The Club - Meeting 456 - Costs and Benefits of Disciplinary Spankings and FLR Relationships

“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly meeting of men and women who are in, or interested in being in, Domestic Discipline and Female Led (FLR) relationships.

 

Before we get started, I would like to extend a specific invitation to any of our female readers, if they still exist, to move from “lurker” to “commenter” status. While I’ve always said the blog is open to both men and women, one of our commenters suggested I expressly invite our female readers to join the discussion.  try to be more expressly inviting in order to get a little more female involvement.

 

 

I hope you all had a great week.  We were on the road, which is always a little grueling, though it was a fun trip.  There wasn’t any actual DD action during the trip, though there was one incident that illustrated Anne escalating her strictness—or at least her threats—steadily.

 

It was on the last day of the trip, and we were pushing through a long drive home.  Anne has a problem with “back seat driving,” and it was on fully display that day after taking a hiatus for a while. She kept “reminding” me of the speed limit, even though while I often was speeding, it was basically just going with the flow of at least the faster traffic.  I started throwing unmistakable signals that the “reminders” were getting on my nerves.  She responded with something along the lines of, “Fine.  You can drive whatever speed you want.  But, if you get a ticket, I’m going to spank your ass hard every single day for a week.”

 

How did I respond?  I slowed down, reluctantly and resentfully.  Not to the speed limit, of course, but to a speed that was pretty unlikely to get me ticketed.

 

 

So, her threat worked, even if to me it does seem kind of like cutting off your nose to spite your face, since the only thing slowing down really accomplished was to get us home even later.  But, in the end, she got what she wanted.

 

It also seemed to me to illustrate something about “threat” and “warnings.”  I’m not really sure whether in those circumstances a threat of a single spanking would have caused me to slow down much. The odds of getting a ticket weren’t particularly high, and a single spanking might have been an insufficient threat. But, when she raised the stakes dramatically to a full week of daily spankings, THAT got my attention. 

 

Something else that might have worked would be had she threatened to give me an immediate spanking in the car.  Severity, in the form of not just one or two but multiple spankings, clearly got my attention, and immediacy might have done the same.  Without out one or both of those, I’m not really sure if my compliance would have been the same.  But, something that seems to be changing this year is her determination to ramp up the punishment to whatever is required.

 

Anyway, thanks to everyone for keeping the conversation going again.  I almost didn’t post again today.  I just wasn’t in the mood and wasn’t feeling the inspiration. But, I felt like not posting was becoming a habit.  So, I looked at some of the recent topic suggestions and started thinking about how to approach it.  Within a few minutes, I went from being not in a DD mood at all to thinking about how, even though I was pretty good on our trip, there certainly were certain things that happened during the week that might merit a session over her knee.

 

The topic I landed on was a very straightforward and simple one from Norton. A couple of weeks ago, he suggested:

 

It occurs to me, since I just wrote about it, that another topic could be about the benefits and costs for you and your wife practicing this kind of lifestyle.

 

While we have comments about costs and benefits of these lifestyles virtually every week, sometimes it’s good to give these “big picture” issues some focused attention. I also think that while we often talk about the benefits of DD, we don’t often talk about what it costs, and we often seem to assume that it has no costs for our wives.  So, let’s talk a bit directly about our respective cost-benefit analyses.

 

For me, the primary benefit of domestic discipline lies in establishing boundaries and guardrails, which I’m not always great at imposing on myself.  I readily admit that I have a personality that is prone to excesses.   

 

 

And, I don’t always do a good job of anticipating more abstract consequences.  Kind of like our “discussion” about my speeding during our trip.  Anne calculated the odds of getting caught differently than I did, and then she amped up the possible consequences way beyond the monetary cost of a speeding ticket.

 

Relatedly, having someone impose boundaries and guardrails balances me out emotionally.  A personality that gravitates toward extremes can be inherently stressful and intense.  I am convinced that our close to 20 years of DD has done at least as much to help bring some balance to my psyche as meditation ever has.  It’s probably no coincidence that I discovered both DD and mindfulness meditation at about the same point in my life as, for me, they address much the same temperamental and personality issues.

 

Then there is the erotic feelings that DD arouses.  While in most of my life I am about as anti-authoritarian as you are ever going to encounter, there clearly is some part of me that gravitates HARD toward a maternal style of imposed discipline and toward being taken outside of my comfort zone.  Near the end of last week’s topic, ZM, GH and I talked a little about the need for “authenticity” and how, for me, that means I have a strong desire to be taken to a mental/emotional state where I am not in control and where someone else decides what consequences I will face for behavior that they THEY decide is an issue. 

 

The speeding thing is, again, a great example.  I did not see the speeding as a problem and, frankly, still don’t. But, Anne decided that it was a problem for her, and then she figured out how to MAKE it a problem for me.  Did I like her decision?  Definitely not in the moment. I resented it and continued to resent it every mile for the rest of that trip – miles in which I complied with her wishes about appropriate speed not because I agreed with her but because she laid down a rule in a way that demonstrated that she didn’t really care whether I agreed with her or not.

 

At its core, there is something incredibly parental about your spouse deciding for you what you will care about and being willing to make you pay a painful price if you do not accept the rule they have laid down.

 

Indirectly, I’m sure that over the years I’ve benefited from DD in the form of better physical and mental health. Given some of my excesses, had trends from 20 years ago continued unchecked, it probably wouldn’t have been pretty.

 

So, are there costs associated with DD?  Of course there are, and for me they tend to be the flipside of the benefits that both Anne and I receive.

 

I ran across the captioned spanking meme just a few days ago, and it seemed to me to sum up very succinctly the paradox of the cost-benefit trade-offs these relationships entail:

 

 

This year in particular, as Anne has ramped up her control, it’s been driven home to me over and over again that when I’m liking our regimen the least is exactly when it is doing its best work. There have been multiple times over this year when she’s given me a hard lecture and harder spanking that I really, truly did not want or sometimes even agree with.

 

But, the ill feelings those brought out at the time were the also the closest I’ve come to the “authenticity” ZM talked about last week.  Those incidents were authentic precisely because, at least at the time, there was nothing erotic about them and, instead, they represented instances of her imposing her will at times or in ways when I very much did not like it.  In fact, authenticity is perhaps the most real “cost” that “real” DD imposes, even if it is simultaneously something many of us crave.

 

There is also a cost to me that varies directly in proportion to one of the biggest benefits Anne receives, namely the ability to communicate to me directly and concretely her dissatisfaction.

 

 

I do get a better sense of balance and psychic well-being from having guardrails imposed. There also are psychic benefits involved in behaving better and not causing problems for myself.  But, the cost of that improvement is the most straightforward cost of all – hard, painful punishments that lead me to want to walk the straight and narrow more often.

 

Perhaps the hardest “cost” associated with the more FLR-oriented aspects of our relationship is being truly, genuinely, kept under someone else’s control and being subject to their decision-making authority. It all is fodder for so many fantasies . . . right up until she exercises her authority in a way you truly do not like.

 

 

Even my fantasies of being taken far beyond what I think I can take, and in a way that feels as close as we can get to non-consensual, have the inevitable cost of, by definition, being taken there by virtue of her decision, not mine.

 

 Anne obviously gets the benefits of having a better-behaved husband and getting her way more often. But, are there costs?  I’m sure there are or have been in the past.

 

Anne was one of those wives who took to the DD relationship I asked for far easier than I feared she might.  Still, I think it took a while before she really embraced the authority and power. Today, I suspect this captioned meme sums up how she feels most of the time:

 

 

She has told me that she gets off giving me orders or imposing limits, especially when my reaction makes it clear that I really dislike complying.  I also think that, while she is not a sadist, she gets that spankings must hurt to be effective and, for that reason, she wants them to hurt.  I think she probably gets off on the whole thing more than she sometimes lets on, and I know she gets off on making me feel nervous and vulnerable. 

 

I do think one cost associated with exercising control is learning to lead and to do so responsibly.  It’s not easy being in charge, even if it may have a lot of benefits.  I suspect it sometimes seems like a duty or obligation.

 

 

I do know that she sometimes struggles with the simple logistics of figuring out how to make time for a spanking in the midst of a busy day.  She’s told me that when she does think of DD, it’s often in the context of figuring out when to announce one is coming and how to fit it into whatever else she has going on.

 

How about you? What benefits do you get from your DD and FLR relationships? What are the costs involved? 

 

Ladies, what benefits do you get from imposing painful consequences on your husband or from exercising more authority than you might in a traditional marriage? Are there costs associated with those benefits, or is it all upside?  If there are trade-offs, are they worth it?

 

Have a great week.