We've moved along

We've moved along in more ways than one.  We picked up with our new journey at http://BothSidesOfTheSlash.WordPress.com .  Jamie came back here for a look around to see how the old haunt looked, and lo and behold, it's still here.  We certainly did end at a bad moment, though.

Perhaps at some point we'll write the connective tissue as to how we got from there (not a good place) to here (which is feeling pretty good right now).  Getting kicked around by life a little, and a fortuitous meeting with a somewhat younger friend both helped a lot.

Come join us.

Some context about the preceeding two posts, and a step forward

The astute reader will notice that the preceding two posts are separated by about two weeks. 

As my beloved so trenchantly noted, our life had devolved into the thoroughly mundane due to a number of external stresses.  My post was supposed to be the first step in examining that and seeing if there was a basis for renewing our special relationship, or if this was going to be my "problem" and fantasy life for the foreseeable future.  Clearly an unsuccessful step, partly because I did not write from an awareness of how serious the situation was.

During a long car ride on an otherwise very stressful night, we started talking about this, and she read my post.  The reaction is there for you to see.

We talked a lot more on that night, and in the end I wrote (in the form of an email) much more of what I should have written in the first place.

---------------

A second try at where my head's at:

Ok, I'm trying to remember what it was I was supposed to write...

1. About why I suddenly stopped doing what we were doing
2. About the differences between submission and service 
3. Ideas about where to go from here

I've put off writing this long enough / haven't felt like there was time to write it because there was always something more important, that I've blown it up in to a big thing.  I think I was also afraid of getting it "wrong" and getting a big reaction. 

Why I suddenly stopped doing what we were doing....

Beyond all the busyness and lack of brain-share, I was very unclear as to what you cared how much about the following

• My only having permitted orgasms - I knew you cared a lot about that because you'd said so.  So that was never an issue.
• Making coffee - I know you appreciate that a lot.  I felt really bad about not making you coffee when you left on business at 5AM.
• Personal service - shaving your legs and doing your toe-nails.  Sometimes that was a time thing, sometimes that was a "laziness" thing, and sometimes it's just not something that I'm naturally "in-to."  That made it easy in my mind for me to slack on those.
• Kissing your feet when I arrive home - I wasn't sure whether that was a "me" thing that you agreed to, or if it meant anything to you.  In our subsequent conversation, it clearly does mean something to you, but I didn't know that at the time.
• Opening doors - I really felt that that was a "me" thing that that I'd just do it to make myself feel better and that you didn't care about it.  So I felt free to quit.
• What specific things have I forgotten?

We talked about how, in the bigger sense of things, we fell out of communicating.  I think we need to create a space to do that.  At some point we remarked on the fact that if you're doing a "normal" set of social roles, there's lots of support in the environment for that and lots of expectations, etc.  Whereas if we're doing what we're doing, we have to make it up as we go along.  That's harder and requires more communication.  I think after having had a good but difficult conversation in the car, we need to be careful not to do that again.

About the different components of this in me:

• Sexually submissive - my whole life and always.
• Submissive in daily life - not so much.  Somewhat, because it leads to sexual submission.  Somewhat, as an exercise because it affirms this "different" relationship that I want to have.  But also something I could be better at if that's what we wanted (which sometimes I do, and which other times I do as an affirmation of the relationship, and which sometimes I'm not sure I do.)
• Service-oriented - sometimes.  Like submissiveness in daily life, only more so.  There are times when I really like it.  There are times when I really want to rub your feet because its a way of communicating to you.  There are times when I love shaving your legs or doing your toe-nails, and times when I am not so much in to that. 
• Sensation-play - Always, I think.  It's like sex, only with my whole body....
• Fetish stuff - shiny clothes, boots, etc - the Magpie effect.  Always.

Here's one possible take-away from this whole episode: I am eager for you to set the terms of the relationship, if not unilaterally, then at least for you to propose what you want it to look like, as you said to me, based on what you've come to enjoy or appreciate.  You said that my coming and going around parts of this made you feel like a fool.  In a similar (but different) vein, my doing all these things that I didn't think you cared about made me sometimes feel foolish, and I'm still getting over the feeling that you'd prefer it if I just didn't do them.  I get, from what you said, that this is not so.  But I'm working on internalizing it.

I had suggested at one point that part of the issue with kissing your feet when I arrive home (which I REALLY LIKE as an indication that, regardless of what else is happening, our relationship is different), was that I wasn't sure if it meant anything to you and I was unsure when it was appropriate and when it wasn't.  My suggestion around this was to get whipped severely enough that I really wouldn't want to go there again, and would, in any way possible strive to kiss your feet so as not to be subject to that.  I don't think I necessarily worded this quite right, but I want to just get this out.
That could go for shaving your legs or painting your toenails.  I dunno, just a (scary) thought.  [This came out of a long discussion of punishment vs "funishment" that wasn't very conclusive.  The idea here was to do straight pain - not fetishized - to change behavior - to make me err on the side of kissing your feet when I arrive home.  It remains an area that we're exploring.]

It's hard to express how much I appreciate the entire concept of the collar and you're taking the initiative on that.  It really does help me understand that this is something that you want and are willing to take ownership of (pun intended).

I love you a lot and I really appreciate your exploring this with me.  I'm very very lucky.  You're very very terrific.

The Man Is Clueless

Jamie's beloved here. The last seven months have been insane as we moved his parents into an assisted living apartment near us. It's left us with no time for ourselves or for each other. As a result, Jamie basically bailed out of our arrangement, except for making me coffee and leaving me in control of his orgasms. All other service and attention ceased. It was totally understandable, but here's my problem: he never informed me that he needed to take a break, never asked me how I felt about it, and never apologized. When I tried to start a conversation or request that he write about the collapse of his commitment, I got nothing.

I have been a reluctant domme but have grown to be content with this arrangement with my sweetie, and enjoyed the attention and the sex. When it ended abruptly, I was disappointed, angry, and felt foolish to have consented in the first place.

Two months later, Jamie still hasn't said anything, despite a couple of attempts on my part to start a conversation. I just read a draft blog post he wrote and it's about new kinds of play that he might like. Fuck that! He needs to beg me to take him back into any kind of arrangement at all, and it's going to be (at least at first) entirely limited to what I feel like.

Am I off- base?

An unsuccessful attempt to describe where my head's at

I was listening to Axe's interview with SubmissAnne(?) And she was talking about pony play, which I've been fascinated with looking at but n never thought about doing.the depersonalization aspect really appeals to me.  She talked about the relationship between the driver/trainer and the pony, particularly wrt dressage, and it sturck a chord. The idea of being trained so that - in her words - your muscle memory responds to the commands of the trainer gets you to a totally submissive nonverbal place. I would love that. She also talked about dressage, which I've seen horses do and never gotten. But when she describes it as "obey, command, obey, command, obey, command" I go all melty inside

Later she talked about blinded obstacle courses for the ponies guided by the trainers. Absolutely intoxicating.  The whole dynamic between the trainer and the point she made sound very intimate. I want to take one or both of the clips where she talks about that and save them.

In a previous interview Axe talked to a mistress who had something of a sub specialty in working with couples, so long as the woman on the couple was the one who made the contact. ( http://www.mistressmorgana.com/couples/ and http://www.mistressmorgana.com/faq/ ) I know that his partner Sade also does couples work.

THIS IS VERY ATTRACTIVE

I feel, with minimal data to substantiate this, that my beloved is warming slightly to the idea of being dominant but that it's still really important that no one else know ... except that she's determined that she has a co worker at her fairly small non profit who is on fet life, and she seems intrigued by that fact.

Which, I hope, opens the door to working with someone around this.  We've determined that I have an ambiguous attitude towards being a service sub - it's not exactly second nature, especially when the going gets rough, but it has its attraction. I think I could be trained In to it and she could learn how to help keep me on that space - that assuming she wants to.  But clearly the current "whip saw" nature of the arrangement where I'm in to it very much sometimes and less other times is very unsatisfactory to her.

Right now the arrangement's down to making her coffee on the mornings and totally no sex for me without permission (simulation or orgasm).  I'm waiting for her to decide that it's time for something more. There are two factors promoting that "waiting": there were a number of things that I was doing that I felt were more for me - or motivatted by me - than by/for her. Two I can think of were opening the car spot for her and kissing her feet once a day.

To go in to more detail: opening the car door (or doors in general) is an old time chivalry thing.  When I felt she didn't care about it, I did it as a barometer of how submissive I was "feeling.  It turns out that she noticed! Specifically, she felt jerked around when this behavior came and went. Where as I was thinking "I don't want to impose this expectation on her and I'll do it if it allows me to feel submissive and this won't be too oppressive to her."

Kissing her feet to me was different: telling her that I wanted to be required to do this every day was my way of saying "whether I'm 'in to this' or not on a given day, at this minimal level, it is real and I need to do this."  After one day where there was no obvious moment to do this, we talked and clearly she had the expectation that I would go out of my way to do this and I had the expectation that I didn't want to impose this on her.

The end of this discussion was that I suggested/asked that she whip me sufficiently with the crop that their should be no doubt in my mind that of there were any possibility of my kissing her feet during the day, that I should leap at the opportunity rather than doubt.  This involved moving whipping from "funishment" to punishment, which can be a hard line for her to perceive (not surprisingly - absent a lot of feedback, how would you know?).  In the event, we never got to test that out due to the press of family commitments and travel.

And shaving her legs? And painting her toenails? And rubbing her feet?  Where did these all go? I know she's peeved about the shaving her legs going away.

Finally, I want to highlight a comment made recently on Krista Tippett's "on being."  She interviewed Joy Ladin, a m-to-f t transsexual professor of poetry who transitioned in her mid-40's.    She said that one of the hardest things for her for 40+ years was to"play the role" of "male" 24x7.  I couldn't figure out why that statement resonated so much with me given that I realized long ago that the attraction of being female for me was not as compelling as of it Is for people who in the end identify as transsexual.

I kind of figured out out tonight, as the press of family commitments made this weekend In to less of a refuge than a series of commitments to be completed, that I was feeling disappointed and oppressed by the prospect of having to be "normative." Internally I had looked forward to  having the opportunity to be naked and at her feet for some part of the weekend.  It was that feeling of not having to pretend that I really identified with.

I think that that realization interacts with the desire to seek some outside expertise both for the wisdom they might offer - can we (and I mean WE)  get over the idea that no one has anything to teach us? And for the acknowledgement that this is "real" and in some sense who I am.

Why, in retrospect, is that do satisfying to write? I feel peaceful and calm.  I think the acknowledgement of who I am in all this, means something to me.

Yesterday we changed the rules

We discussed the reasons for changing them at some length, but suffice it to say that what we had had atrophied to the point where my beloved was unsure of what to do when my behavior floated from the norms we had set. To take a specific example, I was rubbing her legs and feet, and when I was done, I stopped. I had said that I would never stop until she told me it was okay, but this came at the end of a long period of not doing anything service oriented and I lacked the discipline to relax on to it and be who and what she had the right to expect me to be. Since so little had been going on, she was surprised and unsure what to expect/demand.

As to why so little had been going on, external circumstances notwithstanding (and I should read the history to find out if those have been a factor in our pauses in the past), I almost titled this post "Not thinking about sex is better than thinking about no sex." This seems to be my reaction to longer term denial, whether it's in the context of enforced chastity or crazy circumstances. Either way, it decreases my ability to stay focused on my beloved, and things spiral down hill from there.

As a simple corrective to that, I'm now required to stimulate myself as close to orgasm as possible once a day, and, out loud, thank my beloved for controlling my orgasms, then thank her in person or by text.

There are lot of other aspects to our new arrangement, perhaps too many to be put in to place all at once. But it boils down to one transaction: I will do all of these things, some to help keep me in the right head space and some because they serve my beloved.  All I ask in return is something fairly difficult from her, which I think she's agreed to try: She will care about these things as much as she can.

3/27/12 7:33PM

Inklings of a Way Forward

My beloved is amazing. It amazes me that she has volunteered to accompany me on my twisting turning waxing waning journey around power, sex, and relationships. "Volunteered" is maybe too strong a word. But she has very good-naturedly, and sometimes enthusiastically agreed to listen, explore, and poke about in something I can't seem to help but be interested in, but which (I think) strikes her as an emotional and intellectual oddity at best and an emotional disfunction at worst.

After an insanely busy hiatus, in which only her sense of self-discipline has kept us on track, suddenly I come up for air and wonder how I want to go forward with this. (I'll ignore for a minute all the ironies of her self-discipline, my relative lack of self-discipline, and our inability to find a way to apply her discipline to me, in either metaphorical or physical form.) For go forward I must. The stream never stops. Sometimes it runs shallow, and sometimes it runs deep, but it always runs.

One of the things that frustrated me the most was that I am unable to consistently come up with service things to do for my beloved. This has led me to question my whole identity as a "service submissive." The idea of coming up with one thing each day to do that would be nice is very appealing, and I seem totally unable to do it.

One thing I realized I can do is to be submissive, rather than ask her to make me submissive. This is the way I lost my right to decide over my own orgasms over the years: I asked all the time and then finally we had the conversations where she agreed to decide. I think this model could apply to other things. The other day, I asked her if I could paint her nails - a service-submission thing that I also enjoy doing. It was very good and put us (me certainly, her I think as well) into a really good headspace.

I could do this with other things. I'm wearing my chastity device for the afternoon because I asked her if she'd hold the key "till I need it back." That doesn't do anything for her, but it does for me. Simiarly, I could/should/would like to ask to do at least one submissive or service thing every day. These are for me, not for my beloved. Her gift to me is accepting them. It's not that she makes me be as i want to be, but that she allows me to be as I am.

Overall, I think taking responsibility for what I want is helpful. It also might make her more comfortable insisting on things when my mood fluctuates because otherwise it's to inconsistent and annoying for her and thus in some sense help me be more consistently who I am, rather thank my relying on her making me be who I an, which is something she can't do anyway since in the end only we know who we really are. Isn't this a big theme in literature, with pygmalian at one end?

Tamara did a re-post and reply to a post she'd read on another blog. It's about acknowledging the reality that in many relationships (including hers with Rene, and the original poster's with her partner), that one partner is much more "in to this" than the other - in their words, that it's in one partner's soul, but not the the soul of the other. That sounds right to me.

To me, it means managing my expectations, and asking for what I want, and helping my beloved explore what things there are in this that may tickle her fancy, more or less.

And always being grateful that I have some with whom I can talk and explore.

A Blog Back From The Dead?

Is this blog returning from the dead? I don't know.

Why has it been so long since I've posted? Because I've got two intense community commitments, intense job commitments, and it feels in some ways like our FLR has been hanging on by a thread.

The bigger question for me is, "What are we doing here." I've made several attempts at distinguishing between a service-oriented relationship, a submissive relationship, and sexual "bottom" relationship, none successful. Yet I have to try again, because on this short trip with one of our children, it's much of what I've been thinking about - yet another way that sexual being that isn't in tune with the rest of my life is intensely distracting, to my detriment.

Some of this is sexual frustration. It's been - I've lost count - three and a half weeks, maybe? No touching by me, a little by my beloved, but certainly no orgasm. One of my favorite parts of the blog was always the time-since counter. I remember early in the summer when we first had sex and I didn't update the counter. From there on, it seemed impossible to catch up. In once sense, it's been nice to get unhooked from the calendar. I've feared that my beloved was keeping track; for a while it seemed like she'd decided that every two weeks or so was "right." Once, I asked, because I felt that being frustrated was distracting me from the rest of my life. She didn't immediately accommodate me, for which I am grateful. I'd hate to feel like I could just ask and that would be that. I think I need to be able to ask, but I'm not even sure of that any more.

Now my orgasm happens when it pleases her, and that makes me very happy. Most of the time, orgasms are much much more intense that way. Sometimes they come and go so quickly that I hardly notice them. I feel physically satisfied, but the "frustrated" mind-set doesn't really change.

One experiment that is a little on-going in our relationship is the arrive of a CB-6000s. This has been a long-time fantasy of mine, and at some point I mentioned it to my beloved. I was among the early people to order a CB-2000 long ago. (I conclude this because our order was delayed because they were just moving from "hand crafted" to "manufactured.") My anatomy is best described as "high and tight," and the CB-2000 was not effective at all. The idea is that the testicles are "trapped" between two acrylic rings - hence the generic name for these devices: "Trapped ball devices." A very small number of trials indicated what with my anatomy, it was more like "crushed ball..." It's been languishing in a drawer for 8 years.

The "CB" folks have been busy and gone through several models, and there are others testing out related designs, including the "Bird Cage," a flexible silicone version of the same thing. The discussion board at ChastityForums.com is very metal-centric (there are trapped ball devices from Mature Metals), but are willing to condescend to plastic to the extent the CB-6000 and CB-6000s can be useful to figure out your sizing for the "real" devices. The silicone devices they dismiss out of hand. Although my beloved preferred the silicone as a concept and a look, ever the pragmatists, we decided to try the CB-6000s.

It's not clear that this thing is going to work on me. There are five ring sizes, and five post lengths, so that's 25 combinations. We've tried three or four, and either the ring is too small around the base of the balls, or the space is too big, allowing them to slip out. I have one or two ideas of additional combinations to try, but it's quite possible that it will be a fail. I've worn it overnight once, and out-and-about on a number of occasions, but most of the time the result is either too painful to continue or "the boys" slip out, which is painful in its own right. I might think about trying "the birdcage." But I wonder if the results would be different.

Now on to service, submission, and sexual-bottoming.

I don't know if I'm a service submissive. I read Axe talk about being a service submissive. I remember one remark he made about the satisfaction of bringing Sade a cup of tea on a quiet evening. I'm not sure whether or not I share that satisfaction. I think, for me, the satisfaction of doing that comes from the interaction that it implies with my beloved, and I can't figure out what I want that interaction to be: ignoring the service? taking the service for granted? acknowledging the service but at the same time making it clear that I have no choice? Much of that sounds like a lot of work for her.

The service submission things we have figured out need some kind of interaction from her: paying the bills is the biggest one, and I haven't been doing it. At the other extreme, making her coffee in the morning, even if I'm not having coffee, I love too. In the middle, I paint her toenails and shave her legs. I don't suggest these things nearly as often as I should. And when she tells me I need to do them, I do, but not, initially, with as much grace as I should. And I don't know how I'm "supposed to be" while I'm doing it - are we our "partners" selves - as we are partners in life - chatting about stuff? Am I the quite submissive studiously not disturbing the person he's serving? Should I be providing a book or magazine for her to read along with the personal service?

What visions do I have for this? What do I want? I don't know. I think we'd have to try two different extremes: In one, I ask for permission to give her this service, I make sure she is entertained while I do it - book, magazine, radio, movie, something - and I thank her for the privilege of serving. This "brackets" the experience, sets it apart from our "partner" relationship. In the other, we acknowledge that this inequality is part of of the "partner" relationship we have - that she can order me to provide these services for her whenever she wants, that it immediately becomes way more important anything else I might be thinking of doing, but it exists in the context of our whole relationship, so we interact about the rest of life while we're doing this.

Or we do both - bound the event with those rituals AND maintain the connection to the rest of our relationship that goes on at all times. THAT sounds like the most powerful idea to me.

It ties in to what happens when she tells me to rub her feet at night. I appreciate it a lot when she tells me to do this on the evenings when I'm tired and just want to sleep. Surrendering to her in this way is probably the most profound experience I have in this context. She's usually reading or dozing late at night. I rub her feet until she tells me I'm done. When she falls asleep, I feel like I've achieved what I really want, both psychologically and physically. Physically, it's clearly comfortable enough that it feels good. Psychologically, it means she's comfortable enough not to worry about how long I'll be there serving her; I'll be there until she happens to wake up and decide that she wants me to stop. I love that.

The part of service that I don't seem to be good enough at is seeking out things to do for her, and being attentive to her needs when service "play" is not the focus of what we're doing. Does that mean I'm not a service submissive? I think it might mean that.

Submissive. To me, that's letting my beloved take the lead and be "the decider." I'm not sure I want that. I don't know if she does or not. In some ways, I think I'm so desperate to have this dynamic in our relationship, that if she were to say, "When I want your opinion, I'll ask for it," I'd be incredibly turned on. But I'm pretty sure that's not her. We've always functioned as partners.

Sexual bottom? Totally. Sex when she wants it, how she wants it, and involving me in any way she wants to involve me. That ties with service submission in some ways, because sex becomes service to her. My frustration becomes a reminder to me of my service to her and her control over our sex life. And that all is very very satisfying.

That's why "teasing" isn't really teasing - it's a reminder that this is what sex is. And that is very satisfying too.

I thought I'd have more to say about submission, and about sex, but at this moment, I don't. I also thought I'd be writing about objectification, and how that's a bad thing, and how it manifests in a lot of contexts. Also about how wearing the CB-6000s feels - the idea that I would experience discomfort because of our sexual roles, and that I would feel okay about that trade-off, just as women who wear high heels or tight pants make that trade-off. It's not like either of those things aren't uncomfortable. But the discomfort says something about who I am (and, if my conjecture is right, who those women are), and that is a satisfying thing: that I am a sexual being, that my sex has power - in my case, power that my beloved want's to control, in the case of high-heels, power to attract men, but that that attraction will be controlled because of the social mores in our culture. It's why my favorite line in "Miss Congeniality" is when Sandra Bullock's geeky FBI agent has been transformed into a self-possessed, self-confident beauty queen, and she taunts her fellow agent with a little ditty, "You want to hold me, you want to kiss me, you want to [unintelligible - love? fuck? I'm sure that's intentional] me." And she knows he can't and won't because of their professional relationship.

But all that for another day.

Learning from Other Blogs

Some notes on a couple of blog posts.

Ms. Marie has taken a certain amount of heat (irony intended) for making her "sissy" wade around in an icy stream in order to get rights to indulge in his fishing passion. I've always been amazed at how vehement posters can be in reply to some posts. Jeez, if you don't agree with them, go rant on your own blog. The chances that someone is going to read your comment, and then have a blinding flash of insight, and say "Oh my God, I shouldn't have done that," those chances are slim-to-none. Even more so when you're "anonymous." (Ms. Marie addressed this issue in her post It's Come to This. I used to ignore those comments, but this one got me to thinking about "Why?"

Everything we do involves risk - driving in cars, skiing, hiking, walking down urban streets, taking the subway, you name it. But we accept those risks because we get some return from them; they're worth it. But if someone elses activity that you're reading about totally is not worth it to you, but the risks are obvious, then the trade off doesn't make any sense. Hence the vehement comments. But "tubeviewerFm81" (no public profile) put it pretty well,, and at much greater length, and in detail that I mostly agree with. It's when commenters (including tubeviewFm81 in this case) find it necessary to judge ("Oh my, that was too far... but the rest of the blog is hot!"), that's when I find myself puzzled.

Oddly, despite calling him "Sissy," I don't find much "Sissy" about Ms. Marie's husband. Forced cross-dressing, yes. Humiliation, maybe. Being used for her pleasure, certainly. But on Forever Hers, "Mistress" (who seems to write most/all of the posts, despite the "about" over on the right side), seems to delight in making her husband, who she refers to as "dee," act like someone's vision of a drag queen. There's similar forced feminization, but humiliation as well (which, for me, can be kind of a turn-on some times, depending on how it's done).

But her most recent post, It's a Girl!! was the first kinky post I've read in a a long long time that went too far for me. Notice that I'm not over there posting, "Oh my God, how could you do that to him?" in the comments. But the idea of infantilizing him when (from the way she writes it), it's clearly not his thing, was horrifying to me. My strong reaction made me wonder two things: 1) Why? and 2) is this how my beloved felt or feels about what I need?

Why was that so horrifying to me? I still don't have a complete answer, other than that my mind and self-possession and maturity have always been deep-down fundamental to my self-image and my concept of who I am. It would be stripping away from me at the deepest level, that which I value about myself. Yet "dee" went along. Was he as horrified as I? Should I admire his submission? Should I admire "Mistress" for being willing to strip "dee" back to the very beginning ("square one") and recreate him in the image that she desires? Intellectually, it makes sense. But emotionally, that would a totally hard limit for me. If it were that, or walk out of the relationship, I'm pretty sure I'd walk.

More interestingly to me, is this how my beloved felt about my kink? I know that intellectually she can wrap her brain around it. But emotionally was it as horrifying for her as this post was for me? Even if she didn't have such a strong reaction, I think I have a better idea of how she feels. It's so easy, when you're in to kink, to look at someone else's kink and go "Well, that's not me, but I can see how that could be hot." That I can *not* do that about someone's kink, surprises me. And makes me understand, I guess, how my Beloved, with all the love and best will in the world, can *not* do that about my kink.

Which, of course, makes it all the more amazing and admirable and gratitude-inducing that she's chosen to come on this voyage with me. I don't know who's leading right now. I certainly need this much more than her. And I' still trying to figure out how to provide enough value to her that she won't want to stop. But as long as she's willing to continue, I'll be incredibly grateful and awed by her "Good, Giving, and Game" (to quote Dan Savage).

Lines, Context, and Communication

Lilly made a comment when I posted about "Writing lines", asking "How do you feel when you are writing lines?" I seem to be rather backed up with things to say here, so rather than answer in the comment, this turned in to a post.

To start with the direct answer, if I had to sum up how I feel while writing lines, it's "very very content." It's best when I'm writing lines while something else interesting is going on - people watching a movie or something. Meanwhile I'm upstairs writing. Or my beloved is relaxing reading and I'm writing.

It's a feeling like I'm just where I'm supposed to be, doing what my beloved has set me to do, with a set of obligations and priorities and role that is different from the people watching the movie or from my beloved.

I've been thinking a lot and writing a little about "context" - what it is that makes one feel like something different is going on in what might be a very mundane situation - men who want their wives to dress them in maid's outfits or keep them naked while they clean the house. How is that different from just cleaning the house? It's how the guy feels because he is cross-dressed or naked.

I think there is an element of this same thing here. I am doing something I would not otherwise have done, that has no intrinsic value to me, because my beloved wants me to do it.

It's the difference between submission and service. Service is practical. Certainly, there is an element of submission in it - doing what she wants when she wants it, rather than when I want to do it. And the more it serves her the more submission is in it. So Service is doing the dishes and taking out the trash and doing the finances. All things that need to be done in our house, and if I don't do them, she will. But they are really service for "Us" (our household) rather than for her.

On those occasions when I get to do something for her, it's much more satisfying. For example, the other night she was at a meeting and realized that she'd forgotten her knitting. When I got her text, I didn't hesitate and stopped what I was doing to deliver that to her. That was service for her, and it was wonderful.

Writing lines is the same only more so: while bringing her knitting has practical value to her of entertaining her during her meeting, my writing lines has no practical value other than to focus me on how I should improve for her, and reenforce to me that her desires, how ever non-sensical they may seem to me, are more important than mine - an opportunity to submit. What's not to like.

I'm describing this all from the point of view of "before" - before my beloved pointed out that she'd much rather have me doing something practical than writing lines. So my conjecture that the "writing lines" task meant that she wanted me concentrated on how to improve and how to please and how serve. When in fact it was some kind of compromise on consequences for my failing in my commitments.

And that's why shared context is important: doing the dishes means getting the housework done. Doing the dishes naked, or doing the dishes after a little "tease" that says "I'm going to sit and relax while you do the dishes" means "You are doing the dishes because you serve me." Doing the dishes in a mundane context means doing the dishes. And doing the dishes, after the context of the relationship is firmly established, even if there is no outside indication of the context (no "naked", no "tease"), is submission, because the submission suffuses the relationship, once both people really belive that it is the context of the relationship.

It's related to the Zen aphorism: "What do you do before enlightment: chop wood, carry water. What do you do after enlightenment: chop wood, carry water."

If you're not an asshole, what do you do before you're in an FLR: like the good relationship advice says, give 110%. What do you do after you're in an FLR: give 110%. Only it feels different.

Which leads me to believe that those external markers, whatever they are for the couple, that exstablish the context, are really important as the relationship is changing. After the relationship has changed, they're less important.

So doing the finances nude with a butt-plug means that I'm definitely doing them from a point of view of submission and service. But once that's established, the nudity and butt-plug aren't necessary. What is necessary is that both people accept that the context of the relationship is different, and that both people feel certain, comfortable, that their partner feels that the context is different. In the line-writing case for us, I felt the context was one thing, and my beloved felt that it was another.

For a submissive male like me, with a beloved wife who's figuring out how she wants to relate to leading our relationship, there is always the fear that, once the external markers of the submission are removed (the nudity and the butt-plug for example), my beloved is breathing a huge sigh of relief, thinking "Thank goodness that's over..." Because the external behavior is the same (chop wood, carry water, do dishes, do finances).

That's why communication is important in our relationship.

My brief career line writing, and observations on gender roles.

Once again I was musing on the metaphor of preparing a lovely barbecue for a vegetarian. The short version is that I was, as you may have gathered from my previous post, all enamored of writing lines. By not fulfilling my commitment to keep our financial records in order, I ended up with the writing assignment I listed in my previous post. As B?, the expert, pointed out, that was a significantly large assignment, larger than I had anticipated.

The idea emerged from the fact that in our lives, time is the most valuable thing that we have. I took that to the conclusion that by forfeiting my time as a consequence for not fulfilling my obligations, I would establish a big incentive to stay current on them. So when my beloved was seriously annoyed by encountering some unupdated records, I thought I needed a consequence of similar magnitude.

So I was all happy with the thought that every waking moment not otherwise commited was going to be spent writing lines. I was content. Why? I don't know, but I must speculate a little. I was losing the ability to do what I wanted, because I had created a situation that displeased my beloved. I was incurring inconvenience because she had become upset. In essence, all the time I spent writing (2.5 hours more or less) was time I spent expressing my desire to please her. All of the things I gave up doing (watching movies, reading, web surfing, doing e-mail) were things I couldn't do because I hadn't fulfilled my commitment. It was a sacrifice and a form of communication, I felt, with my beloved.

She, perhaps not surprisingly, took this to a completely different conclusion. "All that time you're spending writing lines? You could be spending it doing what I really want done: getting the financial records in order." It's really hard to argue with logic like that, since it's so self-evidently true.

(In my own defense, I wasn't completely oblivious to this fact. Another part of the consequence for the state of the financial records was my obligation to work on them for a half and hour each and every day without fail until release from that obligation by her. But the fact remains that all the time I spent writing I could have spent working on the records.)

So she's given me what seems to me to be a more-or-less symbolic additional number of lines to do, while taking lines off of the menu of consequences. Perhaps they'll reemerge as a reward, I don't know.

To the vegetarian metaphor, if knowing that I am being denied something that I'd like to be doing (reading, hanging out, etc) does not give my beloved any frisson, I got to contemplating what value this whole dynamic might have for her. Frankly, the only non-contrived one I can see so far is the sex, which I think has improved dramatically for her. Sex is all about her pleasure now, and my desire for her. As a result, she has it when she wants, which can be three days in a row, and then not for two weeks. But there's no pressure.

That got me to thinking that my most effective course of action was to become as sexually desirable and stimulating for her as possible. Which is, of course, a complete reversal of our societal sexual roles. Given who we are, this is perhaps not surprising. For most of my adolescence, I harbored strong thoughts of being transgendered, and this was 40 years ago, when the concept was quite exotic. Christine Jorgenson and Jane Morris were my hero(ine)s. My beloved, on the other hand, was one of the first women to graduate from her university with a technical degree. So we've been wandering around those sex role lines for a long time.

I did ask her if the idea of sexual allure or suggestiveness, by behavior, dress, etc had any attraction for her, and she didn't dismiss the idea out of hand. Given that women and men get aroused by different things, I'm thinking that the kinds of displays women to do attract men are not going to be the ticket. Even so, based on her attraction to my anatomy, I was wondering if sexier underwear was in order. Perhaps. Or perhaps this is just another misguided idea on my part. But a cheap one to test out.

So the evolution continues, sometimes at a dizzying pace.

Update, and perhaps return to blogging

If you notice the pattern of posting on the blog, you'll realize that winter seems to be a difficult time for me to post. My desire for an FLR, and for sex generally, seems to wane and return with the sunlight. It wouldn't stun me if it were something like seasonal affective disorder, but I've never investigate. I self-medicate with St. John's Wort and that seems to help. But mostly I wait for spring.

This can make growing an FLR pretty difficult, especially when the impetus comes from me, and then suddenly goes away as it does in the winter. This winter, though, my beloved has given me the wonderful gift of being steady when I can't, and has maintained the basic structure of our FLR, even when I would have let it go (only to know that the desire would return again, as it has).

Every night, we check in before bed time. Often, the only thing I've done for her that day is to make her coffee. I've missed a few of my nightly e-mail performance reports, but only a few. But many of them have been very brief, when it's felt like not much had happened that day.

Occasionally, I've missed on my responsibilities doing something around the house. Back in the late fall, we settled on writing lines as a method of reinforcing my awareness of what I need to be doing. I find it very effective.

Recently I discovered the Line Writing blog, which has given me a whole new perspective on lines. And for failing at one of my household tasks, I now have a dauntingly large number of lines to write:

"Keeping faith with my beloved is important. If I am unsure whether I am fulfilling my commitments, I will ask for guidance." 500 times by Thursday evening. In a new journal she gave me for the purpose. It's daunting, but satisfying. Which is why this won't be a long post - I have lines to do.

Also, from some blog or other I discovered the idea of standing against a wall holding a coin with my nose. To which I added repeating a phrase related to the failure that earned me the consequence.

I know these possibly sound outlandish, but in both cases, the intent is to get me to focus on what needs to be done, and what I need to be mindful of. Because, although I'm very enthusiastic about FLR, I'm often not very steady or diligent about it. These things help that.

It also helps me to know that my beloved cares whether I'm diligent or not, and her consequences enforce this - they help me know what's important to her. The down-side is that she is very deliberate and conscientious, which means that coming up with a consequence for something takes her more thought and time than she'd like to put in to the project.

We've addressed this by coming up with "Make a consequence" - something she can say when she notices a failure, or "MAC" if we're in public (which hasn't happened yet). I then submit the consequence for her approval in my nightly reports.

I've also read the "The Marketplace" - first book in the series by Laura Antoniou. I'm thrilled that my beloved is reading it as well.

Thanks to all those bloggers who blog more steadily than I do. You're a lifeline.

Jamie

What Every Good Service Submissive Should be Thinking About All The Time

I found it thought-provoking. For as long as The New Yorker keeps it posted:

Love, Serve, Obey

Love, Serve, Obey

That's been my manta with my beloved since we started our FLR some months ago. This morning, lying with my head in the crook of her arm, I realized a bit more about what is happening with that mantra.

I love her all the time.

When I serve her, I get to say "I love you" with my actions. A day when I don't get to serve her is NOT a good day. Though that happens, it doesn't happen very often. That's why it's important for me to know that she knows that I'm serving her. What's the point of saying "I love you" if your beloved can't hear it? (Okay, it's not completely pointless but I hope you get the idea.)

That's related to the point of Lady Grey's post on Please, Thank You, and Denial . For me, there are two big caveats in referring to this post: 1) The relationship that kicked off Lady Grey's thinking is very different from ours, and 2) Lady Grey's relationship is very different from ours. Nevertheless, I get a thrill when she says:

When I'm faced with [a gift from my submissive], I simply say "that's very nice" or something of that sort, which acknowledges the gift without having to say thank you. I'm not thankful that he's brought me a gift any more than I'm thankful that he's following my orders. It's expected. Following orders is expected. Being given gifts is expected. There's a constant expectation and assumption of service in a D/s situation ... and the only "please" or "thank you" that will be heard is when it's coming out of my sub's mouth.

I have commented before that my beloved is a hyper-considerate person. "Please" and "Thank you" are in her nature. And while I wouldn't try to change that, I felt that it was important to acknowledge where a service being performed by a submissive is different from a gift being given in a symmetrical relationship (for lack of a better term - our relationship is asymmetrical, which isn't to say un-equal, but which is probably worth its own post). Put another way, I do things for my beloved not ONLY to make her happy, but to tell her that I love her. So for us, finding a way to distinguish that might be very useful.

Obedience is something I get to do less often, which makes it more fun and more valuable. That having been said, I'd like to do it more (unlike some other pleasurable activities which I could mention...). Obedience is my way of answering her implied question: "Do you love me?" The harder obedience is, the more, to me, it says, "Yes, I love you." That's the value of her making tasks harder, or making them gratuitously hard. She sends me little "I love you"s by text or IM on some days - little silly things to do like not sitting down for a period of time or not eating something, or eating something I don't like. That way she says to me, "I want you to be thinking about me" and "You love me enough to do this, right?" I am very grateful for those, and I am grateful for the difficulty they present.

Even my nightly check-ins with her by e-mail have that value. They say, "Do you care enough about this relationship dynamic to do the inconvenient thing and e-mail me every night?" Fortunately, the answer is (almost) always "Yes." The consequence for not doing so, is the (harder) reminder, that I said it was, and forces me to contemplate the reason why it didn't happen.

How it’s going, what’s working, and what’s not

My beloved “suggested” that I write a post on “how it’s going, what’s working, and what’s not.” So here I am.

How’s it going? At the most basic level, it’s going well because I really feel like I can be all of myself with her. So in that sense, after 40 years of hiding who I am, I don’t have to do that with the person who’s most important to me. That’s pretty darn good, and it’s important to keep that perspective as I run down the rest of this post.

We had two dear friends visiting this weekend, friends who have been through at least one iteration of “going public” with my need to be submissive, an iteration that A) didn’t go anywhere, B) wasn’t very stable in my dynamic with my beloved, and C) didn’t lead us to a life style that worked. But that was a long time ago, and arguably a necessary stepping stone to get to where we are today. All that notwithstanding, it felt very awkward to me not to be able to share with these friends the most important thing going on in my life.

So why not share it? One practical reason is that my beloved was away for the week before our friends arrived, so she and I didn’t have any time to talk about it. But in another sense, it felt like too much information. As far as I know, only one person who knows who I am reads this blog (other than my beloved). And I don’t think that person actually follows it, especially given its sporadic nature of the recent past. And with the agreement and the counters, it feels a little like “too much information” to share with friends. I suppose we could have shared the reality with them without sharing the blog, but as I said, we didn’t have an opportunity to talk about it.

But perhaps more importantly, my relationship with my beloved now seems to be more about “how we are with each other” than “what we do.” I think perhaps it’s a little more “how” and less “what” than I might prefer, but in the end we’re looking for a balance that “tells” me (emotionally) what I need to hear, but is fun and satisfying for my beloved. So if that’s got more “how” and less “what” than I might prefer, maybe that’s OK.

What is the most important thing to me about the “Female Led” aspect of our relationship? (So called for lack of a better term, but I think it’s not a bad term in and of itself.) It’s her knowing that I’m happy doing her will because it’s her will. And my knowing that she knows this. Not to wander into the hall of mirrors here, but it’s the back-and-forth knowledge and communication that’s important to me. Doing something hard is, well, hard. Doing something hard but knowing that my beloved knows I’m doing something hard is very satisfying. I haven’t figured out a way of asking for that feedback and I don’t think we’ve naturally come up with one yet, so that’s something to work on.

I think it’s involved in the idea I have (never successfully implemented yet) of disparity play and the talk and acknowledgement of that play. And it’s part of the same dynamic as orgasm control by my beloved – orgasm control being a particularly potent form of disparity play: “I’m getting pleasure and you’re not because we agreed that that’s how it would be.”

So one aspect of what’s not working for me would be my beloved being annoyed at my not coming upstairs because I’m doing my evening chores (writing daily reports, managing cash in her wallet, finding her cell phone, etc). Believe me, at that point, it’s not because I don’t want to come upstairs. But if I’ve left them to the end of the evening and they have to be done….

Perhaps I need an established consequence for each of the chores left undone, so that she could just say, “Come upstairs,” and it’s my misfortune that I didn’t get things done. Perhaps she would be comfortable saying “Are all your chores done?”, that being a command to get them done immediately.

Getting back to the idea of talk and acknowledgment of disparity play, which is kind of like teasing (in a good way), I have this fantasy (not completely articulated) about a dialog we would have where I need to admit and acknowledge the privileges I’ve given up, in a conversation with her. There’s something about the power of the spoken word that this invokes: Just waiting to come to bed is less powerful than, “Do you want to come to bed?” “Yes” “You will when I invite you to.” The bratty sub answers that question, “No” and then spends an unpleasant night not in bed or cold on the floor without a covering.

In summary, what’s hard is when we’re not talking about what we’re doing. Talking about what we’re doing is, to me, almost as important as doing it because it assures me that this isn’t all in my head. I can pretend my beloved wants me to do something and then do it, but what’s the point of that? I’d rather do one tenth the “stuff” because she wants me to than ten times as much because she’s like “Yeah, I guess you could do that.” But if I do one tenth without communication, then that’s almost no different than doing the ten-times-as-much without communication, and less fun.

Now that there’s a counter on the site, I can remember how long it’s been since I had an orgasm. Being required to know that number and report it on demand would be another verbal form of disparity play: I need to know, she doesn’t.

I don’t know if this is really a summary of what’s working and what’s not, but it’s what came to mind. Often when writing prior posts I’d get all hot-and-bothered, and I was waiting for that to happen when writing this one. But I think that dynamic has changed since we’ve started doing stuff, rather than my just fantasizing about stuff. Does that mean the energy has gone out of the blog? I think not, but it has changed a bit.

Our Arrangement

It's taken much longer than I expected to put up the essence of our arrangement. Partly that's due to the fact that I wanted to think about it and give some context to the things we do and decisions we've made. On two occasions I was delayed because I made inappropriate decisions that resulted in writing a number of lines during the time that I intended to work on this.

In the course of editing, I realized that the arrangement we are working on has three parts - the context, the privileges and obligations we've taken on (or, in my case, privileges I've renounced), and the rituals we use to remind ourselves of what we're doing. The first two parts are posted here; rituals will have to wait for another evening.

Context
My beloved and I live in a “Female Led Relationship” because I need tangible manifestations of the love and connection that we share. My beloved has agreed to provide those manifestations in contexts that are either fun or useful to her or that carry great meaning for me. Those manifestations of love and connection take form as a privileges I have surrendered and obligations I have assumed. These allow my beloved to restore those privileges at her prerogative, often linked to my performance of the obligations I have taken on.

My beloved’s awareness of my behavior, which she demonstrates by restoring privileges or requiring me to perform some action, fulfills my need to feel cared about.

Since this arrangement came in to being through my need, I have an incentive to keep my beloved engaged and interested in the arrangement. I do so by constantly seeking ways to be of service, doing things for her which she finds pleasant, which she finds it convenient not to have to worry about, or which are tedious and she would otherwise have to do.

The particulars of the arrangement between me and my beloved are things that work for us - things that fit those three categories of service, privileges that feel meaningful, and activities that are fun.

The Particulars of Our Arrangement
The most important thing in my life, after the children’s well-being, my beloved’s well-being, and my own well-being, is this Female Led Relationship with my beloved.

I have renounced the following privileges:

1. I have no privacy in my thoughts. I have an obligation to volunteer to my beloved any thoughts regarding our arrangement. I have an obligation to answer all questions candidly and without reservation.
2. I have no right to make commitments for myself or the family. When decisions are necessary and my beloved is not available, I will, as much as possible, make commitments conditional upon her approval.
3. I have no right to disagree with a decision made by my beloved. I may contribute information to her decision by asking, ‘May I contribute some thoughts to this?’ This includes, but is not limited to situations where she is missing important information, or her decision would jeopardize my work or make my submission obvious to observers.
4. I have no right to stimulate my own penis, which my beloved regards as hers. I may ask her for permission to do so, at least 24 hours after any other sexual activity, and not more than once every 24 hours.
5. I have no right to orgasm unless invited to do so by my beloved. When stimulated, if I believe an orgasm is imminent, I will advise my beloved.
6. I have no right to sleep other than naked. When away from home, I may ask for the privilege of sleeping not-naked.
7. I have no right to sleep in my beloved’s bed. She may invite me to her bed when she chooses. When we are apart, I may text her with a request to get in to bed when I am ready to go to sleep. Absent a response, I may get in to bed an hour later. Unless invited into bed, I may only fall asleep on the floor beside my beloved’s side of the bed.
8. I have no right to post to the blog. I may prepare drafts which my beloved will approve, edit, disapprove, or send back for editing.
9. I have no right to read, write, view, or listen to submission-related material while at work.
10. I have no right to spend any money on submission-related material (on-line or other) without asking my beloved.

I have assumed the following obligations:

1. Keep track of my failure to perform any of my obligations, as soon as I notice them, or as soon as I am notified of them by my beloved.
2. Report to my beloved once a day, by e-mail, reporting short-comings in my performance, listing consequences in force for previous short-comings, detailing activities I liked during the day, and providing other observations on the FLR.
3. Review once a day with my beloved, my performance during the day.
4. Be able to list at any time the consequences in force for prior short-comings in performance. Failure to be able to so do results in the short-coming in performance remaining unresolved.
5. Immediately obey any request made when my beloved begins a sentence with “I want,” “I need,” or “You will,” or anything in the tone of a command.
6. Make my beloved a double latte every workday morning when we are both at home, and other mornings on request.
7. Keep gas in cars at all times.
8. Keep cash in my beloved’s wallet at all times.
9. Plug in my beloved’s cell phone every night.
10. Be responsible for some personal-care items for my beloved.
    

My beloved has agreed to do the following things for me:

1. Honestly tell me how she feels about our arrangement.
2. Impose a consequences for obligations I did not fulfill, based on the daily report. She will tell me what consequence is a result of what unfulfilled obligation, and will try to choose consequences that feel connected to the failure.
3. Impose consequences at her whim, and tell me that’s why she chose them.
4. Text me when I fail to do something, or she is displeased about something.
5. Give me feedback about how my service is working for her during the daily report.
6. From time to time, ask me what consequences are in force, and what they’re for.
7. Decide when and how we have sex. Tell me how she feels after each time we have sex of any kind. (If she forgets, I may ask.)
   
8. Love me for who I really am.

My beloved wrote, "The idea is for our FLR to be the most important thing in his life now, and him to get validation from me." Those words have been ringing in my brain since she wrote them, and I'm a little at a loss as to how to proceed with the blog, and what to say.

My beloved is out of town, so it's a quiet night in the Unremarkable household. I thought I'd put up some miscellaneous notes.

She has been exploring sex in different ways, mostly ways that I can provide her with more pleasure. Though it started off (years ago) as a "submissive mindset" trope, the notion that her pleasure really is my pleasure has become true. The way our arrangement works now (and I really will post the whole thing some time, after the editor in me gets through with it), I only get physical sexual stimulation from her, or with her permission.

Looking back at the blog (one of the reasons to have it), I realize that since September of 2006 I haven't had an orgasm without her permission. For most of this period, she would say "Yes" if I asked her, but finding the moment was always something of a challenge, so the loss of control over my own physical orgasm was rather real.

We've changed that scheme a bit recently. I am not to touch my penis for pleasure without her permission. And while I used to be able to ask for permission to orgasm, now, we have a prescribed set of outcomes, none of which include pleasurable orgasm for me - either stimulation without orgasm, or ruined orgasms (ejaculation with no immediate stimulation - "Sarah" described it well in Male Chastity Punishment That Really Works).

Though many don't like dice games, I originally made up a little game of chance which my beloved changed in to a dice game. I think she found it convenient to see all the possible outcomes in one place, and easy to adjust the probabilities of the outcomes with only six possibilities per roll. The first time she saw me roll "Stimulate yourself without using your hands for 5 minutes, and then ruin your orgasm," I think she was surprised. I was surprised too. It was very effective, leaving me physically discharged but very submissive.

The "disparity play" aspect of her watching me thrash around was also very hot.

Since then, all of my sexual pleasure comes from her. Either she chooses to stimulate me with her hand (and then stop), or we're having intercourse and she wants me to orgasm because it feels good to her. Maybe some day she'll give me a hand-job, who knows? I know I enjoy the tease.

I find that my physical response to all this stimulation-without-sex is odd: rather than getting incredibly horny physically, I find it harder to get a hard-on. I find that the stimulation is mainly in my head, and if my penis knows it's not going to get off (and how can it "know" anything?) it doesn't seem to bother with the hydraulics of it all. But if my brain is stimulated by submission or disparity play (a concept I thank Subservient Husband for), or service, then the hard-on comes unbidden.

I say this all because we've decided to add a time-since-last-orgasm counter to the blog. Not because we're obsessed by the number. Just the opposite. One of the chastity-related bloggers I read (I forget which one) pointed out that he wasn't interested in how long it had been since his last orgasm, that it was more about the submission than the lack of spurting. I agree. So much so that we figured we'd forget if we didn't "write it down" somewhere, and a blog counter seemed like the place.

Earlier in our relationship, I've tried keeping logs in my smartphone about what kind of orgasm and when, and how many of hers for each of mine, and all that. No luck. I don't seem to care enough. So the counter may disappear at any time if we figure that we don't care or forgot to update it some long time ago. But for now, here it is.

Blogging vs. Actually Living It

Jamie's beloved here. I'm glad that Jamie has learned so much about what he wants and needs from all of you out there in cyberspace. And I'm glad he's found community and validation for who he is. On the other hand, I'm not sorry if he has less tine to blog now. The idea is for our FLR to be the most important thing in his life now, and him to get validation from me. That sounds egotistical, but that's where we're going, which necessarily puts blogging and reading blogs lower on Jamie's priorities.

We're planning to continue to post our thoughts on this blog. Jamie is going to start another blog for his daily performance reports, so we have a record of them. We'll also post our Arrangement -- the agreement about what we do each other. It's a work in progress, but we can share what we've come up with so far, along with the list of consequences that Jamie has suggested (rewards and punishments) that I impose based on how well he lives up to his part of the agreement.

I hope you find them useful!

The Morning After

I'm fairly sure I've mentioned that many years ago (probably 20), when my beloved and I were making a very early experiment in an FLR (and I'm not sure the term had been invented at the time), she asked, "So how would today have been different if we had been doing this stuff?"

At the time, and for many years after, I had no answer. I think I'm beginning to develop one.

For the past two-and-a-half weeks, my beloved and I have been exploring a different understanding of our relationship. There's been much more sex involved than I had anticipated (mostly for her, some for me), a lot of talking, and a lot of experimentation in terms of behaviors she wants from me. In short, it's been just about top-of-mind for me, and I'm guessing only slightly less for her.

For us, that couldn't last. Not for bad reasons, but because we both have lives and interests and activities. So ironically, when things were all in flux, with kid summer schedules, separate vacations, etc, it was easier for this to be the most prominent thing between us.

Today we're off doing all sorts of different things and FLR needs to become part of our existing lives, not replace them. I think we're succeeding at that, slowly, since it's early days.

If you followed us around for a day, the most salient thing you'd see would be our daily check-in, which right now seems to be happening right before bed, but is designed to happen any time in the evening. And our going-to-bed ritual, based on the fact that the bed has become hers, to which I am only allowed by invitation.

We're testing out a mantra for me to repeat when entering and leaving the house. I'll report to her on that on Sunday evening and she'll decide where she wants to go with it.

And I'm responsible for some personal care items for her - mostly culled from the now-defunct Ms. Rika web site - massages, cell phone maintenance, cars, wallet, etc.

What's much more important, however, is what's different between my beloved and myself:

1) I'm 100% here. Expanding on what I wrote a few posts ago, I have no privacy in my thoughts. She can (and has, once or twice, to my great delight) ask at any time what I'm thinking and get and uncensored answer. And I will ask questions and volunteer reactions and emotions, so that she knows that there's nothing going on in my head that she isn't party to.

2) My beloved is exploring this FLR or power-relationship or whatever-it-is with me. She is looking for information from me, and on-line. She is looking for what works for her in all this.

3) Because we're unequivocally in this together, she can say, "That's too much" or "I don't want to go there" and I don't take it as a rebuke; it's more communication and expectation setting. If there's something in "there" that's really important to me, it's my responsibility to unpack it and find the essence, so we can talk about it.

There's more to this, but I don't think I'm going to get it today, and would rather have this posted than wait for it to be perfect.

I have two great fears, and our communication helps keep them under control. One is that I'm doing this "alone" - that is, it's all in my head and she's just going "unhuh" enough for me to maintain the fantasy in my own head. Fortunately, I have to report to her every day on how the day is going, and once I do that, it's impossible for me to get deluded that way. Rather, I keep being stunned by how much she's doing for me.

The other is that she's engaged in this, but she's laughing at my silliness all the way along. Again, I got to ask her that directly this morning, and she cleared me up: She's amused by the power disparity, when I have to do things and she doesn't. I hadn't realized that she was noticing, and I'm tickled pink that she is, and that she finds it amusing.

There are two places I hope we get to. One, I've mentioned to my beloved, and she sees it as plausible: That she gets to the point where this style of relationship works well enough for her that she would be reluctant to "go back." The other I haven't had a chance to mention yet: that at some point during our daily review, she brings up something I should have done that I wasn't aware of. In other words, that she's expecting more of me than I realized. Not that I fell down on the expectations I knew about, but that she expects more.

Other bloggers have noted (and disappeared after noting) that once one really starts in an FLR, there's not so much time left over for blogging. That's my experience. There have been several occasions when I had something I wanted to blog, or some subject that I wanted to cover, but by the time I get a moment to do it, things have moved on. I'll attempt not to disappear, but will be interested to see how much blogging I do.

Learning by doing

Insights come in little drips. Repeatedly.

My beloved and I have a ritual in the evenings that helps us structure our conversation about my submission and her work with me on finding a place from which she can celebrate who I am.

She has been generous the past week or so with little commands - I suspect we'll want to come up with a cute name for them. But they're huge for me. I was at a concert and she was away when she texted me to "put one foot in front of the other for two minutes." I did, and marveled at how it made me feel: connected to her, content, in short, "loved." Why?

I'm currently going on the theory that people hear different things in different ways. I am perfectly able to hear "I love you" from my beloved, and internalize it in an intellectual way. But there are aspects of my life where I learn much more kinesthetically, and I'm wondering if emotional learning is one of those aspects. If my beloved tells me to do something, then the muscle memory, and attention, the time, the feeling of doing it penetrates my emotions much more deeply. In short, doing the arbitrary, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes inconvenient things she sets for me, allows me to emotionally hear "I love you" in a way that I can't otherwise.

What? And Why Now?

My beloved pointed out that it is interesting that we've embarked on this adventure (for the third? time) at a moment when we both have new jobs. Not only is change in the air, but my job involves managing both a (small) staff and a lot of projects - the former, a first for me.

One of my biggest issues in my work career has been self-confidence (or lack thereof). Not with regard to my skills in my field of work, but with regard to myself. With staff, it comes out as having to remind myself that demands on my staff by others is a validation of the people I selected and of the work our group is doing.

I can't have that confidence without the acceptance of myself that comes with actually being who I am in the most important relationship in my life - my marriage. My beloved's acceptance of me, not just grudging, but engaged with who I am is key to that.

So what's different this time? Or the time before that? Or the time before that? I just searched for old posts regarding "Gardening," because I recall that the last time we tried this, I ended up rototilling new garden beds, which is not my idea of a good time. But, as I recall, it was right at the beginning of another attempt at this, so I was interested to see what I had been writing in the blog.

It was the throes of starting up, a moment of passion and new love, similar to where we are now. What I am passionately committed to is that we're not going to let go of this change in our relationship. Which doesn't mean it's always going to be at the passionate level it is now - not that I would complain, mind you . But experience tells me that life seldom works that way.

In one sense, this is working when it becomes unremarkable - it is what we do. Our going-to-bed ritual is not from a "vanilla" relationship. When it's just "what we do," I'll feel we will have established this in some way. When she sees something I'm doing as being hard, and insists anyway, or provides consequences anyway, I'll feel that this has come to be the expectation, rather than a "game" we're playing (even though I suspect there will always be game-like aspects to it).

The place where we're succeeded so far with this is orgasm control symbolized by the necklace. even when nothing was going on power-wise in our relationship, I would still ask her permission to masturbate. As I've commented before, the asking was really really important. I'm hoping we come up with other behaviors like that - keeping gas in the cars, money in her wallet, and her cell phone charged are three that I can imagine. What those lack, though, that asking for permission to masturbate has is the element of communication. And the communication is key. That's what says to me (as I feel I'm saying over and over again, but I think it's a measure of how important it is to me, that my thoughts keep coming back to it, as "all roads lead to Rome") "this isn't just in your head; we're doing this; I'm engaged with you on this." So more than the routines of gas and money and cell phones, it will be something where we communicate.

That's where this "Oh, I'll 'forget' to do gas" behavior that so many submissives engage in comes from. It's the plea, "Are we still in communication?; do you care?" And the dominant notices and punishes, then the submissive gets that communication feedback. That's very very powerful, and unless there's communication in some other way, that dynamic is not going away. The submissive isn't going to get to serve, over the long term, because that behavior is a pain in the ass for the dominant. The dominant isn't going to get whatever service might be convenient to her.

So if failure-to-perform isn't about a plea for communication, and punishment isn't the communication that the submissive craves, then punishment can work as "Fern" describes in the post linked over on the side-bar.

(And while I'm OK with the term "submissive," I'm not happy with "dominant" because that's not who my beloved is, but it'll have to do for now.)

The other thing that's different is my attitude towards all this, and that I lay to reading blogs by younger people who are so much more self-accepting than I am about this. And to listening to Masocast, where people who do this kind of thing actually talk about this in matter-of-fact ways. Emotionally, I think I've finally come to understand that I am not a bad, flawed, broken, incomplete, dirty, perverted person for wanting/needing this. And I am so fortunate that my beloved has agreed to come on this journey with me.

That transformation is so fraught: "You are not the person I married; you've been hiding from me for all these years; you've been living a lie and made me live it too; you're going to make me change my life and I like the life I have now." All these are reasonable reactions. (And though this wasn't as "out of the blue" for her as it is for many couples, I'm still grateful that she has chosen not to see it in any of those ways, and to explore with me.)

I'm struck with the parallels with 12-step groups. That's not a path I have a personal experience with - I only know it from popular culture, friends, and a little reading. But the acceptance of myself seems parallel. And so does the part about surrendering my thoughts to my beloved. If I understand 12-step, one usually has a "sponsor" to whom one can be open about temptations, failures (and successes, I guess). My beloved is doing that for me, and my thoughts and actions stand naked before her.

I'm really lucky she accepts me.

Which is why I feel like the luckiest guy around.