who are empty-nesters, what has changed?  What did not? If things did change substantially, did it happen all at once, or was it more incremental and gradual?

 

I hope you all have a great weekend.  I’ll leave you with this picture.  Anne and I are quite a bit younger than the couple in this picture, but the picture seems to fit this week’s topic, and for whatever reason I really like it and have been looking for a reason to use it.

 

 

The Club - Meeting 398 - Others Knowing

“Karma is a tricky thing. To serve karma, one must repay good karma to others. To serve Karma well, one must sometimes deliver bad karma where it is due.” ― R. Mathias

Hello all. Welcome back to The Disciplinary Couple’s Club.  Our (more or less, though recently not really) 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, it was another pretty quiet week here at the Club. It got me curious about the overall state of readership.  I hadn’t looked at the blog’s stats in a while but suspected the viewership had gone down.  Sure enough, it has, by even more than I suspected.

 

While the drop was bigger than expected, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised at the trend.  I don’t think it’s accidental that the drop started near the end of 2019 and really picked up steam in the first half of 2020, right around the time of the presidential election and its aftermath. I was incensed about the state of the country and definitely let that be known.  I’m guessing that I lost more than a few red state viewers, and a few conservative commenters, as a result.

 

The trend also reflects the extent to which blogs with this kind of theme are kind of an ecosystem, driving traffic to each other.  I used to get a lot of traffic from the Strict Julie Spanks blog, but she dropped me from her blogroll in retaliation for me dropping hers when she started posting anti-vaccine stuff.  Red’s Consensual Spanking blog was also a big referrer of traffic to this blog, but his original was taken down and then he decided a couple of months ago to close down its successor.  KD’s blog ran afoul of Google’s censors and was taken down.  Given those changes in the referral base, it’s not too surprising that traffic is down.  Some of it also is probably attributable to my more lackadaisical approach to posting over the last few months.  The situation is what it is, though I do hope that people who are interested in This Thing We Do and stop by will consider commenting more.  While I love chatting with the regulars, it’s good to get some new viewpoints every once in a while.

 
This week’s post probably won’t do much to reverse the readership trend, as I don’t have much of a topic in mind. There has been zero spanking action in our household, though that could change over the weekend.  We were traveling a bit, and it seemed like one or both of us were sick through much of April. The unspanked state of my bottom definitely isn’t the result of exceptionally good behavior on my part.  As I talked about last week, I feel like things have been slipping after several months of real improvement. 

I do feel like I turned a corner a couple of weeks ago in a few areas.  I seemed to find my old exercise intensity again.  My diet improved a little.  I did some volunteering, which I kept saying I would do more of this year but somehow never quite got around to.  I started making progress on developing a writing habit beyond this blog.   

 

But, other problem areas have been going in the wrong direction. Some of them are things that Anne doesn’t seem particularly concerned about and don’t necessarily impact her, so I don’t think she will order a spanking for them. 

 

 Yet, I know I need one.  I’ve been thinking all day that I need to “man up” and ask her to do it.  We’ll see whether I still feel that way as we get closer to bedtime, which is the time at which it typically happens.

 

 

What else to talk about?  I think I may have spotted a fellow disciplined husband, or maybe just a guy with a taste for hard spankings, in the gym this week.  I walked by a guy who was discarding his wet towel and was close enough to get a good luck at his butt.  I could easily be mistaken, but I thought I saw the distinctive marks from a cane or switch.  Not fresh ones; faded, like from older pretty severe sessions.  It was subtle, but those kind of marks are pretty distinctive, right?

 

 

I also have a feeling that at least one other person now knows about me being spanked.  I’ve related here before that long ago, I told one of my close friends about that Anne spanks me for real discipline. She’s been married twice during the time we’ve been friends, and I always kind of assumed that she told one or both husbands.  I had never outright asked her, however.  A few months ago over drinks, I asked whether her current husband knows. Surprisingly, she told me that he didn’t.  I told her that it wasn’t a big deal to me if she were to tell him.  I wasn’t encouraging her to do it.  It was more like I didn’t want to impose a secret on her with her spouse and wanted her to know that I’d understand and wouldn’t be upset with her if she were to tell him at some point.

 

Well, I have a feeling that after that conversation she may have told him.  I haven’t asked yet, but we had dinner with them a few nights ago, and I felt like my friend was being more open with things like allusions to a woman we know wearing the pants and other references to female power, and I felt like her husband was watching for my reaction.  I think there was even one veiled reference to spanking though, honestly, it turned into a very long dinner and we all had several drinks; the details are little hazy. 

 

The prospect that another man may know doesn’t bother me as much as I used to think it would.  Her husband is a very friendly, good-spirited guy.  I don’t get the impression that he is particularly kinky himself, but I also don’t think he’s the type that would be judgmental of kink in others.  In fact, I think it is highly unlikely that my friend would have gotten involved with him if he wasn’t a pretty open-minded guy.

 

The situation was on my mind when I read one of ZM’s recent comments about humbling.  He said, "Now if I were to have a spanking witnessed and if I were to be around the witness immediately after, I think the post-spanking time might be quite a bit more humbling, knowing that the person just watched that happen to me." 

 

 

I assume I would be too, and I’m very sure I would be extremely self-conscious.  I think that would be magnified if it was a man.  It strikes me that our many, many discussions about witnesses here indicates that witnessed spankings hold some real fascination for many of us. But, isn’t it almost always in the context of female witnesses?  While we seem to be fascinated, even if morbidly so, by the possibility of a woman seeing us spanked, it’s almost the opposite with men.  It's downright taboo, and I don't think it's the kind of taboo that many are fascinated by, morbidly or  not.   

 

I was thinking about it while trolling through my spanking art collection for pieces to use with this post.  While I have a few (very few) examples with men witnessing spankings, it is almost always in one of two contexts: (a) two men being spanked together; or (b) a husband being spanked by a man her husband is involved with, i.e. cuckolding scenarios.  In both contexts, the other male is a participant, not a witness.  And, as I said, even those examples are a trivially small proportion of my “witnesses” art collection.

 

I’m not sure why female witnesses seem to hold such an attraction for us, even if the attraction is a kind of morbid one, while male witnesses seems to be a full-scale taboo. I'm also not sure why a spanking witnessed by a male seems especially mortifying, yet I don't care that much that a good friend's husband may know all about me being spanked.

 

As I said, I don’t have any concise topic in mind for this week, so feel free to comment on anything that strikes your interest.