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.