Then vs. Now: FLRs & Domestic Discipline — The Things I Got Wrong
I went into our FLR and Domestic Discipline relationship with some preconceived notions. Here are some things I got wrong or didn’t quite understand.
My wife and I started our Domestic Discipline/FLR relationship after we had been married for over ten years. Couples often come to these relationships after first exploring some form of spanking-related or BDSM kink. That wasn’t our course.
Instead, we went from spanking neophytes to jumping into a full-blown Female-dominant Domestic Discipline relationship almost immediately after I discovered a website called The Disciplinary Wives Club (DWC). [Note: I would provide a link, but the current authorized site is experiencing a technical outage.] Other than the stories (as we learned over time, some were more “true to life” than others) and tips on that website, we didn’t have a clue what we were doing.
From the moment I discovered the DWC, something about it drew me in hard. Obsessively hard. I knew that I wanted this lifestyle, but I really had no idea what that meant.
Twenty years later, there are times I still don’t. I’m amazed that after two decades, things still change. My wife retired from her career a couple of years ago, and the change accelerated.
Thus, I’m not sure whether I’m ever going to stop getting things wrong about these relationships. But, here are a handful of things I was clearly wrong about or didn’t really understand well when we jumped into this with both feet all those years ago.
Crying is common.
I discovered the Disciplinary Wives Club at a point where we had experimented, for a very short time, with erotic, play-acted spankings.
I had no adult experience with a real disciplinary/punishment spanking. The stories on the DWC website left with the impression that crying from an adult spanking was very common.
In fact, I went into our first session fully expecting to be brought to tears.
Even though I had suggested we try DD, I was in a state of dread and high anxiety right before that first spanking, and the prospect of sobbing over my wife’s knee was the main source of both the dread and the morbid fascination I felt about the whole thing. Part of me really wanted that kind of humbling, while another part was terrified of it.
Well, almost twenty years later I still haven’t really cried, despite getting some very, very hard spankings.
I’m not alone. After communicating over the years with dozens of men in these lifestyles, I realize that while some men do get to that point of surrender and release where they can cry real tears, it isn’t really all that common. I would estimate it happens for maybe 2 in 10.
It’s all about severity.
When I didn’t cry during that first disciplinary spanking, or during any spankings, I assumed that maybe I just wasn’t being spanked hard enough.
Though, it was hard to imagine what a hard spanking would be like if her standard ones didn’t qualify.
The possibility of tears, and the full-throated emotional surrender they represented, however, continued to be a source of morbid fascination and desire.
Not knowing how to bring them about except by amping up the severity of each spanking session, I became kind of a severity junkie, buying more and more intimidating implements in a quest to receive the kind of spanking that I assumed the guys in those DWC stories were getting.
Now, I should have known better from the start. Somehow, I never noted that most of those DWC stories in which the men sobbed and sobbed involved hairbrush spankings.
I had learned relatively early on that most hairbrush spankings just aren’t all that hard. I’m not saying they can’t be hard, but it takes a very determined spanker and a very heavy hairbrush to deliver a spanking that is remotely comparable to, say, the bath brush or a heavy paddle or strap.
What I didn’t know at that time, and had to experience for myself, is that some instruments really can be too hard, at least if the goal is to surrender, to really accept responsibility and take the “correction” she is trying ot provide.
My quest for more and more severe instruments culminated with some rubber straps that both of us decided were just too much. My decision was all about the fact that the pain was so immediate and shocking that I always went immediately into “man up” mode and couldn’t accept or surrender to the punishment. Instead, I went into a state of pure resistance.
For my wife, the issue was the damage the rubber often did to my butt. She is very capable of giving very hard spankings but the visuals the rubber instruments left made her more than a little squeamish.
Over time, I’ve come to understand that the effectiveness of a spanking isn’t about — or at least is not just about — the severity of the instrument and the energy behind the swats.
Duration, setting, the spanker’s demeanor — all these contribute as much as, or more than, severity to the overall effectiveness of a spanking.
“Effectiveness” is all about behavior modification, accountability, and/or balancing power.
When we first began our FLR with Domestic Discipline, my primary focus was on giving my wife a way to correct and punish behaviors that we both agreed were problems.
The overall goal was to eliminate or reduce those behaviors by holding me accountable. From the beginning, I thought that giving her the “tool” of adult corporal punishment would “even out” the balance of power in a relationship that sometimes felt unbalanced even to me.
That was all well and good and mostly true, but I think it missed some very important nuances.
Although our new arrangement was about giving her more power, in a subtle way I didn’t quite appreciate, I still was looking at it from my own point of view.
I did see adult disciplinary spanking as a way for her to express her dissatisfaction, but I don’t think I really understood that it could serve a purpose for her even if my behavior didn’t actually change at all. There was an element of getting “payback,” of simple retribution and justice, involved in her taking out her dissatisfaction, annoyance and anger on my upturned butt.
I didn’t appreciate that there were going to be spankings that were really all about punishment, with behavior modification a very secondary consideration.
Just how much “real” spankings freaking hurt!
When I brought my wife the idea of trying real disciplinary spankings, I emphasized that these would not be erotic in any way. Rather, they were designed to hurt, and hurt badly. That was what it took to affect behavior, right?
Therefore, at a surface level, I knew what I was getting into.
One spanked husband I know put it this way:
By far the biggest shock — Just how much spankings really hurt! I had read that nothing could actually prepare you for how much they hurt. I even incorporated that idea into some spanking stories I wrote before I had actually experienced being a spanked husband. But, nothing really prepares you for that first real — long and hard — spanking.
I agree with that commenter, but it wasn’t only that “first” real spanking that was a surprise. Somehow, after almost twenty years, the reality of the pain from that first volley of swats never ceases to surprise me.
Over those years, I’ve been spanked dozens and dozens of times, and every single time I’m desperately asking myself why in the world I’ve allowed myself to be in this position again, shocked at how unbearable the pain seems.
I am very sure that when I read the Disciplinary Wives Club for the first time, despite its emphasis on tears and remorse and its advice to wives to err on the side of severity, I had no idea what I was getting into.
Most men in DD relationships are “alphas” who want to yield control.
This was a pre-conception that was all about me projecting my own dynamic onto others.
I was anti-authoritarian, or type-A, or Alpha — whatever term you want to use — and I assumed that most other husbands in these relationships were as well.
I still think many men fit that profile, but I now realize that many others simply like being under their wives’ control because they like following or being controlled in other aspects of their life as well. They are natural submissives with submissive temperaments.
I am not.
My wife would reject domestic discipline as “weird.”
When I first brought the DWC concept to my wife, I thought the most likely outcome was she would reject it as just too kinky for her tastes.
Yet, after her very first time viewing the DWC material, she called to tell me she thought it was “interesting” and instructed me to “go buy a brush.”
After our first few times experimenting with it, she admitted that while she did, in fact, find it more than a little weird, there was enough upside for her to keep experimenting with it.
She recognized that while it was kinky, it went beyond mere kink. It instead offered a real possibility of empowering her and disempowering me, thereby balancing out an otherwise unbalanced relationship.
The maternal aspect.
Early on, I’m not sure I appreciated how much of the DWC dynamic was about “maternal” discipline.
In fact, I was surprised a year or so ago when someone pointed out that a reference to its style of discipline as “maternal” was in the DWC website’s masthead.
For a long time, I didn’t really appreciate how core that “maternal” archetype was to my own desire for DD.
It’s not about wanting a wife to be a a mother in any weird Freudian sense.
Rather, I wanted the kind of strict, imposed, almost involuntary discipline that parental relationships once entailed. It was about the kind of explicit power hierarchy that exists, for the most part, only in families and perhaps in the military.
Even once I started appreciating my own gravitation toward the “maternal” archetype, I was reluctant to say much about it to my wife, because of all the negative Freudian baggage.
In short, I assumed that if she found anything about Domestic Discipline to be weird, linking it to a maternal archetype would seem WAY weird.
In recent years, I’ve talked about it more openly.
Although I feel like we still dance around this a little, I’ve been surprised by how much she is not turned off by my references to it and will even sometimes reference it herself.
Just recently, she described me as being like an obnoxious teenage boy who likes pushing Mom’s buttons but then seems surprised by the consequences. There is probably more than a grain of truth in that description.
My wife’s interest would stay purely utilitarian.
From the beginning, I had a pretty utilitarian view of domestic discipline.
It was about correcting problems through accountability.
It was about empowering my wife.
It was mainly about changing my behavior.
I assumed my wife saw it the same way. In the beginning, she probably did.
What I underestimated was just how much she would come to enjoy her increased power and enjoy giving disciplinary spankings.
It’s a bit nuanced, as she says it’s not so much the spanking itself she enjoys. Rather, it’s about ordering me to take one and get ready for it, and then watching me comply.
In the end, I think she still is into domestic discipline primarily because it does have a lot of utility for her. It is a tool for getting her way. For expressing herself. For resolving arguments quickly and decisively.
In short, it probably is mostly about the practicality.
For that reason, maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised that, from the very beginning, she seemed to struggle so little with giving very hard spankings.
Once she decides one has been earned, she has no problem at all delivering it.
If you would like to discuss these issues directly but don’t feel comfortable leaving a public comment, feel free to reach out to me directly at dwc_husband@proton.me. You can also use Medium to leave me a private note. Just highlight part of the article, which brings up the box with bold, italics, etc. Click on the box that shows a comment/quote bubble with a little lock inside. It allows you to send a private note that will be visible to me but not to the public.
