The Club - Meeting 302 - Tears

“People can cry much easier than they can change.”  ― James Baldwin

Hello all.  I hope you had a great week.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships. I hope you all had a good week.

My week involved a very, very sore bottom.  As I related over the last two or three weeks, we hit a rough patch where FLR and obedience were concerned.  We had a talk about it on Saturday after I thought we had reached an understanding on things and, wow, was I ever wrong. When we went to bed that night, I was really in a funk, thinking that after more than a decade of DD, we really might have hit an impasse.  But, the next day I sent a long journal entry trying to work through where my feelings were, what I thought to be her thoughts and feelings, etc.  Without going into details, we seem to have gotten things back on track.  The clearest indication of that was that around 8:00 pm that night she sent me a text saying that I was going to get a spanking as soon as we had the house to ourselves, and she definitely delivered.  It was one of the hardest she has ever given me, and for the first time in a long time, I came very close to begging her to stop.  So, she definitely got her point across.

Thanks for all your participation last week.  We’ve had some really great conversations lately.  When I posted last week’s topic, I thought it was so narrow that it wouldn’t generate much discussion, yet we were once again well over 100 comments, and what a range they covered: marking, caning techniques, cuckolding, spanking in anger, communications between DWC couples, severity, surrender and tears.  Lots and lots to explore in future topics! On the idea of communicating more openly and directly with DWC couples, I do want to be part of a solution for that, though so far I haven’t been able to come up with a good alternative that fosters such exchanges yet preserves confidentiality.  But, maybe I need to stop worrying about the confidentiality issue as much, as there seems to be a broad spectrum of how much people care, and those who do care a lot don't need to participate on any alternative platform.  As for getting together in an actual meeting, I’m not sure my wife is there yet, and some days I'm not either.  But, I have dipped my toes into that pool with one or two people who know about our lifestyle and who I am. So, who knows what the future might hold.

But, for this week, let’s talk about two of those things that came up last week – surrender and tears. Now, K.D. will chastise me for taking on the subject of tears yet again, though looking at the topics over the life of the blog, I really have not had that many devoted to to the topic of crying.  Yet, he's right that it is a subject that is near and dear to my DD heart, and its a subject that has played a major role in my DD motivation and aspirations.  Yet, more than a decade into this, I’ve never once cried from a spanking.  I’ve gotten close a time or two, but it’s still never happened but is still often on my mind.  So, while we have talked about this topic before, it's been over a year and we have a bunch of new contributors.  So, let's talk about it again. As with last week, I’m feeling a little lazy and time pressured, so I will crib liberally from last year’s topic and a couple that we did in previous years.

Back in 2018, when Blogger still had a polling gadget, I ran a poll that encompassed both experience with, and interest in, crying real tears from a real adult spanking.  The results for the disciplined husbands regarding whether they had cried and, if not, whether they wanted to, were as follows:

I have not but want to:                                            46%

I have not and do not want to:                                12%

I have but only a few tears:                                    17%

I have, including crying hard or sobbing:               22%

So, about 40% of those who took the poll claimed to have cried at least a few tears.  Among those who had not done so, 46% wanted to.   So, this seems to be an experience that many men sort of want, maybe even enough to ask for it.

The prospect of crying was probably the most significant driver of the emotional reaction I had when I first discovered domestic discipline by stumbling across the DWC website.  Stories of men being brought to tears over their wives knees transfixed me.  It left me with butterflies in my stomach, though that really understates the reaction.  I couldn't sleep.  I couldn't think of much of anything else for the couple of days between when I first stumbled on the concept and when I brought it to my wife's attention. I found the whole prospect both utterly compelling and utterly repulsive.  It both fascinated and scared the living hell out of me.  The thought of letting go of control so thoroughly that I would sob in front of my wife as a result of a paddling or strapping really shook me to my core in a fundamental way.  It scared me like nothing else really every had or has since, yet I found myself compulsively drawn to it.  And, I truly do think that the prospect of being reduced to tears was probably the #1 thing that made DD such an obsession after I found the DWC site.  It didn't feel like a want, so much as a deep-seated need.

While the prospect of sobbing from a spanking now has haunted my DD fantasies for years, I still have not experienced it, even as a result of spankings that plainly fall into the "severe" range. While it's impossible for me to pinpoint exactly why, I've come to believe there are certain factors that play into why some men get there and some don't:

Severity:  This one is a little counter-intuitive.  A spanking must be severe enough to "get the job done."  But, at least in my case, if it starts out very severe from the start using a really painful instrument like a skinny wooden paddle or a rubber strap, I absolutely will not be brought to tears because, paradoxically, it is just too hard and I can't stop myself from resisting it.  I cannot stop myself from trying to "man up" and just get through each swat.  No matter how much I go into the spanking with the intent of "taking my medicine" and leaving myself open to it in a way that might let me release into tears, I just cannot do it if the pain level is too much at the beginning. When my wife was spanking me earlier this week, her first instrument was a leather paddle with holes that has a way of finding my most sensitive areas.  Had she continued with it for a long time, I think she really might have gotten me to the point of real tears.

Duration: My wife tends to spank very hard, but sometimes so much so that my bottom gets in bad shape quickly and then she decides to terminate the spanking.  I suspect that duration plays at least as big a role as severity in bringing about real tears and that sobbing is more likely to happen when it starts really occurring to him that this spanking is going to go on way past his ability to "take it like a man."

 

Immediacy and remorse:  Oftentimes, I'm being spanked for something that we both agree is something I should be spanked for but, (a) it's something that didn't have any real impact on her or anyone else and, hence, I don't really feel all that guilty about it; or (b) so much time has passed between the offense and the consequences that whatever guilt I once felt has dissipated.

Lecturing/Displayed Anger: Related to the presence or absence of remorse, I suspect that a very strong lecture before the spanking would help soften me up emotionally and leave me more vulnerable and, hence, more likely to cry.  Last week, we talked a little about spanking in anger, and I believe that if my wife would really cut loose with the verbal scolding when she is, in fact, very angry at me it would help break down the “take it like a man” resistance.

Embarrassment/"Toxic" Masculinity: Some men's identities are more bound up with the concept of being "manly" with all that it entails.  Unfortunately, one thing it may entail is a very deep-seated resistance to showing vulnerability and an inability to easily display that vulnerability or weakness.  Those identity traits are actually strengths that can help us get through a lot, accomplish a lot and succeed in out-sized ways. But, like all such traits, they can come at a price when they become excessive or one-dimensional. That price may be a very strong resistance to embarrassment and emotional vulnerability, both of which crying from a spanking would likely entail.

Pain tolerance:  The plain fact is, I have a lead bottom and a weirdly high pain threshold.  I've suffered some fairly significant injuries in the past, but they just didn't hurt me as much as they seem to hurt other people.  So, getting me to a point at which the pain becomes truly unbearable is a daunting prospect. 

Encouragement:  Those of us who have a strong emotional resistance to crying may also fear embarrassment more than others.  In those cases, I think the disciplinary wife probably has a role in facilitating tears not just by lecturing sternly then spanking severely, but also by letting her husband know before and during the spanking that not only is she comfortable with him crying, but she wants him to do so.

ZM weighed in on this several months ago, after he had his first crying experience.  His comments [slightly edited] touch on a lot of these points:

Yesterday, I got to experience a first, in that I was spanked to tears for the first time ever, at least as an adult. This has been a topic of endless (and perhaps morbid?) fascination for me, to say the least, and I really couldn't believe that it happened. The punishment was for several prolonged bouts of bad attitude. My wife has been under huge amounts of stress in recent months due to parental health issues, and as she was administering the punishment, I just felt so incredibly bad when I thought of how unhelpful my attitude has been, and how rather than supporting her I was making things more difficult. This guilt, combined with a delrin cane (which is basically just horrible), and in the diaper position (which makes everything so much worse), finally broke down that barrier that I have never really been able to cross before. [She] had pretty much decided beforehand that tears were going to happen, and she continued until they did. Afterwards she said she would have liked to go a bit longer, but it was hard to see me crying. She decided that next time, she will go until she decides it has been enough and then will add a certain number of additional strokes, probably by rolling two dice (resulting in 2-12 additional) just to make sure she didn't under-punish and to give fate a bit of say in the matter.  I agree that it was mostly driven by guilt, combined with a non-relenting spanking. I don't think she punished harder than usual, but certainly longer, and plus she had said before that the next punishment would certainly result in tears, so I think she set the stage for it and that helped me to get into the proper state of mind. Anyway, the tears took it to a whole new level of "real" feeling for us.”

So, tears are once again this week’s topic.  For the men, have you cried from an adult spanking? If so, was it only a few tears, or did you get to the real sobbing we’ve probably all read about in the spanking stories?  If you haven’t cried yet, do you want to? If so, what do you think holds you back?  For the Wives, have you brought your husband (or other significant other) to tears with a disciplinary spanking?  If so, tell us about it. How did you react it?  If you have not brought him to that point, do you want to? Or, does the idea of that leave you squeamish? 

I hope you all have a great week.

The Club - Meeting 301 - Marking

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ― Rumi

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships.  I hope you had a good week.

It has been an interesting week for us in terms of couples communication.  They say actions speak louder than words, and sometimes you have to see something to believe it.  This week, my wife got a bit of a first-hand look at some of my business entertaining obligations. After a couple of nights of it, she awoke the next morning exhausted and said, "I don't know how you manage to do this all the time."  The plain fact is, I don't really "manage" this pace.  I just kind of hold on tight and try to get through it.  And, I am starting to think that is really the best that can be done at this particular phase of my career and it is, in a twisted and dysfunctional way, a form of balance.  Because the other options aren't really palatable.  First, I could just stop the business entertaining, but that really is not an option in this job at this phase of my career.  And, part of what my wife saw this week is that sometimes it really is not me instigating things or staying out late by choice.  Rather, I'm doing what has to be done to court certain business contacts and capitulating to their desire to keep going.  Second, I have thought from time to time that maybe I need to address this out-sized need I have for accountability not by changing the behavior but, rather, by just not feeling guilty or contrite about it.  In other words, accept who I am and revel in it the way some of my friends do.  I was once a big Mad Men fan, and the attitude of simply enjoying your excesses was epitomized by the Roger Sterling character.  I loved one of his speeches to Don Draper, who also epitomized excesses but for him along with the excesses came self-loathing and guilt.  With respect to alcohol, Sterling observed, "You don't know how to drink. Your whole generation, you drink for the wrong reasons. My generation, we drink because it's good, because it feels better than unbuttoning your collar, because we deserve it. We drink because it's what men do."  Now, the problem with that is, most people just can't do it over time without damaging their body, brains and spirits, though some hearty souls pull it off.

Believe it or not, that long lead in has something to do with this week's topic, which is an extension of one of the many strands of last week's discussion.  Near the end of the week, we got off on a tangent about marking and bruising.  I decided to make it this week's topic.  We've done it before, but not since 2017.  I went back and looked at the topic from that year, and it was a little depressing how little changes year-over-year, because coincidentally the trade-offs between accountability and guilt-free enjoyment of one's debauchery were something I was noodling about two years ago at the same time I was thinking about bruising and marking.  Here is what I wrote then, edited only slightly for content and for updated artwork. It is something I could have easily written from scratch to describe the last couple of weeks here two years later.  Conveniently, repeating it verbatim also relieves me of some of the time required to come up with something truly new:

"This was one of those weeks that makes me question sometimes the extent to which I really do want this kind of relationship, while at the same time affirming why I need it.  It has been a couple of really tough weeks at work.  I've been traveling constantly.  Lots of after work socializing. I also had one of the people on my team go into full-blown Drama Queen mode, requiring me to play career counselor over several beers.  My way through all this was to go way Alpha, powering through this pretty dysfunctional time by sheer force of will powered by adrenaline and caffeine, followed by a lot of bad airplane wine.  For a while, I actually started thinking, "This is who I am.  Part of me likes being this way, and it makes me good at what I do.  Maybe I just need to embrace it instead of trying to balance it or contain it."  Which is all well and good, until I hit a Saturday like this where I am so tired that it really feels almost like a form of psychosis, and I realize that living like that just isn't sustainable, and eventually something is going to break or I am going to break something or someone in a way that can't be fixed.  So, as much as I really don't want to be controlled or contained right now, I know that I need to be, and that I will be healthier for it.  

Now, on to other things.  DWC Fred posted a great comment last week, describing his DD dynamic and how he is spanked.  He noted that his spankings generally leave his bottom marked for several days.  That is this week's topic.  Do your disciplinary spankings generally leave marks, welts or bruises that last more than a few hours?

Is marking or "blistering" an explicit goal? 

When it is over, does your Disciplinarian inspect her handiwork? Does she take pride in the tangible evidence of a job well done?

(This one is one of our KD Pierre's pieces.  I have a link to his website over to the right.)  

This is an area that has changed for us over time, not as a result of any change in the intensity of her spankings, but apparently due to a change in my physiology.  When we first started Domestic Discipline, any significant spanking would leave me very badly bruised.  That doesn't happen nearly as much now.  Even a really, really hard spanking may leave me with only a few visible marks the next day.  Interestingly, my bottom does look in bad shape immediately after the spanking, but the marks just don't last very long.  It also seems like my bottom has developed this non-bruising tolerance specifically to spanking.  I took a nasty fall a few weeks ago, and it left me literally black and blue across one cheek.

My wife's reaction to this is also interesting.  It really didn't take her very long to get comfortable with giving a hard disciplinary spanking, and the bruising or marking has never seemed to make her squeamish.  She is very comfortable leaving visible evidence of her spanking prowess. In fact, she will sometimes make me drop my pants to show her the condition of my butt, and will express disappointment when the marking is gone a day or two later."

That was what I wrote  a couple of years ago, and it is the topic for this week.  Are marking and bruising part of your spanking experience?  Has the degree or duration of marking or bruising changed over time?  Ladies, does concern about marking or bruising may you squeamish about giving a really hard, disciplinary spanking, or is that just part of him getting what he has coming?  Is it even possibly part of the evidence you look for that you made your point?  And, lastly, has anyone ever gotten an unintended peek at the after effects of a good, hard disciplinary session?

Have a great week.

Delayed Post

All, sorry.  I'm tied up with some things this weekend.  I likely won't post tomorrow and possibly not until next week.  Have a great weekend.

The Club - Meeting 300 - Rules

“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” ― Robert A. Heinlein

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships.  I hope you had a good week. 

For us, this last week or so has involved some reflection on aspects of this thing we do, in light of the disobedience incident from a couple of weeks ago, and the dinner with boozy friends last week.  Though, unfortunately, all this reflection has been solo, since we haven’t had much alone time. I was traveling for a big part of the week, and there were other distractions and visitors.  But, I can tell that she is in the same reflective place I am, because some of the assertions of control or dominance have moderated.  More on this below.

As for last week, great conversation folks.  Especially at the first of the week, there was so much great interaction going on.  Though, interestingly, I’m not sure a single person actually answered the topic question about whether DD and FLR have ever become “so much” and lead to any serious questioning of the pros and cons.  But, it was a good conversation anyway.  There was one comment in particular that I found really profound in light of my current mindset.  Danielle observed: 

“You also seem to think that the following behaviors are not issues for couples who aren’t in FLR’s:

- coming home late for supper

- having a third drink at happy hour

- receiving texts from your wife asking you not to stay out late

If you think those aren’t bones of contention in non-FLR marriages, I think you are fooling yourself. Sure, lots of guys will ignore their wives’ nagging about such behavior, but many will likely have bitter arguments with their wives about it, and in the worst case such disputes can lead to marital breakdown. The only difference between a FLR and a regular marriage is that a wife in a FLR has more leverage to curb behaviors she doesn’t like.”

That observation struck me as profound, in part because it is so simple. I had spent a week or two asking myself, “If this is how it is going to be, do I really want to do this whole FLR thing?”  But, Danielle hit the nail on the head: Disagreements similar to those we had over the last few weeks that left me feeling nagged and frustrated also happened before we even knew about DD and FLR.  If anything, those arguments were more intense and lasted longer.  Danielle was right to point out that while DD or FLR may not have eliminated bad behavior and nagging about bad behavior, neither are DD and FLR really to blame for the speedbump we seem to be hitting.

 But, the second part of Danielle’s comment also is something we need to think about as a couple: “Now, if a husband doesn’t want to be ruled by his wife, if it makes him feel “resentful”, FLR probably isn’t a good fit for the couple. Resentment isn’t healthy, and the day Wayne tells me that he feels more resentment than gratitude for the way I exercise my authority, I will be the first to suggest putting FLR on hold.” 

Is that where we are? I don’t think so.  The plain fact is, I am not resenting DD at all, and there are only a couple of things in this emerging FLR that are causing the resentment.  Though, admittedly, they are things that have been a source of contention for a very long time.  But, I still do like her becoming more powerful and assertive, and conceptually I know that having tighter boundaries is, in general, something I need.  So, there are a couple of ways this could go, and Alan alluded to them both:

“I think the kind of resistance you are feeling may be a sign that your FLR is working and you are reacting to restrictions on your freedom. Assuming you really want an FLR that is not a bad thing and will pass as you submit more and more to her orders. In both my relationships every time the screws were tightened on me I went through a temporary rebellion and that is natural. But I also come back to a precept I first encountered from the DWC and that was that in a consensual relationship both parties should agree beforehand that a behavior is forbidden and will be punished. Only if both agree will there be real behavior modification.”

 First, it very well could be the case that this is a sign that the FLR is real, and that surrendering to it may become easier over time.  But, honestly, it doesn’t really feel like that.  It feels like there really is some of this that is just plain old nagging and there does need to be some room for me to do adult things without being treated like a kid.  Which brings us to the second option, namely revisiting the rules and talking through what they should be, what discretion she has to set them, and whether there are areas where the restrictions are causing such resentment that they aren’t counterproductive.  It’s not so much that she wouldn’t tackle those areas at all, just not as tightly right now and not as the first priority.  We all had a discussion a few months ago about how much couples focus on the “small things” (picking up socks, cleaning the kitchen and doing it well, etc.) and I am coming around to the view that at least for us, plunging headlong into a major power exchange encompassing areas where personal freedom is important to me just isn’t going to work.  But, the good news is, I think we probably will get past this temporary hurdle and move forward, even if the precise vector of “forward” is a little bit up in the air right now.

We also ended up talking a lot last week about what exactly distinguishes DD from an FLR.  While there wasn’t a consensus view on a workable definition that distinguishes one from the other, there did seem to be some general agreement that one thing that defines an FLR is decision-making authority and the extent to which she sets the rules instead of just enforcing rules that the couple agrees to together in advance.

Which brings us to this week’s topic, which is admittedly a repeat of one we did in 2017. It is not about what the rules are, but about how they are set.  How does that work for you?  Are all the rules agreed to in advance?  Or, is the agreement to the power hierarchy as a whole, with him consenting to her authority to both make the rules and enforce them?  Do you get spanked for anything that you think should not be spankable?  And, is there express agreement to what the consequences will be, e.g. is it all about spanking or does she have discretion to come up with any punishment that fits the crime? 

I hope you have a great week.

The Club - Meeting 299 - Be Careful What You Wish For . . .

“This book will teach your partner how to be more dominant. Your partner will learn how to say no to you. She will learn how to train you. She will learn how to punish you and hold you accountable for your actions. She will learn that she can demand whatever she wants from you, despite whatever you might want from her. So beware, my unsuspecting male friend... if you bought this book for her, you might get more than you asked for. You have been warned.” – The Hesitant Mistress

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships.  I hope you had a good week.  Ours seemed to be a little better than the week before, which may be the best we can hope for after a couple of months that were just exceptionally hard.

The original post from last week included a line about a recent incident in which I was very overtly resistant to something she told me to do, and I followed up with something that was flat-out disobedient.  I said I would deal with it in a separate post, but people started commenting on it so I took it out.  But, I’ll address it now, as it feeds into the subject of this week’s post.  In a nutshell, I had come home tired from a work event, and started watching a movie. It had been a really long, hard week and I was just desperate for some downtime to decompress.  My wife decided in the middle of the movie that I should go to bed.  I resisted, and while I don’t think I ever just said “no,” it is fair to say I did not comply.  She gave in, but instructed me that I was not to have even one drink before coming to bed.  Once she went to bed, I decided to ignore that instruction too and had a nightcap.  So, not a good night at all in terms of being a good little submissive. 

And, therein lies the start of this week’s topic.  It wasn’t just that I disobeyed an order from her.  Rather, the order itself led to so much resentment at that moment in time that I really did start questioning the pros and cons of the entire FLR part of our lifestyle. It kind of felt like the last straw during a week in which the resentment had been building.  It was not just telling me to go to bed early.  It was telling me when to come home from work, then chastising me about being late for dinner, then telling me to go to bed when I was in the middle of a movie and then trying to keep me from having a drink in my own house when it was not hurting anyone and had no impact on her.  I started thinking about the fact that none of my colleagues are subjected to that kind of control.  They don’t feel guilty about having that third drink at happy hour. They don’t have someone sending them texts that is time to come home.  They don’t have restrictions on things they can do once they get home, and they definitely do not have someone giving them a bed time.   

 So, for the first time in a long time, I asked myself the serious question of whether the whole FLR thing is really for me and, frankly, worth it.  I felt like I was being treated like a child, and I really, really resented it to the point that for that evening I started wondering whether I should just call an end to it.  But, then in the morning, as usual I once again appreciated that she treated me like a child because I was acting like one.  Yeah, I wanted to stay up late because I was wired after a hard week and needed to decompress. But, staying up later was just going to exacerbate the fatigue I was already fighting, especially if staying up involved a few nightcaps.  She was trying to look out for me, even if it did not feel that way at the time.  And, while it’s true that some of my colleagues do probably have the same excessive behaviors I do, who knows that will do to them over time.  Maybe deep down inside they wish they had someone reining them in the way I do.

But, I also think this reflects a basic distinction between DD and FLR for me.  My angst at where we seem to be right now is really all about the FLR and not DD, and it is the former that my resistance was aimed at.  I still have never refused a spanking and, in fact, she gave me a very hard one on Saturday to deal with the week’s bad behavior.  So, I am still very comfortable with the idea of consequences for bad behavior.   

What I am much less comfortable with is trying to stop or prevent behavior that not, in fact, inherently bad.  There are times I feel like it is getting way too close to trying to change an identity that I am, in fact, relatively comfortable with or that it is just removing too much that I find fun or relaxing.  And, that was what was on my mind last night when she tried to impose some controls during a social event even though I was doing nothing more than hanging out with friends of hers who were, if anything, drinking more than I was!  Once again, it all just started feeling like too much.

After the first incident, I wrote a long journal entry to my wife that tried to explore these conflict desires being wanting someone to impose boundaries but also feeling like sometimes those boundaries are just too tight.  As, I pointed out to her, part of my resistance to authority is a result of just never having been subject to any. In my entire life (or at least since my adolescent and teenage years, I have NEVER had anyone impose any controls on things like bed time, curfew, being home in time for dinner or drinking. Most kids are subject to those kinds of controls, and when they don’t comply there is a consequence.   

But, the reality is my parents never imposed those kinds of rules, and the few things they saw as rules were seldom actually enforced.  So, when five decades into this life my starts telling me to go to bed at a certain time, it is something that has never once been a part of my experience.

So, I think part of what is happening is resistance to a change that, yes, I asked for but that is proving more restrictive than I anticipated.  Classic “be careful what you ask for, because you might get it” stuff.  Hence, the quote at the top of this page.  Yet, another part of the dynamic is trying to find the right balance – the balance between moderating excessive behavior, on the one hand, and stifling who I am or making my life less enjoyable or a constant irritation on the other.

I recognize this puts her in a hard position, but I also do think it may be an inevitable part of real leadership, as opposed to Femdom fantasy leadership.  When I was less experienced as a manager, there were times I know I drove people too hard and expected too much.  It took me a while to learn that there really are limits on what you can impose on people or how much you can expect them to be something they are not.  Once I learned to lighten up a little, things worked better and the performance of the whole group improved. 

Last week, before I took down the two or three lines that alluded to my disobedience problem, Tomy and Alan posed the following:

Tomy:  “Resisting one's wife is perhaps the most self-defeating behavior I have seen (or done) in a DWC relationship. Everyone has their own reasons and excuses and rationalizations. We men who visit this blog are here becuase we want/need/desire a particular lifestyle experience. Those who actually have a spouse who is on board with it are among a very small percentage of men who long for it. Any act that undermines the woman's authority undermines her confidence and undermines the genuine fulfillment of the dream - OUR dream - that she has stepped into mainly FOR us. I hate to say this. But for any reader who indulges their own resistance at the expense of their wife's efforts to be in charge, to fulfill their dreams, needs to man up, shut up, and grow up. Again, sorry if I ruffle feathers. But I'm talking man to man here.”

Alan: “I agree with you completely that resisting your wife's authority is one of the most self-destructive things one can do. And that is probably particularly the case before she is completely empowered. In fact there is probably a point where you can no longer psychologically resist that authority. I know if I did it today my wife would soundly slap my face and have my pants down and nose in the corner before I could count to three. But for those just starting out maybe there has to be a grace period because for many the difference between a fantasy punishment spanking and a real one can be a staggering experience. With the girlfriend who introduced me to DD I never disobeyed her instructions to go over her lap but did (maybe three times) stop a spanking as it reached that point where I thought I couldn't take any more. This caused a lot of tension with us but she stayed with it and one particularly hard hair brushing I was just about to jump up again and then the thoughts started to form that this was what I wanted and needed and deserved and I was a wimp for not taking my punishment. I just relaxed and let it happen reaching that fulfilled numb zone for the first time. Afterwards my bum was a mess but she was very proud of me (and herself) and so was I. I never resisted her authority after that breakthrough and have never resisted my wife's authority either. But maybe young couples should expect some tension and resistance to authority in the beginning. If a women stays firm it will pass and for me at least once it has passed it doesn't come up again. Female authority once established is forever.”

But, while these two quotes emphasize the danger of undermining authority, Alan also had this to say, which I think reflects the real-life trade-offs I am thinking through in balancing FLR in a way that is actually workable in the context of our particular relationship.  He said, “I like Danielle’s Venn diagram /continuum metaphor for distinguishing FLR from DD. But to some extent we tend to complicate the distinction. I am in a DD and have been for many years. Our understanding is that she has unquestioned authority to discipline and punish me for violation of her rules particularly with respect to things that could harm or impinge our relationship. Her authority is unlimited in the sense she can punish anywhere for any reason she thinks necessary. However, in practice we have carved out behaviors that threaten to damage the relationship, display immaturity, arrogance or deliberate disobedience. She is not H.O.H, for that matter, either am I. We pursue an equal relationship in which she is in charge of many things (including my discipline) and I am in charge of many other things. We try to split that down the middle as much as practical leaning to our respective strengths as a couple. In an FLR by contrast there is a clear leader, much less consensus about roles and a clear hierarchy in the relationship in terms of who call the shots. I see the differences as primarily matters of style and personality, with both working with different couples. I also imagine that some DD's evolve into FLR's as partners get to know themselves and each other. The power to discipline is powerful and just practicing it may bring out submissiveness in some males and dominance in some females not earlier present. That is one of the enormous advantages of F/M relationships. They are dynamic and change as you live them.”

I do believe these relationships are dynamic, and while Alan brought up DD evolving into FLR, I wonder whether it also sometimes works in reverse.  For those men who are not natural submissives or for whom being bossed around is not necessarily erotic (at least not all the time), can experimenting with FLR prove to be too much? Should they have taken the warning at the top of the page to heart?  And, for the women, can the responsibility of exercising real leadership, of getting the balance between control and micro-management right prove to be harder than anticipated?  Has anyone had an experience in which it did just become too much, to the point that you reevaluated either whether you wanted to continue or at least whether the balance needed some adjustment?

I do realize, by  the way, that just raising this will almost certainly bring out the, “Just submit or you are being a bad husband and just playing a game,” comments.  All I can say is, too bad.  We are living this in real life and in the context of who we are as concrete individuals with needs and desires, strengths and weaknesses.  I’ll keep living that reality and not someone else’s fantasy.

Have a great week.

The Club -- Meeting 298 -- Empty Nesting

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or interested in being in, Domestic Discipline relationships. I hope you had a good week.

Mine was tough.  We had something happen in the family last week that I won’t go into, but it left us all stressed, depressed and unsettled. 

And, then there was that Game of Thrones finale. What a letdown.  As if I wasn’t depressed enough, I can now think about what I could have done with the 80-plus hours that I devoted to watching and re-watching episodes of that series.  What am I going to do now to mindlessly waste my time?  And, while I appreciated the generous serving of gratuitous T&A, I did find myself identifying a bit too much with one of the characters.

During last week’s discussion, Darren brought up the topic of how life changes after we become empty nesters.  I realize this topic won’t resonate with every reader, as some won’t be at that stage of life.  But, based on past polling, many of us are.  It’s a topic we have touched on before, a little less than a year ago, but we do have some new participants, so why not do it again?  Moreover, going back and reading my last empty nesting post (post 255) forced me to confront a somewhat painful reality – sometimes things just don’t change very much even when you think they will and even when you say you want them to. 

It seems perfectly logical that having kids in the house would put some hard limits on fully exploring DD and FLR lifestyles.  And, for us, they did.  Like almost all couples who get into this lifestyle with kids in the house, we had to work around their little ears and eyes, which made things like instantaneous discipline difficult to pull off.  Lots of bad behavior went unpunished entirely.  When issues were addressed, sometimes it was so many days after the bad act that much of the emotional connection between the crime and the punishment was lost.  Logistically, the two things that changed the most over time were location and timing.  When we first began the kids were pretty young, and we could often get away with spanking sessions in the basement after they had gone to bed.  Though, who knows whether one or more of them overheard something despite our best efforts?

As they became teenagers, late evening spankings were less of an option, because the kids started staying up later than we do!  So, spanking tended to happen on weekends when they were out of the house, which alleviated some of the constraints on where spankings happened.  Now, they almost always happen in our bedroom.  But, our kids kind of liked hanging out with us and visited regularly.  So, there were many times that even Saturdays and Sundays proved difficult to find “alone time” for Anne to take care of business. And, we have never even thought about simply being totally open about the power exchange in the house, let alone the spanking piece.  Though, as we talked about last week, I do find the prospect of more open shows of authority morbidly attractive in the same way DD itself is morbidly attractive.  And, if Alan is right about there being a DD gene (I still have my doubts), for all I know one or more of the kids have discovered this thing we do and may not be repulsed by it at all.

But, we have always operated from the premise that this is something we keep to ourselves and have mostly acted accordingly.  So, having more time alone would theoretically lead to more freedom to explore this side of our relationship. Everything changes.  Kids graduate from high school, go on to have their own lives, and mom and dad are then left to move on and take their own lives in different directions, right?  Well, sort of.  I first took on this empty nesting topic back in 2016 when we seemed to be on the verge going into that new stage when we would have much more freedom.  I assumed that would mean big changes in the DD and FLR aspects of our relationship.  What I didn’t quite get at that time is that for this generation of kids, leaving the nest is a “process” not an “event.”  They move out the door and into the real world slowly and in spurts.  I didn’t really anticipate just how much they would still be around, visiting on weekends, holidays, summer vacations, etc.  And, when ours “left” for college they initially were within easy driving distance, so it turned out there were lots of nights when a hot meal at home seemed more attractive than ramen in a college apartment.

Last year, we thought that things finally were moving in a direction in which there really would be big blocks of time when we truly were empty nesting.  We talked expressly about what that meant for the Domestic Discipline and FLR aspects of our relationship.  As I said in Post 255:

She wants to take over, I want her to do that, and now there is just the little matter of execution.  Of making a hard left turn into a very different style of dealing with each other and trying to make much more real something that has been more of a goal than a reality.  Not that the DD aspects of our relationship have not been real, but they have been confined and departmentalized, bounded on all sides by a life that revolved around kids and, frankly, keeping kids from discovering much about this aspect of how their parents relate to each other.

That is what is really changing -- her ability or at least willingness to really step into a 24/7 role as Head of Household has always been met with the roadblock of observant little eyes and ears.  Which wouldn't be a problem if, like a small number of people who visit here, we were "out" about this aspect of our relationship, or at least not actively hiding it even in the privacy of our own home. But, we always have been.  So, with no one but us and the pets around, it really is a brave new world.

(I also included in that post some honest reflection about just how prepared I really was to move into a relationship that was more FLR-oriented and the extent to which that might entail getting much more than I asked for.  More on that in a later post.)

So, here we are, a year later.  The house is more empty than it has ever been.  We have the place to ourselves most nights and most weekends.  And, we’ve spent a couple of years talking about how much we want to put her more firmly in charge.  So, how much has changed?  Honestly, not that much.  In terms of frequency of spankings, it’s about the same.  In terms of more open expressions of her authority, also about the same.  My submission to her authority?  Very spotty and, if anything, the past month has showed some disturbing moves in the wrong direction.  What accounts for this lack of progress despite our new empty nest status?  I don’t really know, but here are some thoughts:

·        Circumstances change quickly but personalities and habits do so only slowly and with effort.  She wants to be more assertive but struggles to really internalize any sense of her own power.  I want to behave better, but I also have a fierce anti-authoritarian streak and some bad habits that have been such a part of me for 40 years that they have become a part of how I see myself.  Those things are hard to unwire.  You don’t just become a new person, whether more authoritarian or more compliant, based on good intentions.  And, frankly, neither one of us has really committed fully and completely to going down this path and doing what it takes.

·        Despite being together for a quarter of a century, I think we both are still kind of embarrassed about moving into new roles with each other.  In fact, it may be that we’ve been together so long that moving in a different direction feels less like a real change in the relationship and more like fantasy role playing.

·        Life is busy.  While the house may be more empty, we too are out of it a lot, especially me.  Business travel now generally takes me away from home several days a week.

One other angle on empty nesting that I am starting to suspect may be in play is that while it may present more opportunities for discipline it also may lead to more reasons for it.  I’m really starting to wonder whether my behavior is slipping because I don’t have to worry as much about being a poor role model.  While it is subtle, I do feel like in the last year I’ve lost some hard-won maturity and drifted back toward more of the guy I was right out of college and graduate school.  Now that I am no longer running my life around other people’s school, sports and social activities, life is more free, and I’m kind of acting out in response to the drop in family-related responsibilities.  Or, is this all just another spin on the classic mid-life crisis?  One is almost perfectly timed.

So, for those of you who have faced the empty nest in the context of a Domestic Discipline relationship, what changed?  And, what did not?  Did it, in fact, lead to her stepping more firmly and confidently into the role?  If so, did that happen gradually, or was there a moment when it seemed to all come together?  Or, is change harder and less dependent on the presence of others than we like to think?

No Post This Week

Sorry for the late notice, but we are tied up with some things this weekend that will not allow time for blogging.  Have a good week.

Dan

The Club - Meeting 297 - Public Displays of Authority

“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.”

― Margaret Thatcher

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline relationships.  I hope you had a good week.  Ours was rough.  Not on the personal behavior front.  While hardly a perfect week, I did do better than in recent weeks, and I obeyed a direct command even on something I could have done that might have gone undetected.  So, again, while not perfect, I did make some progress in getting my act together. But, a rough week nonetheless.  We’ve had some losses among our extended “family,” and had another this week.  I know that is cryptic, but I’m not quite ready to reveal personal details that could allow someone to figure out who I am.  Now, that sort of assumes that someone who knows me in “real life” reads this blog, but you never know. . . .

That note about anonymity and secrecy leads us to this week’s topic. Last week, Danielle observed, "I’ve been inching closer and closer to some such public display of my authority over my husband. But that would probably be too embarrassing for him in real life. Also, there would be an ethical problem of involving other people in your kink, right?" We also had a couple of side discussions about openly displaying utensils and beauty items in ways that might suggest their dual purpose as disciplinary devices.

What level of display of authority are you comfortable with?  Some take great pains to make sure no one knows about their DD or FLR activities.  Others are open.  Some don’t openly reveal the nature of their relationship but take risks that someone could figure it out.  Where do you fall on that spectrum, and what form do your displays of authority take?  

We are one of those “in the middle” couples.  Her public displays of authority are fairly understated, most of the time.  She almost always pays the bill when we go to restaurants.  I clear her plate after dinner at home, which does not go unnoticed by our now older kids.  In public, she has occasionally given me something that sounds like an order, such as telling me to go to the bar and have her drink refilled.  At an office Christmas party a few years ago, I came to suspect one of my younger female colleagues and her husband might be in an FLR, as I observed her repeatedly direct him, politely but authoritatively, to go to the bar and get her another drink.  Finally, as I’ve noted before, I also wear a pendent that those in BDSM relationships might identify as the sign of a submissive male.  It doesn’t quite fit our situation, but it is the closest established symbol to our dynamic.  

Within the family, on occasion she has inched forward to more prominent displays of authority.  As I said, we have established a ritual in which I take her plate away after dinner, or she leaves the table and leaves it there for me to clean up.  And, the kids have definitely noticed it and commented about it to her.  They also definitely get something has changed in the last few years and that she makes more decisions. As far as I know, they don't know about the corporal punishment aspect of the relationship, though there is no way to know for sure.  Kids are more observant than we sometimes like to believe.  Moreover, I will not be surprised if, at some point, my wife tells one or more of the kids. And, on a couple of occasions she has made a cryptic or flippant reference to spanking me, in front of our extended family. One Christmas morning, we had extended family over and I made some semi-snotty comment in response to something she asked me to do. She replied, "Well, you can do it or I can just spank you." Some family members were definitely within earshot. If they overheard, I *think* they would have thought she was joking, but you never know. . . . On the other hand, as far as I know she has never openly revealed our FLR or DD relationship to anyone, and she's never done anything beyond dropping hints in public.

How about you?  For the wives, how comfortable are you in displaying your authority over him or hinting at your DD activities? Give us some examples of times you’ve done so.  If you are not open about it now, do you have any desire to be more so in the future?  For the men, has your wife let others know about her authority?  Does she do things in public that make her authority known or might let others figure it out?  Do you wish your wife was more, or less, open about whatever level of authority she has over you?

Have a great week.