You Can't Always Get What You Want

I have recently crossed paths with a lovely man who enjoys having his balls busted.  We met at camp and had lunch shortly thereafter, where I was more surprised than I should have been to realize he is married.  Since that lovely lunch -- wherein we discussed the current effort to gently re-negotiate his marriage contract to allow for other women to bust his balls since the wife isn’t really into it – I have been feeling that *feeling* I get when I am around a married man I like who hasn’t figured out how to have a Dominant in his life. It reminded Me that out there in cyber space I have a profile in which I addressed the matter.  And it got Me thinking that the substance of that posting really should be here in the blog so that it is more accessible.  So here it is, with some minor tweaks:

I must speak directly to the married men among you. This is a position I have come to slowly and somewhat painfully after countless remarkably consistent experiences with marrieds.  If you cannot admit your submissiveness to your wife, if she refuses to sanction it openly, do not go looking for a lifestyle Domme, on this website or anywhere else.  It is a complete waste of everyone’s time and irresponsible to the Dominants you approach. Go hire a pro Domme.  Why?  Because Dominance and submission is an emotional – and when it works, deeply fulfilling -- relationship. A married man whose wife does not actively encourage him and expressly consent/approve cannot commit the time and emotional energy to a Dominant that is necessary for a successful submission dynamic. I have seen many try, and none succeed.  In the absence of giving your emotional investment and personal accountability, the only thing you really have to offer the Dominant is fair payment for services rendered at the going rate.  It’s harsh but true. 

For things to work with a lifestyle Domme, you need at minimum, express wife consent to have a Dominant in your life *plus* express (ideally even written) agreement that there are two women in your life with an active, on-going claim to your energies.  It means your wife has to agree to occasionally be the second banana, and to get less of your time, in exchange for you being happier in the time she does get.  It effectively means to that to be married to one woman and submissive to someone else, you have to wrap your mind around being functionally polyamorous… even if there is no actual sex involved.  Absent your wife’s full consent, you might manage some isolated sessions of bottoming, and that bottoming might happen with a subby/slavey fantasy vibe to it, but at the end of the session, you are going to need to go home and not be held accountable to Me in any way afterward.  Sure, you might lend a hand occasionally when it is convenient for you to do so, in the way that friends help friends, but the core of the matter is this:   if I cannot hold you accountable and communicate with you freely, if I cannot reasonably have any expectation of relying on you, then you are in a fantasy about service instead of living the reality.

The key thing here is the Second Banana problem.

I have met so many married men who are north of their mid-50s.  They’ve been married forever, had kids together, a house, a country club or a church, a community, in-laws.  These are men who usually always knew they wanted to be kinky but didn’t give themselves permission.  They rejected it in themselves, and often they feared the wife would reject them if she knew.  So they built a really complex edifice of a life to keep them busy, keep them distracted. Then the day (often after a funeral or other big loss) came where they decided, hey, I just don’t want to die without being fully myself in this way, this is something I need to do.  So they got to the point of going online to find a Dominant.  But it had to be secret, at minimum a veneer of deniability had to be maintained. 

What I learned was this:  even if these guys had somehow managed to achieve basic self-acceptance, they just didn’t understand what it would take to have a D/s relationship with Me.  I could explain it to them all day long, and they would tell Me all day long that they were ready willing and able.  Over and over I bought the story they told themselves about being ready for Me.  And then the rubber would hit the road in ways like these:

--Unable to schedule a visit anywhere for the foreseeable future, can’t we just play it by ear and whatever day works works? 

--I can’t make it, something really important came up at the office.

--I couldn’t make it because I… [INSERT COMPLETELY VALID SOUNDING REASON HERE]… the beloved family dog needed to go to the vet… my kid came home from college… my special needs adult child had a doctor’s visit… the wife’s car wouldn’t start… my father in managed care broke his ankle… I had to meet the furnace repair man before the pipes froze… my mother in law needed her heart attack prescription filled… I wasn’t going to be able to get back in time for an un-miss-able dinner…

In these cases, they either stood Me up completely, or cancelled on an hour’s notice, long past the point where I had already invested time in getting ready and could not effectively make alternative plans, sometimes leaving Me alone on a major holiday. The thing is, these reasons were not made up falsehoods. I accepted them as legitimate demands on their time.  They were real problems that had to be solved.  When you’re married, you’ve got double the issues because there’s a partner and then several more multiples of issues with each child, each job, each parent, each pet, each car. It’s endless. They always felt that I should understand, I should recognize how impossible it was to make any other choice except the one at My expense.  When a guy has to be secretive, he loses the ability to commit and defend his time. He cannot risk exposure of the plans he has made with his Dominant.  And so the Dominant – who is usually in this in significant part because She likes feeling important – ends up being the LAST THING IN THE WORLD this guy can make a priority.

And few things will piss off a Dominant faster than feeling ignored.

I came to think of it as a walled garden that people build throughout their lives, thousands of bricks in the walls they make that define the perimeter of how they live, what they will allow into their lives.  One day they realize they have walled themselves in, into a life that is missing this very important shared experience of submission. So they screw up all their courage and bust out a couple of bricks, just enough to be able to conduct a conversation with the outside world.  But it’s only enough to talk.  In order to actually live it, they need to bust out a nice wide doorway.  And *that* they are unable to do without the wife’s active knowledge and support. It requires admitting to the wife that there is something big going on under the surface, something she probably doesn’t know about, something she is really not going to like, something that’s going to possibly cause her to question the entire relationship.  Something that might make her inclined to leave.  It requires re-negotiating the marriage contract.  And OBTW it requires a guy who hasn’t tried to date in 20+ years to brush up some courtly social skills, and learn a bunch of other ones for a changed world, *plus* learn how to be a subby.

It’s partly an intractable timing problem. He’s not likely to take those big risks until he’s sure it’s worth it.  But he can’t figure out whether it’s worth it until he actually has shown up for a while and walked the walk. But having that secret relationship makes re-negotiating even harder because now there’s a big deception on top of everything else. He concludes he just can’t get there from here.

One really interesting thing to Me has been that as I watch these men struggle in a not-fun way, it becomes clear that they usually are already in an unacknowledged submissive relationship with the wife.  That’s how they got to this point.  The wife holds the power – the very real power, not the fun kind at all -- to define the marriage and to enforce the definition of what it is supposed to be, both because that’s the original deal they struck and because she has Society’s definition of marriage on her side.  And by time I meet the guy, it’s no longer fully consensual, this power she has in the marriage. But there is no safeword available to him.  He is in a very serious pickle.

I never know what happens to these men, because one day they just disappear.  They almost never provide Me the slightest explanation, much less an apology for wasting My time, for not being able to carry through on all they said they were prepared to do.  They just…go… *poof*.  It’s like they were never there at all. It used to really hurt Me, every time, because I invested emotionally in helping them through it. I liked them, I wanted us to figure it out, and I even got smarter after a while, and told them that going poof would hurt Me, and made them promise not to do it.  The swore up and down, then did it anyway. I assume they cave, and shove their subby desires back into the box they used to live in, they stuff Me in with it, tape the lid on tight, stick it in the back of the garage, and they give up.  It has made Me very sad many times, because I think their wives would actually like to see them happy, see the light in their eyes when this deep, ignored need begins to be met.  These guys just light up, and then I see the deadness, the quiet despair return as they contemplate their situation.  And no one ever takes Me up on the offer to help the wife explore her own potential dominance.  That’s always a non-starter.

There’s a poem about how I was walking down the street, I fell in a big hole, and it took forever to get out.  The poem repeats several times, each time with the hole getting smaller and easier, until finally it ends with, “The next day, I walked down a different street”.  I had to learn to walk down a different street, and that meant swearing off these long-denied subby guys.  Each one is going through it for the first time, but I’ve been through it many times and I know the patterns.  I had to learn to trust Myself in a new way and I had to learn that people who are deceiving themselves really believe their own stories.  It took a long time.

Now the only marrieds who make the cut -- even for fairly limited purposes -- are the poly ones, ideally poly as a foundational agreement of the marriage when it began... poly to the point that I meet the wife, like her, and hear from her directly that she is poly and she is fine with being Second Banana sometimes.  If she has a concern, we need to be able to talk directly, and keep the boy out of the middle of it as much as possible.  It isn’t easy, but in some very special cases -- I have two -- you hit all the lights and it can work.  A guy who is already taken will never be everything I want us to be together, but sometimes they scratch a particular itch and help Me learn about Myself and I like them so much as a person that it's worth accepting the limitations.  The good outweighs the bad, and they take shared responsibility for the fact there are sharp corners for everyone in the situation. These men are grown ups and it takes a grown up to make the poly work.