The Club - Meeting 460 - Happy New Year 2024

“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.” - Benjamin Franklin

 

Hello all.  Welcome back to the first meeting of the Disciplinary Couples Club for 2022.

 

As long-term readers know, my New Years posts tend to be both reflective and verbose.  So, hopefully those who have been here a while and who come for the camaraderie will bear with me.

 

Those who are just here for the spanking porn may want to come back some other time.

 

First off, a hearty "thank you" to all those who participated here in 2023 for the first time.  Given the inevitable attrition as "real life" interferes with our best intentions, new members are the lifeblood of this little club.  And, thanks to all our regulars who have stuck with us for many years now.  I truly never get tired of talking to you guys.  

Finally, thank you in advance to all the Disciplinary Wives who did not join the conversation in 2023 but will in 2024.  😀

 

I usually start off with a summary of how the last year went for me and for us as a couple, but in preparing for this post I reviewed the one from last year, and it left me thinking I should comment on subjectivity and the vagaries of selective memory.

 

See, for most of 2013, I’ve been kicking myself.  I felt like in the first year and a half of retirement I made quite a bit of progress in getting my health back, regaining some life balance, taking up some new hobbies and productive activities, and meeting, or at least making progress on, some long-term goals. Then, in 2013, I totally stagnated.  I backslid on drinking, on exercise and health, on exploring new hobbies, on cultivating better and deeper relationships with friends and family I had neglected while working.  I had been doing really well up until the holidays in 2022, then all my self-discipline melted away.

 

At least, that's how I remember it.

 

Then, today, I read my New Years post from last year, which included this summary of my goals and how well I did at hitting them in 2022:

 

“I am kind of annoyed with myself that I let 2022 drift.  A lot.  Here are the goals I posted for last year:

 

·      Solidify the progress I made last year on reducing the number of excessive drinking incidents.

·      Renew and energize some friendships that I let drift away over the last few years when I was too focused on career.

·      Volunteer on some effort that has a real and substantial impact on the lives of vulnerable or powerless people.

·      Take at least three long road trips with Anne and the dogs.

·      Complete drafts of two books I’ve wanted to write for some time but never seem to get around to.

·      Multiple multi-state motorcycle trips. 

·      Take up some sport or demanding fitness activity that doesn’t take place in a gym.

·      Reverse the recent losses in our investment portfolio.

 

Of those 8 items, I fully completed only one.  A couple of others I sort of partially fulfilled.  Overall, it was a pretty uninspiring performance.” 

 

My self-assessment of my 2022 performance was so dismal, I decided to keep all the same goals for 2023 and just work toward fulfilling those.  (Truth be told, it’s damn depressing the extent to which most of my goals carry over year-to-year, partially or wholly unfulfilled.)  Within a month, I had more or less forgotten about the specific goals and did literally nothing to track my actual 2023 performance against them.

 

Yet, looking at that list from the perspective of the first day of 2024, I seem to have accidentally done better in 2023 than I did intentionally in 2022!  It wasn't all great.  Objectively, I did backslide on some of the previous year’s improvement on excessive drinking.  Those books still aren’t drafted, and I stopped writing altogether in another medium I had been experimenting with. Taking up a demanding sport didn’t happen, though that one proved to be a little more outside my control than I anticipated, as it has become clear that three rounds of Covid have left me with some ongoing lung capacity issues.

 

On the other hand, I did put more energy into some existing friendships. Better yet, despite reading article after article about how middle-aged men struggle to make and hold onto friends, I actually made a brand new one - someone to hang out with over beers and talk about life, which I haven’t really had since leaving my last job.  I didn’t exactly volunteer to help the unfortunate, but I did become unexpectedly very active on a local political/quality of life issue.  I took several long-ish road trips with Anne and the dogs and we did a couple of international vacations. I didn’t do more multi-state motorcycle trips in 2023 than 2022, but I did do some advanced training and a multi-day group trip, which also led to, if not new friendships, a couple of new good acquaintances.  By year-end, a very large bit of our investment losses from 2021 and 2022 had reversed.  Finally, I had my annual physical a couple of months ago and, while my perception had been that my diet and exercise dedication had sucked all year, objectively I seem to be in better shape on big things like cholesterol and blood sugar than I was a year ago.

 

Oh, don’t get me wrong.  It was FAR from a perfect year.  But, in my mind there had developed this rosy view of 2022 that was inconstdent with how I felt at the time, and the same for 2023 but in reverse. 

 

Yet, I do feel that even if I did some things in 2023, there was an accidental quality to it.  And, the areas in which I made progress aren’t necessarily those that I associate with having a life that isn’t just busy, or even interesting, but meaningful.  It may be the case that after 30+ of working my ass off in a career, even a couple of years of decompression and recovery were needed. But, in year three it started to feel more like stagnation than relaxation.  I’ve always been a fairly ambitious guy, and it turns out even in retirement I want a life that is, well . . . bigger. 

 

 

I can actually tie some of this "big picture" goal to domestic discipline.  Where I feel 2023 went off the guardrails a bit was, in fact, guardrails.  Some of the backsliding on things like excessive drinking might not have happened without some concurrent backsliding on Anne’s part.  I’ve come to believe that when I’m allowed to backslide in one area, it often spills over into  generalized sloppiness and a lowering of standards.

 

Then there was procrastination.  I am as guilty as any of you of procrastinating on things big and small, but in the past I  comforted myself with the rationalization that while I might be as bad as others, I probably wasn’t much worse either.  After 2023, I’m not sure the distinction matters.   

 

Some of the things that I’ve had on my list for a long time—like getting more involved in public policy/politics and helping others—are things I am really going to regret on my dead bed if they go undone.  And, it’s become increasingly clear to me that my failure is more than procrastination. Without career-oriented goals driving me forward, procrastination has crossed the line into stagnation.  I’ve settled into spending whole days, then weeks, then months, accomplishing little more than  reading books, watching Netflix, and writing this blog.  But, again, I don’t want to settle.

 

Newton’s first law is that an object at rest will stay at rest.

 

 

UNLESS acted upon by an external force. 

 

I’m hoping in 2024, Anne will be that external force.  Why would that work in 2024 when it didn’t in 2023? Or 2022? Or 2021?

 

Well, first, it took several months of slacking in 2023 before I came to feel like it really was time to stop “recovering” and start “growing” again. I simply feel more motivated in 2024 to get off my ass and DO something significant than I did in 2023.

 

Second, while we’ve talked about it on this blog a few times, the fact is I’ve never really asked Anne to fill a motivational, coaching-like role. When we were both working, it seemed too burdensome, particularly since consistency was already a big problem where DD was concerned.

 

When I talked here back in August of 2023 about using DD to meet personal performance goals, I didn’t follow up with actually suggesting to Anne that we try such a thing because, again, I didn't think she'd be interested and probably would see it as burdensome. Yet, she brought it up a few weeks later, during some DD-related pillow talk. It was a passing reference, and neither of us followed up at the time. However, it is pretty rare for her to proactively bring up subjects from the blog, so the fact that she brought that one up seemed to be a signal.

 

 

Honestly, I got the sense a few times in 2023 that she was kind of disappointed that there weren’t more times that I presented her with a clear and compelling reason to spank me. Back when she was working, I think that finding time for discipline often was at least somewhat burdensome. In 2023, however, after her own retirement, when we got into periods in which DD became somewhat regular, it seemed like there were times she wanted it to be even more frequent.

 

Now, one obvious solution would be for her to move unilaterally in the direction KOJ’s wife did after retirement.  He has described how she almost instantly ramped up her assertiveness and, for the next decade, continuously moved the goalposts by making more and more issues “punishable.”

 

Anne didn’t go through such a big, self-initiated change in approach after retirement. But, she has talked about how being retired has removed some of the mental restraints she felt about being openly dominant and the possibility of others knowing about the nature of our relationship.  For whatever reason, the process for her has been slower and less dramatic, yet there were clear signs of it throughout last year.

 

Including her positive reference to a blog post about taking on more of a “coaching” role.  Maybe we've both just finally hit a point where I recognize I need that internal push to overcome some multi-year inertia, where she likes doling out discipline and being in charge, and we both are open to that approach and have time to do it.

 

 

I don’t want to make this post too long, but over the last few weeks I’ve gone through a deliberate, systematic effort to identify the “big ticket” aspirations that I’ve harbored for years and years but never really gone for in a big way, whether because of work busyness, the distractions of day-to-day family and work life, or simply laziness and lack of sufficient ambition. I’m zoning in on three or four areas I really want to see more progress in this year, along with some actionable tasks to get that stone-like “object at rest” moving.

 

I think bringing DD into this will fail if I try to make it “too much.” Even weekly is probably too much in terms of reporting/checking in. But, maybe a monthly session where I have to show some actual progress on each of the concrete tasks I set out, with failure leading to however many spankings she feels are appropriate?

 

Anyway, I’m still tinkering with the precise proposal, and if she doesn’t seem truly motivated to pursue it, I will drop it entirely and go back to a more traditional set of resolutions and hope for the best.  But, I do think that given my track record of settling back into a comfortable state of inertia, things are going to be different in 2024 only if there is a step-change in the consistency of discipline in the relationship.  I've posted many of these New Years memes over the years, but this one probably sums it up best:

I do fee like one area in which 2023 improved a lot over 2022 was Anne stepping up to some serious scoldings that reflected things she saw as important, whether I agreed or not.  But, I think we both recognize that there wasn't always follow-through on things that weren't huge fails but have been chronic annoyances.  Anne and I have talked several times about how much better it would be if there was a really solid, dependable connection in her mind between, "He's really annoying me" and "He just earned a spanking and I'm going to give it to him right now."

The thing about our DD in 2023 that was challenging, for me, and that made the whole thing more "real" than in past years was that, as I said, she seemed increasingly willing to exert control over things that she saw as problems.  

 

Getting scolded and/or spanked when I didn't really agree with the premise was a major ego blow, but that is precisely why those incidents felt like the biggest stimuli for personal growth, for both of us. Again, the only thing lacking as consistency.

ds

How about you? How did 2023 turn out? Were there any interesting developments on the DD front that you’d like to share?  Are there any particular goals or things you’d like to accomplish—DD or otherwise—in 2024?  Do you intend to share those with your wife?

 

For the ladies (one of my 2024 resolutions IS to get some of them commenting again), do you have anything in particular you want your husband to improve on in 2024? Any specific goals you expect him to hit?  What are your thoughts on providing him some DD or FLR-oriented motivation to do that?