The Club - Meeting 450 - DD's Role in Meeting Personal Performance, Fitness, Resilience, Etc.

"If I had got you when you were young you would have been a brain surgeon." – Aunt Kay to her husband Jerry

 

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

 

I hope you had a good week.  Mine was both fulfilling and frustrating.  As I alluded to last week, I was out and off-grid for much of the week.  Some might call it living up to my mid-life crisis.  Without going into a lot of detail, it involved doing stupid things on my motorcycles with a bunch of men, most of them at the age they may be going through similar mid-life crises.

 

I took away a lot of good things from it.  One being that men really can be incredibly supportive of other men when they get away from their conditioned roles and face similar challenges in a deliberately non-competitive atmosphere.  It kind of makes me understand how books about manhood and male-oriented support groups have become a thing.  I hope that maybe we have a little of that going here on this blog.

 

However, some aspects were not so great.  There was an inherent element of danger in it.

 

Though, nothing really life-threatening, I did have a couple of moments where I (and, in fairness, others) bailed out on some optional training activities that I was concerned I just couldn’t do. Then, some of us encountered an unplanned obstacle that quickly revealed our varying skill levels. And, also, our varying tolerance for risk.

 

I’m embarrassed to say, my risk-tolerance wasn’t what I wish it had been.  Like I said, there was some inherent danger involved. But, we’re talking broken bone levels of danger at most.  Really serious, permanent injury kinds of outcomes were unlikely.  

 

Yet, kind of like the incident I described on the mountain, I pulled away from the risk.  The going got tough and, when provided with an “out,” I took it.  I’m still a little pissed at myself for it.

 

What does this have to do with domestic discipline?  Well, like my mountain climbing story from a couple of weeks ago, not all that much.  At least directly. But, indirectly, maybe some.  It made me question a few things about my current direction.

 

While part of my withdrawal was about risk, an equal or larger factor was I was bumping up against some physical limitations.  I was feeling way more tired and winded than I should have.  Perhaps I was doing OK for a guy "my age," but I hate, hate, hate that qualifier.

 

While the activity was physically hard, I think I would have handled it better a year ago. I came out of the pandemic in better shape than I had been in in years, but this year I frittered some of those health, strength, and resilience gains away. It showed on the side of a mountain a couple of weeks ago and it showed on a difficult ride this week.  Had I taken better care of myself and pushed myself harder over the last year, I might have fared better.

 

 

It also occurred to me that what I was really afraid of that caused me to back away from this particular challenge wasn’t so much physical injury as ego.  I was afraid to try and fail, somehow not quite getting that my ego was going to take an even bigger from failing by not trying.

 

I think I do that more often than I like to admit. Sometimes it’s ego. Sometimes it’s laziness.  Or, lack of positive stubbornness.  I don’t try certain challenging things, because I might fail. 

 

Or, I quit those things before I’m at my real physical or mental limit. 

 

Or, I try to talk my way out of a well-deserved spanking that I know I’ve earned and that I know might lead to some incremental self-improvement, because it's just mentally preferable in that moment to take the easier way out if that door seems open.

 

Or, I don’t let go and cry during a spanking because it would involve an ego hit, even though I know the personal growth I'd achieve could be huge.

 

I’m not sure whether DD has a role in helping with this kind of stuff.  On the risk-taking thing, probably not.  Anne is way more risk averse than I, so it’s not reasonable to expect she would do anything to encourage me to take more risks than I already do.

 

 But, on things like letting my physical fitness lapse, she could play a role if she wanted.

 

Moreover, the back-sliding on health and fitness issues was one aspect of a year that has been a disappointment on multiple fronts as compared to the year before.  

 

Honestly, I’ve just been kind of a slug this year, in lots of areas.  

  

Last year, I was working out more, writing more, exploring new interests more.   

 

This year, for some reason, things started to go off course around the holidays and I just got kind of lazy.

 

I do think DD can play a role in addressing that kind of stuff, but for us it really hasn’t. 

 

I talked to Aunt Kay’s husband about this a bit by email. He reminded me about the quote at the top of this post, which I’ve used here before.  He also advised this:

 

 

“One suggestion is to write her a note or, alternatively, as I have recommended in the past to some other husbands, excerpt exactly what you just unselfconsciously wrote to me and let her know these are your unfiltered thoughts.”

 

I explained to him that in the past I’ve consciously steered clear of asking Anne to play that kind of “coaching” role in which she takes charge of things that don’t really affect our relationship but where I might benefit from some imposed discipline.

 

 

I always felt like it would be kind of a burden.  And, we already had consistency issues around things that we both agreed should be punishable and that did have relationship implications.  It seemed like making her responsible for things like me making bad eating and drinking choices and avoiding the gym would exacerbate those consistency issues.

 

However, the fact is, things have changed for both of us in the last couple of years.  She now has more time on her hands.  She’s also more fully embraced her DD role and some of its more “maternal” manifestations. And, I do fee like there is something very maternal/parental in setting standards around personal performance and holding someone subordinate to you responsible for them. It’s why getting spanked for bad grades was so prevalent when I was growing up.

 

 

Also, recently, I have felt like she is almost looking for more reasons to spank and that she sometimes seems almost disappointed if I haven’t earned one recently. Maybe she would actually want to take on something that involves, at her discretion, addressing performance issues in areas that kind of do affect her indirectly, like staying healthy? 

 

 

And, it’s not just health and fitness where, heaven knows, I could use some improvement. There is procrastination and letting little problems become big ones.  This morning, she reminded me that I need to cancel a credit card by tomorrow to avoid an auto-renewal. It was the second or third time she had reminded me about it.   

This time, her tone was more serious. She didn’t expressly threaten a spanking, though perhaps she should have just given one.  It probably would have made me think twice about procrastinating next time she asks me to do something. 

 

In the end, I don’t want me to be this guy, and I don’t think she wants that for me either:

 

 

The Domestic Discipline that most of us practice seems to focus primarily on consequences for “bad” behavior, often behavior that is hurtful or annoying to our spouse or to others.  But, what about more goal-oriented behavioral modification?

 

There could be any number of such goals or desires, including”

 

·      losing weight

·      running a 10k or competing in a triathalon

·      starting a business or side hustle

·      meeting a sales or business development goal at work

·      getting a promotion

·      putting a personal budget in place and sticking to it

·      writing a novel

·      learning a musical instrument

 

It could even work on some bigger challenges and more subjective things like mental resilience.  In my case, what if I picked a less technical mountain climb than the one I attempted last week? One that was more about just gutting it out and pushing one’s body to the limit.  What if Anne told me that a consequence of turning around before the top, absent an injury other serious problem, would be a hard spanking?  Would that help me avoid taking the easy way out when encountering real difficulty?

 

What thoughts do you guys have about this? What role does DD play in things like hitting personal goals, staying fit and healthy, or in facing up to challenging situations? What role would you like it to play?  If you have used DD in this context, were the areas for improvement ones you identified, or were they things she came up with herself? 

While we don’t have any regular female commenters these days, I’ll take HP’s advice from last week and make the invitation for them to comment more explicit. For the wives, are there areas in which you have provided your husband with some disciplinary “motivation” to achieve a goal or make a change that he was struggling with?  

 

Is that something you would do if you thought he needed it or if he asked? Would it be more of a burden than you’re interested in taking on? Or, would you get a benefit from either exercising your authority in that context or indirectly from improving his performance in areas like personal effort and goal-achievement?  Would you enjoy the authority that comes with such an empowered mentoring role?

 

 

Also, guys, I realize there have been a couple of recent topic suggestions. I thought about working them into this one, but it’s so hard to come up with new topics sometimes, I decided to keep them in reserve and use them in a week or two.

 

Have a great week.