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.

Sex as Proxy. And on Being Happy.

"Ken and Emily Addison" publish a blog and web site and book called "Around Her Finger" that recommends female led relationships, mainly through orgasm control. Every month they answer some letters on their blog. I found this one particularly affecting and really identify with it.

"My desire for sex is a proxy for my desire to achieve an intimate connection with my wife. I also know that I can achieve a higher level intimate connection without sexual intercourse. If she affords me a dominant intimate encounter, a moment of connection between us where she exerts her authority through verbal cues and allows some form of intimacy to occur, then I have received something more satisfying than intercourse.“

From http://aroundherfinger.blogspot.com/2010/08/august-2010.html the second of the "letters from men"

Each time I go back and read that I go "yup, that's mostly what it's all about." (Though I know denial and control are also really important to me.)

I've been irrationally happy all day, and I'll lay that to serving my beloved last night even though she and I are apart. She left me a garden and kitchen task which I probably wouldn't have done otherwise. It took about two hours and while each and every moment of it wasn't fun, there was a quiet sense of contentment that has lasted over into today.

My beloved also gave me a lot of attention last night for which I am also very grateful - and which may have something to do with my happy state. First, while using the computer, she told me to type only with my right hand. Then she upped the ante and told me to get naked. Finally she ordered me upstairs and to masturbate without cumming, using a little leather cock ring we have. After which she gave me permission to go to bed - something I cannot do without permission.

We worked out how our arrangement would work when we're apart, and we tweak it as needed based on what works and on reality. But I feel much closer to her than I usually do when we're apart, and house chores are getting done, so what's not to like?

I made a note to myself that I wanted to write a blog post on "Am I a Service Submissive" and I still want to do that, but I realized last night that I want to concentrate on ways to serve my beloved. She's doing an awful lot of work on this. There are a couple of personal care items she likes. Beyond that, I'm going to have to think about what I can do, and be attentive to anything that seems to work for her.

Quick Update on Many Changes

I've felt bad leaving a somewhat negative post at the top of the blog for so long.

But the quick update is that life is changing as my beloved takes control. I think we're in the process of discovering or building something that is going to work for us. I worry that all this is is "work" for my beloved, but I'm hoping either that's a misplaced worry, or we'll rearrange things so it's not true.

Right now, we're apart for a week, which makes it a little difficult to work this in to our "typical everyday life," since in every day life we're together.

I asked for permission to buy a month at House of Gord, and she allowed me to - a first for me! First time I've ever spent money on porn. Many thanks due to my beloved!

I try to stay out of her hair so she can have a good vacation with the family.

She left me a "honey do" list (which is more in the way of orders) for a few things that need to be done around the house. This helps me feel that I'm actually being useful for her. And every once in a while, she swoops in to my life with an order to do something, like "go to bed now" or "For the rest of the evening, kneel if you're using the computer." These help me feel connected to her and keep my sense of being controlled very alive.

We are very much a work in progress, and I suppose success is far from assured. But we're working together, and 35 years of experience tells me that when we do that, we get some place good.

Thank you, my beloved.

Not A Good Way to End the Day

My beloved is very smart and no-nonsense. In my performance report yesterday I reported that I had spent some of my first hour at work reading submission-related material. This was the second time I had to admit to going outside the rule she has established, and her concern went beyond the confines of our arrangement. "Either," she said, "you're trying to be bratty or you have an addiction. I don't believe you're trying to be bratty, but if you have an addiction, it calls into question this whole arrangement."

I think she's willing to explore something very different from the normative relationship in our culture, but I don't think she's willing to enable an addictive behavior.

So which is it? Being totally honest, putting at risk the most hopeful thing that I feel had happened to my psyche in 20 years, I'll say that I don't know.

I'd like to say that for sure it's just bad work habits and a reaction to a stressful week at work. And I think that.s some of it. But I can't in good conscience say that there isn't an addictive component to it.

What to do about that is another question. If there was a kink-aware or kink-friendly therapist or marriage counselor around to go to for advice that would be just the ticket, but my year of seven therapists taught me that it's silly to assume that.

I'm hoping that the strong draw of material on-line will wane as we do stuff, and that until then self discipline combined with my beloved as a support resource I can call upon when that threatens to fail will get me through.

What was much more upsetting was the look of disappointment, almost betrayal in my beloved's eyes as we had this conversation. She's working incredibly hard to create something that works for both of us, and this threatens to say that I've lured her on to an impossible task under false pretenses.

I don't want this to be so and will do everything in my power to make it not be so, and to make this easier for her rather than harder.

Which is why I'm siting in the parking lot before work writing this on my phone.

And now, to work.

A Momentous Week

After reading the blog and some long and heartfelt conversation, I had to leave on a two day trip. so just when we were in a place where things could have gotten interesting, there was a hiatus. And it turns out, it was a hiatus which my beloved put to good use.

From what we talked about the other night, she put together a draft "arrangement", about which we had a great deal of conversation including a scad of texts just after I wrote my last post. By the end of writing that post I had gotten to a state of surrender where I think it would have been ok with me for my beloved to decide to start the arrangement any time she chose. In the event, she chose when I arrived home from my trip at about midnight. We'd been texting and talking and sharing Google docs all evening so the only surprise was her decision to start right then. (Not that there haven't been surprises subsequently!)

I don't know what her thinking was but we have a very busy week with family commitments and my work commitments so she may have decided just to go for it.

We are talking a lot. This to me is the most important thing. We talked about what derailed us in the past and I think it was largely not talking due to my shame and my beloved's ambivalence. For my part, I'm working very hard at radical surrender as part of my practice of this. Specifically that is the surrender of my private thoughts. As much as I as I can manage it, I have no private thoughts, especially about our arrangement. Anything I can formulate coherently is available to my beloved and if it isn't horribly out of context at the time it comes up, I tell her.

Along with that goes honesty on outing myself when I try to slack off or look for loopholes, a thing which submissives seem to be prone to. If I can't fix it in the moment, my beloved gets an email or text about it later as part of my performance report for the day. As someone who hid much of his interior life, since it was based on kink that I was ashamed of, this is huge and radical and transformative.and while I expect my beloved to do the same regarding our arrangement (at least while it's in its formative stages), I don't necessarily expect reciprocity from her on the lack of privacy on her thoughts. It's part of the asymmetry in the relationship which I find very hot, like her being able to use the bed at will while I need too wait for an invitation or her ability to have sex at will while I need to ask permission.

I could go on for a long time and hope to, but lunch hour is over and I'm prohibited from taking time at work to post, so more later.

I do believe I'm the happiest man in the whole world.

Waiting is the Hardest Part

This is the hardest part. I'm on a two day trip, in fact on my way home on the train. We've talked (well, mostly IM'ed and traded document revisions and e-mails) about what an arrangement might look like. So even our mundane interactions are colored, in my view, with the impendingness of the thing. As a result, I'm happier and more relaxed and engaged. But we haven't done anything different. So from my beloved's point of view, things are great - no uncomfortable changes on her part, happier Jamie.

On my part, I'm dying to start doing something different. But I don't want to press her; I want this to be her initiative, since it seems that she's willing to take it. But darn the waiting is hard. On the one hand, I've waited 40 years, what's another day or week or month. On the other hand, just from our conversations, I feel like I've tasted what it might be like to do what we can do. Or maybe I've just fantsized about it. Either way, the waiting is hard.

And I wonder if the waiting is part of the surrender. It certainly ups the ante for my beloved. Or maybe it doesn't. One the one hand, I will surrender and trust that in the not-indefinite future, my beloved will accept my need for her control and my submission and my service, in whatever combination those things please her or she's willing to do for me, will happen. Kind of like chastity play in a sense. On the other hand, if nothing ever happens - we start the arrangement but it's no different from what we do now - we still get to talk every week or whenever our checkins are, and I can tell her how crazy I am. Assuming I can make it that long.

By which I talk myself into just chilling out and surrendering, but it's not easy. Perhaps by the end of the evening my beloved and I will have talked and things will be different. Though I took a look at her draft notes on our arrangement, and I fear not so much. I'll post those eventually (if she approves). On the other other hand, before we start the arrangement, I'm free to ask for what I want, so I guess the lesson is that that's what I ought to do.

What we talked about last night

My beloved described it as a two level discussion - the meta discussion about what the parameters were around our arrangement, and possible aspects of the arrangement itself.

She read the entire blog, which is a little scary to me since I really don't remember what I wrote back in the early days. But I think she got that it is a snapshot of where I am at any given moment. It's also wierd writing about her in the third person given that she's participating in the blog now.

One of my fantasies was for her to approve these blog posts. Her concern is that this might mean that I was no longer comfortable writing everything in the blog. I don't think that's a problem, given that the whole purpose of the thing is for there to be full communication between us.

In the event, she's agreed to do so, not for the reasons that have been floated in some other blogs, as to keep the content appropriate (though I guess she could do that if it's what she wanted). But more to ensure that she knows everything that's on my mind. So this is the first post that she's read and approved.

We didn't decide anything last night on the "possible aspects of the arrangement", but threw out a lot of ideas. One thing she was adamant about was "no blogging at work." To the extent that I've done this (and I have), it was stupid, and she's right to insist that I not do so. Not, I guess that it matters - if she says so, that's how it goes.

She talked about how she chooses to view this - as a game, as a deal, or as an arrangement. Which just goes to show how words are loaded. She reminded me that a long time ago when she referred to this as a game, I blogged about how upset I got about that. I don't remember it, but will look for it in the blog. Her point is that people take games seriously, and I agreed - thinking of Sarah at MaleChastityBlog.com. Sarah's take on this is that it's a game she plays with her husband, but none the less serious for that. I think we agreed that this confusion over words was behind us. Because what's most important to me is that she take this seriously - that it not be "she's humoring me" or "look at the silly thing" we're doing (which is the conntation I think I gave to "game" before.)

On the other hand, part of the reason we communicated so poorly about this in the past was my perception that she really didn't want to think about this. So to the extent that we could put an arrangement in place, like kneeling before bed, if it wasn't working for me, I didn't feel like it was a good idea to bring up my reservations because I was afraid she's say, "Oh, fine. We agreed to do this thing and now you're trying to micro-manage it. Remember, I'm not the one who wants to be doing this." She agreed that this had been true back in the early early days (would you believe almost 20 years ago) that we were doing this, but that was a long time ago.

Regarding the seriousness of the thing, she compared it to the arrangement we have with orgasm control and the gold chain she gave me a long time ago. As long as I'm wearing it, I need to ask her for permission for an orgasm. This is inconvenient for me, since life and family commitments often interfere with just being able to go up to her and say "Could you take this thing off so I can toss one off?" So, often, I'm wanting relief but unable to get it. Which is just the kind of control I crave.

We talked about extending this kind of control to other areas, without getting in to any specifics. I did share my fantasy about "high protocol days" or times; times when I'd have a set of rules that are too strict to be followed realistically over the long term, but that would work for an hour, or a day, or maybe even a weekend.

I also shared how totally hot Kathy's arrangement with her husband is, in which she snaps her fingers and he has to kowtow until she releases him. What that says is, "regardless of what else we're doing or how mundane life is at the moment, you're always under my control". And that's the reenforcement that I crave most. And it doesn't have to be something as submissive as kowtowing. I joked that it could be "touch your finger to your nose until I tell you to stop." The point is the control, not the activity. She was concerned to figure out three classes of these: ones that we could do when we're alone (easiest), ones that we could do when we're around family and friends (with obvious needs for subtlty), and ones she could IM or text me anywhere. I hadn't thought about the latter two, and was thrilled that her thoughts went that way.

I mentioned my long-term fantasy about "need a cookie" - that there are times when I need an affirmation of this relationship. I've always thought of those as "I need a cookie," and my thought was that she'd have a "cookie jar" of things she could tell me to do. I think the most important part of that to me is to know that she's not laughing at me for needed that. I was pretty well reassured on that point.

We didn't talk about consequences, though we skirted around them a little. I mentioned that writing lines seems to have gotten popular in this part of the blogosphere recently. That got us in to a discusson about how this kind of relationship skirts parent/child issues, a place we totally don't want to go. But my beloved pointed out that this could be equally well framed as supervisor/worker issues. I did mention the "pressing a penny to the wall with your nose" meme, which has no erotic value for me, but that's the point.

We talked about who we might become if we were to do this. She is (rightfully) concerned that we'll become my parents - a very controlling and bitchy mother and a very sweet but down-trodden father. I suggested we go more for the model of her mother, who in the final days of her terminal illness was joyously imperious, and who we all thought was having a brief taste fo the imperious old woman she never got to be. And while my beloved pointed out that it got a little tedious after a while, I pointed out that the advantages of doing the relationship consciously as we are is that it won't get tedious - it's what I signed up for.

I also pointed out that I think she and Thumper's Belle are not dissimilar in many ways. When he talks about Belle's concern that the people around her be happy (though I can't find the link right now), that very much strikes a chord in how my beloved relates to those around her.

Just in terms of communicating, I said that the two nicest words she could say to me are "I want." (Thinking about it this morning, I realized "you will" or "you are going to" work equally well) because then I get to do things for her. This got us in to the difference between doing things because we love each other, and doing things because we're in this peculiar relationship. I wan't totally able to decode that difference, but to date, when she asks me to paint her toenails (to take one example), I do because it's something I can do for her that she doesn't enjoy doing. But in the context of the relationship, if she says, "I want you to paint my toenails" it means something very different: we're doing this peculiar thing, and you're doing this for me. As I said above, it's all about the acknowledgement of the relationship, more than the actual activities themselves. I'm sure there's mroe exploration to be done around that, but it seems like a good place to start.

Then she told me she wanted me to kiss every inch of her body, and one thing led to another....

So we didn't actually resolve anything, except that we're going to do "this", whatever "this" turns out to be. And I was incredibly appreciative that she read the blog in and saw it as a constructive thing. And she was very gracious about appreciating image of her that I painted in the blog.

Sharing This Blog with My Beloved

Last Saturday night, I found that I had so much on my mind relating to this blog, and whatever the intersection is among wife-led-marriage, female-led-relationships, dominance and submission, discipline, and whatever other labels one might care to attach, that I had to share the existance of this blog with my beloved.

We had, as I recall, a good, if brief, conversation about it, after which she asked me to remind her of the url a couple of times. She read it during her business trip earlier this week.

It feels great to have shared this. There's so much, from the profound to the trivial that I think about relating to either the blog or the things I read in other blogs linked from here, that it felt very isolating not to be able to share that.

After she got home, we talked about it. That conversation is the subject of the next post.

Getting to "The Conversation"

I mentioned this blog to my beloved for the third time recently; the first time was a couple of years ago when I wanted to share it with another member of our extended family. There was no way I was going to do that without first telling her about it, but it turned out to be in the middle of a much larger conversation about our relative and about kink and fantasy in general. I reminisced about the "Man From Uncle" episode that got me started and she described a "Star Trek" episode that was very revealing about her character. Nice to know there's still stuff to discover after 25 plus years married!

But all that stuff swamped the discussion about the blog and, as it tuned out, she forgot the url and never asked about it. I was a little disappointed but didn't want to nag about it so end of conversation.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned it again - I don't remember if it was on our vacation (when we had another conversation that I'll try to remember to blog about) or later. But as subsequently came out in conversation, she forgot the url again. Finally last Saturday I mentioned it a third time (which was when all the revelations about the previous mentions came out) and she agreed that the fact that she couldn't remember the url probably meant something and we left it at that. Finally, on her way out of town she texted that she was looking for the blog but couldn't remember the address. (Guess it really isn't that memorable!) I texted it to her and later she remarked on the fact that there was a lot to catch up on there.

I'm so glad the blog is out in the open between us. As "she" put it on http://forever-hers2010.blogspot.com/ secrets are really really bad things to keep in a relationship and this one, though well within the bounds of what we had negotiated, was still corrosive, mainly because I'd read about stuff and be contemplating it and be unable to mention it. That's over now at least as far as I can tell, or at least I certainly want it to be. Some of it was trivial stuff like finding an ad for a campsite we go to beside someone's blog post and some of it was more profound, like the effects listening to Masocast has had on me.

My beloved sent me an email saying she'd read the whole blog (wow, she reads fast, but I knew that) and wondered if email might be a good way to discuss this stuff. She said some other stuff that was very very sweet and understanding as well.

So now my thought is whether this blog might be a good way of discussing this. The Forever Hers blog is such a frank and helpful discussion between a husband and wife that I might hope we could do the same and be a resource for others as well.

At least for starters I think I'd like my beloved to approve all the posts to this blog. That way she'd know there's nothing on my mind she doesn't know about and of course it's a delicious control thing for me.

I guess I'll ask her.