103. A Curious Cat

A reader, Curious Cat, commented on my last post and shared his observations about what I have shared and he posed some interesting questions.  I thought the answers deserved their own post.

Warning – no spanking stories here.  Just a bit of a rant and ramble about this, that, and the other.  Okay, more than a bit.  It’s more like an epic ramble on my part.  I thought of omitting it, but it felt so good to get it out of my system, so you’re stuck with a choice of reading it or not.  If you stick with reading through it, you will find that I eventually address his questions!

MONOLOGUE
First I’ll ruminate on some things before I directly answer the questions he posed.  I can imagine how my life is perceived by those reading my blog.   Surely my days are consumed with the things I post about?  Sorry, truth is these posts are simply glimpses into a particular moment.   Much of my day is mundane and ordinary.  The ordinary isn’t the focus of my blog.  My focus is on how Domestic Discipline shapes my life.  Here’s something “ordinary” – I like to cook and try new recipes – in fact, I follow several cooking/baking oriented blogs (whose author’s probably gasp when they click on a comment I made and arrive at my blog!).  I don’t blog about my kitchen experiments or great recipe find.  Not because those things aren’t interesting to me – it just isn’t the purpose of my blog.

With that said, yes, even the ordinary parts of my day are susceptible to an injection of something erotic or scintillating.  Such is the byproduct of the lifestyle Mike and I have chosen.  You can certainly have a DD lifestyle sans the eroticism, but that isn’t us. 

I have written about how the pace of the last eight months has surprised me.  Our first year of DD was confined to sexual exploration between just Mike and I.  Even after nearly 25 years of marriage, DD opened us up to more exploration between the two of us than I thought possible.  That exploration started taking a new path about the time I started blogging.  First John and Donna, then Kayla. 

I mentioned before that I believe this happened because we were open to such things.   We never sought out to say, “We are open to having sex with John and Donna,” or, “Let’s see if Kayla wants to join us.”  Instead, we agreed that our relationship was full of love and understanding and we both aspired to help the other experience their dreams, hopes, and desires.   That openness positioned us to be accepting of certain things.  Once you are open to such things, those things are likely to occur.  Some may call it karma or apply something mystical or spiritual to it.  I simply look at it as awareness.   It’s like when you buy a new car and then suddenly see that same make and model everywhere.  They’ve always been there, but your mind is now tuned in to recognize them.   It’s not magic, it is simply awareness.

Mike and I were in a mindset that made us more aware of the sexual exploring that was available to us.  I mentioned before that Mike and I attended two FetLife functions.  We stopped going primarily because we were both satisfied with our relationship with John and Donna.  If our relationship with them didn’t turn sexual, I am sure we would have met other people and explored whatever interested us.  So if not John, Donna, and Kayla, I am sure I would be posting about other erotic adventures.  

Back on Post 14 I mentioned a growing sexual subtext to our DD.  I can directly link it to the addition of something in our last contract revision in October 2015.  I cover that in Post 16, Sexual Thoughts, Dreams, Desires, Fantasies.   It required me to share all my sexual thoughts, dreams, desires, and fantasies with Mike.  I won’t rehash what all that entails (read post 16 if you’d like).  Suffice to say it led to Mike reciprocating.  Once we could have a completely open and honest discussion about those things we could then talk about what we truly wanted to explore and what we wanted to leave as strictly fantasy.   THAT opened the floodgates to what led to John, Donna, and Kayla.  

Curious Cat’s Questions
Curious Cat asked if, in looking back, I see the seeds of the life I am now living.  The short answer is no.  While I would never in a million years have envisioned living the life I live now, I do see the characteristics I had (and still have) that allowed me to seek and accept this lifestyle. 

I am curious and willing to try new things.  Secondly, I am nonjudgmental and tend not to attach stigma or bias or judgement based on a few data points.  “Oh, he’s a Republican therefore…”  “Oh, look at that immigrant, they are….”   “Oh, she likes anal, therefore…”   “Oh, he will suck dick therefore…”   While I am not perfect in this (we all have biases of various sorts), I tend not to attach shame or judgement (on others or myself) based on a select few behaviors or characteristics.  While I may not be a Republican immigrant who likes to suck dick, I still don’t judge Ted Cruz.    Pause.  Insert laugh track.  Okay, that was a joke.  Pause.  Wait for it… Of course I judge Ted Cruz, he is an a-hole.  But I digress. 

I also am generally not a jealous person — not to say that jealously isn’t foreign to me.  I’ve got prior posts to prove that.  But, I do not get jealous when Mike enjoys himself without me.  Think of it this way – I love going to zoos, museums, and theme parks.  Mike is accepting of that and enjoys them enough to come along sometimes, but I often go with J and without Mike.   Even when it means an out of town trip overnight or several nights.  Sometimes Mike comes, sometimes he doesn’t.   I can enjoy myself in that manner without any stigma or shame. 

Mike likes sports.  Me?  Meh!  I can watch a bit here and there, and enjoy going to live sporting events, but I can’t park myself in front of the tv to watch an entire football game.   Mike really enjoys it, thus he often goes over to John’s or John comes to our house and they hang out watching the game.  I may stick around or I may go run errands.  It isn’t my thing.   Again, no stigma or shame in that.

Why is sex so different?  Because society as a whole says so.   There are millions of people who do not conform to various societal “norms.”  Just because these people are in the minority doesn’t mean they are defective or should feel shameful.   We can list a dozen societal “norms” and likely identify with one or more that we don’t conform to.   And these norms are certainly not sacred.    Look at the “norms’ of twenty years ago, fifty years ago, a hundred…. they change!  They change because as a whole we are more enlightened, more accepting, more understanding.   As a human race we are slowly but surely collectively realizing that because you are “x” doesn’t mean you are therefore “y.”   Those X’s are more like you and me than they are different, and their X does not diminish their worth as a human. 

Unfortunately as we move towards greater acceptance of each other, those who are unable to be accepting will continue to become more desperate to hold on to their inability to accept.  They will hold on to their bias or their fear or their hate.  They will continue to try harder and harder to force their “norms” on us by passing laws, restricting voting rights, gerrymandering, and the various other tools that allow a minority view to prevail for as long as possible.  In the short run they will and have succeeded here and there.   But as their numbers continue to dwindle, they lose more than they win (latest presidential election excluded) and eventually they will lose.

Okay, I lost my way here. . .
Sorry to get off topic.  My point isn’t that we are heading towards everyone embracing DD.  My point is we are heading towards fewer and fewer people caring about what people do with their private lives to the extent those actions do not negatively affect them.   It’s called freedom.  It’s also called love and acceptance.   Love is not shame.  Love is not damnation.   Funny but the millennials seem to understand this.  I wish more of the age 30+ crowd did.

While I hope for greater society acceptance of all types of people, when it comes to our specific personal relationships, our acceptance will always have limits as we are individuals with different needs and desires.  We surround ourselves with people whose limits give us the greatest sense of love, acceptance, and security.  That said, we don’t have to try and impose those limits on society as a whole.  If a couple wants separate beds like Ricky and Lucy and use sex only for procreation – go for it.  If a couple wants to share their bed with others and likes to be tied up and spanked – go for that too!   My wish is for people to engage life to the fullest, however it may fulfill them – just so long as it doesn’t come at the expense of others fulfillment. 

Sorry, don’t know where all that came from.  I guess it just struck a chord in me and I had to vent.

OH YEAH, BACK TO CURIOUS CAT’S QUESTIONS
Curious Cat, I completely understand and accept that you were not judging me in any way.  I hope you don’t feel my rant was due to feeling defensive about your comments.  I felt no such defensiveness.  My tirade sprung from really connecting with why I am open to sexual exploration.  It then caused me to want to address the stigma that is too often attached to that.  Sorry for getting so far off topic but it felt good for me to express that stuff.  I hadn’t really tried to put those feelings into words before.

You asked if Mike and I had ever had threesomes pre-DD. No.  There was actually an opportunity for one but it did not happen because we were not open to it at the time.  My guess is there were probably many more opportunities that we weren’t even aware of simply because we were not open or in-tune with it.   Pre-DD we were pretty vanilla.  No toys, no paddles, not sexual accoutrements.  I will say that if we were both limber enough to bend a certain way, then we tried it, but other than that, pretty vanilla.

You asked about whether this more extreme version of Mike was visible to me back in my vanilla days.  I wouldn’t call his current actions “extreme” but clearly, they are not reflective of his pre-DD days.  Mike has always been easy going and not that much of a take charge guy.  While he has become very comfortable in his role as a dom, he still surprises me when he comes up with something very Dom-like that I don’t expect. 

Mike has shared that he has found he is less passive even at work, than he used to be.  He isn’t aggressive in a mean way or overly authoritarian way, but he said he has found he holds others a lot more accountable than he used to and it actually has made him a better leader at work.  He said he believes it is about confidence, not arrogance, and about being bold, without being a bully. He credits that to our DD.

You said you can’t imagine your wife masturbating in front of neighbors, swinging, or taking on a third.  What CAN you both imagine doing?  Whatever it is, do it!  I encourage you both to share your dreams, desires, and fantasies (whether or not sexual) and then talk about which ones you want to explore and which ones you want to leave as fantasy.   If you both are completely honest with each other you’ll both know what is and is not productive to your marriage.  To me, Pandora’s Box is the unsaid expectations that someone has and then they later are filled with resentment when those expectations are not met. The way to keep that box closed is to not have any unsaid expectations.  (I talked about this is post 81. Expectations). 

Communicate, communicate, communicate!   When a couple shares all their thoughts with each other it displays a willingness to be vulnerable to each other.  I believe that if you aren’t willing to be vulnerable with the person you love the most in this life, then you are missing out on a big part of what love is.    I have always loved my husband, but that love has deepened more than I ever imagined once I became vulnerable to him.  And vulnerability has a way of being reciprocated and Mike is much more vulnerable to me now, as a Dom, than he was pre-DD.  I talked about this in my Post 67: An Esoteric Ramble.  To me, if someone is with a person that they feel is not worthy of their vulnerability, then perhaps they are with the wrong person.   

I am not directing that comment at you, Curious Cat.  It was just a general statement and my words are intended to encourage people to completely open up with their partners and share their full selves with their partner.  Anything less is unfair to you and to them.

Next: 104. What’s my Role?  Dom-ish?