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.

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!

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.

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.