The Club - Meeting 419 - Who Changes More and in What Ways?

“Women marry men hoping they will change, and men marry women hoping they will not. So each is inevitably disappointed.” – (wrongly?) attributed to Albert Einstein

 

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couple’s Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are, or would like to be, in a Domestic Discipline relationship.

 

 

I hope you all had a great week, including for those in the U.S., a happy Thanksgiving.  Ours was pretty laid back.  A drama-free day spent with family, then on to Christmas decorating over the weekend.  I’m not quite feeling the spirit yet, but hopefully it will hit me soon.

 

One thing that has hit me is disappointment and frustration at my continuing issues with carelessness.  If we hadn’t done an entire topic in it so recently, I’d probably explore it in depth.  Instead, suffice it to say, every time I think that I’ve learned my lesson, it’s not long before I do something else that costs my time and money fixing problems caused by my own carelessness, lack of attention to detail, or tendency to take shortcuts. Most recently, I both delayed doing something around the house that needed doing before winter and took a shortcut when I finally got around to doing it.  In the end, a maintenance job that should have taken about 15 minutes became a repair job taking about 5 hours. As I said, the frustration with the time my carelessness it costing me has hit me, but one thing that hasn’t is a hard paddle or strap over and over until my mindset about these things gets a real correction.

 

Anyway, with that bit of venting at myself out of the way . . . we got several responses to ZM’s poll last week, which sought to tease out our and our partner’s relative levels of dominance and submission in various contexts.  It was a pretty small sample size, which makes it difficult to talk about patterns or trends.  Perhaps one interesting pattern is I don’t think anyone self-identified as being “submissive” or appearing to others to be submissive outside the home, though several said they have issues with confrontation.

 

Something else that came up in one thread answering ZM’s poll was the issue of “change.” KOJ had these two comments:

 

As a young man, I thought I wanted a partner who was the opposite of my mother (overbearing) and I wanted to run the show. I married such a woman. By middle age, with a marriage with a lot of frustration on both sides, I wanted a wife more like my mother -- to manage our lives, including with maternal discipline. Fortunately for me, my wife was growing in confidence and was so sick of my boyish and boorish behavior that she instantly took to her newfound authority backed up by corporal punishment. I think it is no coincidence that we both took on these new roles in middle age, for all the reasons already cited by others. My wife's explanation was simple and straightforward: "I just couldn't take any more of your shit, and whipping your ass to get my way was a better option than divorce."

 

Reputation among friends/relatives: This changed dramatically after retirement. Folks previously saw us as equals. After retirement she was obviously dominant. One of my adult children has discussed this with me because the change was so blatant to her.

 

Cynthia Ellen had a question that also was about “change”:

 

It seems that some of you guys changed your wives' minds, so they took accountability over you. How did you do that? Maybe a future topic?

 

 

So, let’s talk about change.  With respect to Cynthia Ellen’s question, did either you or your partner ever change your minds about Domestic Discipline or exercising authority?   

 

Regarding KOJ’s broader theme of changes over time, in what ways have your or your partner’s attitudes toward DD and your respective roles changed over time?  In what ways has practicing DD changed one or both of you over time?  Who has changed more, and in what ways?

 

Regarding Cynthia Ellen’s question, I don’t think there have been that many examples raised here of changing a spouse’s mind about Domestic Discipline and dominance, but I can think of a couple.  Interestingly, both were female disciplinarians.  The most recent that comes to mind is Danielle, who hasn’t come around in a while.  She noted a few times that when her husband first raised the issue of having an FLR with her and his kinks around spanking and dominance, she was in a very traditional, vanilla mindset and wasn’t open to it.  It wasn’t until several years later that she “matured” enough to give it a try.  I recall at one point she said she regretted that her delay and initial rejection resulted in so many years lost in which she and her husband could have been exploring D/s, DD, and other kinks.

 

 

Then, there was this from “Holly”:

 

“Calling me a bitch was what led to my husband’s first appointment with the strap. He had done it before, but my mom heard it for the first time and told me I was a fool for allowing it. There were other things going on at the time, including his general brattiness and temper tantrums when he was frustrated. It was a big change for me, because I had been determined to manage my own marriage differently than my mom had done. But over a period of time, about three years, I saw the same behavior in my husband that had gotten dad in trouble with mom. When I told him what was going to happen, he gave me almost no resistance. That makes me think he wanted me to take charge and his brattiness and tantrums were his way of asking for it. He knew how mom had run things, and I think that made him want the same thing from me. The strap transformed him into a sweet loving husband. I don't think that would have ever happened if I had not acted, or to be honest, if mom had not pushed it."

 

In our case, I don’t think Anne nor I “changed” our minds about accountability or Domestic Discipline.  We both were kind of a tabula rasa where the whole concept was concerned.  Until I stumbled on the Disciplinary Wives Club and raised the concept with her, I don’t think either of us were even aware that anything like it existed.

 

Regarding KOJ’s wife’s changes in retirement, the extent of change and how abruptly it happened seem like outliers, and intriguing ones. I do suspect, however, that on average the Disciplinary Wives do change more than the husbands.

 

If I’m right about that, it’s kind of ironic, right?  It seems like almost all these relationships (Holly’s being an exception) start with the man raising the prospect of disciplinary spankings with his wife, and it’s almost always centered on changing his behavior.

 

Yet, maybe a deeper lesson in Cynthia Ellen’s question is that it may take a pretty huge change in the disciplinarian partner just to get the ball rolling!  

 

 

I didn’t have a pre-existing interest in spanking, so I guess you could say that I did have a big change in attitude right out of the gate. In most cases, however, the men who ask for DD have had a strong spanking interest or fetish for years. Therefore, when they ask their wives to take up the paddle or strap, they aren’t “changing,” so much as expressing a desire that’s always been there.

 

The wives, on the other hand, may be coming to that conversation completely cold, having never even thought about taking on that kind of role.  This makes it all the more surprising that so many of them willingly give it a try, with many of them coming to embrace it over time.  

 

In KOJ’s case, his wife not only embraced it became so open about it that one of his adult kids asked about the change.  I don’t think that’s the typical pattern, but I do think many Disciplinary Wives do change a lot over time.  As I said, it’s a little ironic that so much of the discussion around DD is about how to change us but, in the end, it may change them even more.  

 

In our case, I suspect there was more inner dialogue going on in Anne's head than I was privy to initially, but she got to where she needed to be surprisingly quickly.

In our case, I do think that over time Anne has changed more than I have, but it was a longer and more subtle process than KOJ experienced.  She was in her low 30s when we started.  Unlike the situation Holly describes growing up with a disciplinary mother, my wife’s grew up in a traditional, male-dominated home.  When arguments happened, it was almost always the passive-aggressive variety in which she pouted and he slept on the couch until one or both moved on, with the underlying problem never really getting resolved.

 

That was our dynamic when we first got married.  Arguments almost always ended with her flouncing out and pouting.  I think the biggest way in which she has changed over time is her willingness to assert herself more directly and, sometimes, painfully.  I think she also has become way more assertive in general over the 18 or so years we’ve been doing DD and experimenting on and off with something more like an FLR.

 

 

Although the changes have been incremental, I do think they accelerated as retirement approached.  During a period three or four years ago when Anne was becoming more openly “bossy,” one of our kids asked about the dynamic, basically commenting that it seemed like Anne was the one who “wore the pants.”  I wasn’t there, but Anne says she gave her a kind of vague or cryptic answer to the effect that I had a lot of responsibility at work and, therefore, didn’t want to make lots of decisions at home. When pressed a bit more, she did own that she kind of did wear the pants.

 

How have I changed?  Regarding Domestic Discipline, I think my attitude about it has been relatively stable, though I think there are a few things I appreciated now more than I did when we started.

 

First, I do think that from the very first conversation I emphasized that part of the goal was equalizing the relationship, helping her become more assertive by taking me down a peg or two.  But, I think I had a pretty limited and vague understanding of what that might entail.  I think at the time I still saw her assertiveness as a means, with the end being to bring about changes in my behavior.  Now, I sometimes think I had that “means versus ends” dichotomy backward.  Over time, I’ve come to think that one reason DD seems to work for so many wives is that it allows them to assert themselves—to  “find their voice” as it were—even if many of his problematic behaviors come up over and over.

 

Another way of putting it might be that I recognized I needed, and that part of me desperately wanted, imposed boundaries.  But, I looked at the value of those boundaries from my perspective. I now think that she gets as much gratification or more from doing the imposing than I get from having them imposed.  

 

Second, when I first became interested in DD, I thought about it as being almost entirely about the discipline.  Today, I’m far more on board with the observations of many here that even if the whole thing is permeated with sexual energy, that doesn’t mean it isn’t real discipline.  I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with the fact that the two can co-exist.  

 

Third, today I’m way more certain that a big part of my underlying attraction to DD is about the authority as opposed to the discipline. Accountability and penance are always going to be a big part of the dynamic for me, but over time I’ve come to see that those aren’t as powerful unless they feel imposed by someone in authority. 

 

 

Alan and ZM in particular have talked a lot about it being the need for strong female authority.  I agree, though I’m not quite as insistent that for me it has to be about female authority. I think I have a strong attraction to power in general and to having power imposed on me, and I’m maybe more agnostic than some about whether that authority has to be female.

 

 

Which leads to the final observation about how I think my attitude has changed over time.  I never think of myself as a submissive, yet as I get older and become more open to all sorts of things and shed more and more of my biases—including biases about myself—I do think that part of my attraction to DD reflects a deep-seated desire to be subject to someone’s dominance.

 

I’ve always had an anti-authoritarian streak, which probably seems at odds with what I just said about getting off on authority and needing it to be imposed.  I think the two can be reconciled by the fact that at work I didn’t feel like anyone who tried to dominate me had any real ability to do so and make it stick, and I didn’t have any particular incentive to submit to anyone.  This may loop back a bit to some of ZM and Alan’s observations about how the sexual or erotic aspects of DD help make the whole thing work.  Anne doesn’t have any more objective “power” over me than some superiors at work, with one important exception . . . because of the erotic and sexual energy involved, I’m driven to submit to her authority to whatever extent she attempts to use it.  I hope that makes sense, because I’m not sure I can articulate it any better than that.

 

Have a great week.