“There are moments when
one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or
dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its
hypocrisy demands.” – Oscar Wilde
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/or Female Led (FLR) relationships.
Once again, before we get started, I would like to thank the female commenters who have recently joined us and to extend a specific invitation to all others who may be inclined to move from “lurker” to “commenter” status. We like having you around.
I hope you all had a good week. Ours has been pretty painful, literally and figuratively. This was the week that a lot of the medical stuff I referred to a few posts ago really came to a head, at least with respect to Anne's issues. So far, so good for the most part, but I expect the next several weeks to be pretty bumpy, so I’m going to be playing blog posting by ear.
The one clear impact of the medical drama is that, coming on top of what had already been a substantial lull, this period likely will go down as our longest hiatus from domestic discipline since we started almost 20 years ago.
On the one hand, that is an obvious downer. On the other hand, maybe it gives us an opportunity to break out of the old patterns and lift ourselves out of the established ruts, possibly allowing us to set up a deeper, broader dynamic once recovery schedules allow.
In the short term, it does mean I may need to recycle some content on the blog; more so than I generally like doing. As I was pondering that, it occurred to me that we do have several new regular participants including, for the first time in a while, multiple Disciplinary Wives.
While we old-timers all know each other’s “origin” stories, i.e. how we found ourselves in these unconventional relationships, some of the newer folks haven’t shared theirs.
So, let’s do that. Although many have probably pieced together
mine, or read it all in an older post, it has been a few years since I did a full post on origins. So, I’ll kick it off, relying mostly on some
previous posts but adding or changing where I’ve gotten new or deeper
insights. I hope some of the old-timers will join me in telling their stories, even if they've done so before.
I grew up in the heart of the Bible Belt, which also seems to have been the heart of the “spanking belt.” However, despite the fact that corporal punishment was pervasive both at school and in most homes, I don’t recall getting it a lot myself. It probably happened more than I have specific memories of, though that goes to show that while it was all around me growing up, it wasn't something that got a lot of conscious mind share.
My mother had a forceful personality, but as I got older she became increasingly erratic when it came to parenting. My stepfather was a hyper-masculine force of nature but also very anti-authoritarian. When I was in high school, he told me that his basic approach to rules was that he wasn’t going to lay down any as long as whatever trouble I got myself into was something I got myself out of.
The result of their parenting styles—hers erratic and his almost entirely “hands-off”—is that I grew up with few real boundaries and none that were really enforced.
At the time, I thought that was a teenager’s wet dream. I’ve now come to appreciate, however, how much pressure it imposed, being given carte blanche to get myself into trouble but knowing I had to get myself out of it. (I’ve come to believe that teenagers, especially high energy ones with a proclivity for risk taking, need enforced boundaries.)
And, on basic good behavior things around the home, there was certainly nothing like this going on:
While I can speculate about why my not-very-rigorous disciplinary background developed into a fascination with the idea of imposed boundaries and power dynamics later in life, it really is just speculation.
All I know for sure is that, unlike most of the husbands who come to this blog, I did not have any early interest in spanking, let alone any fetish-like fascination with it.
In fact, from at least high school through the first decade of marriage, I don’t recall thinking about it at all.
Yet, it's also true that I always had a thing for older women. With the benefit of hindsight, I now think it probably was strong female authority I was gravitating to, rather than a pure age thing. Though that wasn't something I understood at the time, had any of the older women (teachers, principals, friend's mothers) I crushed on tried to impose their authority on me in more forceful ways, been into it, I don't have much doubt that I would have given into it.
But alas, such an early introduction to female authority expressed in a disciplinary fashion never happened.
Anne was not older than me and didn't have that air of maternal authority when we met.
While we were never what I would consider repressed, our first decade of married life was pretty conventional. Overall, we had a good relationship, but it was not particularly well-balanced. I had always been more than a little, shall we say, “Type A,” with an intense personality. I also was prone to doing everything—both positive things and negative things—to excess.
When my wife and I first met, she probably found that brashness attractive. But, I doubt she envisioned that, ten years later, very little would have changed.
Anne was less brash and bold than I was, and probably more emotionally well-balanced, but I think it's fair to say she had trouble asserting herself. She was raised in a very
traditional, male dominated family. Her
dad worked, her mom raised the family, and there was little overlap between
those roles. When they argued, which was fairly frequently, she pouted and gave him
the silent treatment, and he slept on the couch for a few nights. Anne admits that she brought some of those
same dispute resolution mechanisms to our marriage.
My intensity and her lack of self-assurance did not create a good balance. And, while we weren't unhappy, neither of us was living up to our potential either. Thanks to my temperament and anti-authoritarian tendencies, I had a tendency to "step on my own dick." And, as much as I may have thought I liked having no rules growing up, I was now in my late thirties and still feeling out of control and sometimes overwhelmed with the responsibility of making too many decisions.
My wife, on the other hand, was not developing into all she could be. Despite accumulating degrees and professional accomplishments, she still had a hard time taking charge. She also had her mom’s tendency to pout and flounce instead of taking me head on when my excesses became, well, excessive.
Then, seemingly out of the blue, something happened to shake up that thoroughly conventional, yet thoroughly dysfunctional, dynamic.
Although I didn’t have wide-ranging experience, I had always been pretty erotically-oriented and open to learning about various kinks. I had become a fan of an HBO series called “Real Sex,” which explored all sorts of kinky lifestyles. They devoted one segment to adult erotic spanking, featuring a couple spanking each other with leather paddles and a riding crop. It turned me on; not extraordinarily so but enough that I had Anne watch it.
She had zero interest in being spanked but was happy to try it on me. So, a few days later I bought one of those flimsy leather paddles sold in adult “novelty” shops.
Although our experiments with erotic spanking were fun, it never went beyond a sort of “BDSM Lite” foreplay. There were role play aspects, in which she would "punish" me for various real misdeeds. After a few modest swats with the flimsy leather paddle, we would have sex.
The problem was, while the spankings were fake, the bad behavior was real. Since the spankings merely stung a little, and it all ended in a nice orgasm, I essentially was being rewarded for bad behavior.
She became concerned (rightly) that she was inadvertently reinforcing bad behavior and soon put an end to the whole thing. That phase lasted for two or three months at most.
It didn't bother me that she
had ended our spanking experiments. It hadn't been that big a thing for either
of us. But, I remained interested enough
in it that I would read spanking stories when I found them in publications like
Penthouse Variations, and I assume I was interested enough to look for Female-male spanking materials on-line.
I don’t recall exactly how I found it, but at some point I came across a link to the Disciplinary Wives Club. Although I can’t remember exactly how I found it, I certainly do remember the effect it had on me.
It hit me like a sledgehammer.
It was like no erotic reading experience I’ve had before or since, even though it was not, in fact, overtly sexual. Sex was barely even mentioned.
Instead, the DWC advocated for real spankings, used in the context of real punishment, to correct real misbehavior. There also were sections offering tips and advice to aspiring disciplinary wives. Then and now, I think the advice from Aunt Kay to disciplinary wives that really hit me in the gut was:
A spanking should be an event to remember. Don't worry about how red his bottom gets. The more color you put into it, the better you are doing. Don't pay any attention to his cries and pleas and promises. He will tell you anything to get you to stop. Allow him to squirm within limits. If it gets out of hand, give him a smack or two on the back of his thighs. If you give a spanking the way it should be given, the results should still show a week later. He should wince every time he tries to sit for days after.
That advice served to emphasize how different DWC-style spankings were from the erotic foreplay we had been doing. Moreover, it served as notice that a DWC-style spanking would only be both physically and psychologically painful, causing severe pain to both the bottom and the male ego.
Something about that affected me in ways I find hard to describe. Looking back, I’m not sure it was the spanking per se that really got to me. Rather, it was the prospect of giving up control—being forced to give up control--in a way I had not done in my entire life.
The prospect of losing control to the point of sobbing over my wife's knee was disturbing on a level I can't really describe. Yet, I found myself desperately wanting to tell Anne all about it.
I couldn’t get it out of my mind. After two or three days of thinking of little else,
I could not imagine NOT raising it. The
lure was just too strong, even if it made my male ego tremble.
So, less than a week after discovering the DWC website, I initiated a discussion with Anne. We were in bed, getting ready to go to sleep. At least she was getting ready for sleep. I hadn’t slept well in three days.
The lights were off, which was good because I was so embarrassed that I don’t think I could have faced her with them on. I began with something like, "I found this interesting website. . ." and explained the basic premise: Women taking control of their marriages, using real corporal punishment on their misbehaving husbands.
She started to restate her position that our spanking games had reinforced my bad behavior, but I quickly stammered out that this was different. These spankings were . . . real.
She didn’t say much as I stuttered my way through a description of the DWC philosophy, emphasizing the reality-based, severe spankings that empowered wives to take more control. I told her honestly how I felt that our relationship wasn’t balanced, and that maybe we needed something that would empower her to hold me more accountable and, frankly, take me down a peg or two.
When I was done, there was short pause, then she asked whether I was suggesting this as something I actually wanted to try. It was much like the wife’s reaction in the DWC fiction story Even More, which I later learned was authored by our long-time blog commenter “al.” Like the character David in that story, I almost lost my nerve but finally told her the truth: the idea scared the hell out of me, had left me with butterflies in my stomach and little sleep in three days but, yes, I did want to try it.
She listened quietly but intently, but
that night she was noncommittal, saying only that she would take a look at the
DWC website. She's told me later that she did think it was more than a little weird. I honestly thought she would just drop the whole thing and never follow up on checking out the DWC site.
Instead, she called me at the office the next day. After a few pleasantries, there was a pause and then, “Well . . . I visited that website.”
Gulp.
"And, . . .?" I asked, tentatively.
Another pause, then just two words. "Very interesting.”
"Interesting? . . . What . . . what does that mean exactly?" Words to that effect. I was really on pins and needles and don't remember the exact words, only that they came out in an embarrassed, halting fashion.
"Well, I guess it means you need to buy me a nice, heavy wooden hairbrush on your way home from work tonight."
I don’t remember exactly what I said in response to that first DWC instruction.
What I do recall is walking around a mall for an hour, trying to find a good quality hairbrush. They aren’t easy to find these days. I also recall the butterflies in my stomach, though that hardly describes it. Since all I really had to go on in imagining the spanking that was to come were the stories on the DWC website--the ones in which the husband always seemed to end up bawling--I was in a state of very high anxiety. Yet, I also remember that over the course of the hour or more I spent going from shop to shop, I had a raging erection.
It was the strangest, most peculiar, most paradoxical mix of extreme arousal and equally extreme anxiety.
When I got home, we sat at the kitchen table and talked through a set of rules.
First and foremost, she would
control why, when, and how hard I was spanked. While she would listen to my views, she would make the decisions.
Second, she remained concerned that “play” spankings could reinforce bad behavior, so her spankings would be long, hard and, in short, "real" each and every time.
Despite all that, unlike the woman in the above captioned pic, I don't think either of us really understood just how profoundly the relationship might change if we really implemented this.
I mean, we kind of got it. But, we didn't really get it. Honestly, I think it's taken us twenty years of spankings and discussing spankings to get to where we both accept that I really do want a very substantial power shift.
Instead, I think that when she said she found it "interesting," what she really meant was she found it intriguing as hell, particularly the prospect for being able to inflict some well-deserved payback for bad behavior. But, she also didn't quite believe I was serious or wouldn't back out.
It's odd that while I recall virtually everything leading up to that first spanking, I don't remember a lot about the main event. I suspect that is because we followed a prescription that was iconic but resulted in a less-than-memorable spanking: over-the-knee position with a hairbrush.
We graduated quickly to
wooden paddles and leather straps, and she became a surprisingly
determined spanker virtually right out of the gate. I was shocked at how few reservations she had about really roasting my butt, almost from the very beginning.
Over the years of doing this blog, I've heard variations on that story many times. We husbands are so concerned about how to broach the topic of Domestic Discipline but once we do, the wives take up the paddle or strap with surprisingly little diffidence or reluctance and are soon spanking like pros.
Over the years we have been doing Domestic Discipline, my wife has grown into a much stronger, confident woman with a voice all her own, and the relationship has gone beyond merely discipline. Instead of just enforcing rules, she imposes them. She sets boundaries for me and expects me to respect them.
Twenty years after that first spanking, she’s still determined and intent on making her spankings hurt and hurt badly, every single time.
So, how about you? For the husbands who initiated DD:
- When/how did your interest first arise?
- Howexactly did you approach your wife/partner?
- What did you say?
- How did you work up the courage? How long did it take you?
- What was her initial reaction? Did it change?
- How long until your first spanking? Was it all you expected it to be?
For wives whose husbands
asked them to consider a DD relationship:
- How did your husband approach you?
- What was your initial reaction? Did it change?
- How did you decide to spank him?
- What was that first spanking like? How did you feel?
And, if you are one of those rare wives who initiated the DD relationship, please tell us all about it!
These “origin” posts always work better when the discussion is more than surface level, so please give as many details as you’re comfortable sharing.
Have a great week.
