You Decide

Friday was maintenance spanking night. I forgot to remind Mrs. Lion. She pointed that out to  after my 8:30 PM deadline. Oops. That earns me a punishment on Monday. Later, Mrs. Lion forgot too. There was no maintenance spanking Friday night. Saturday we dragged our RV to get some work done. The ground seemed dry enough. But when we returned home, we couldn’t get it back to its spot in our side yard. It ended up in the wrong spot since our truck couldn’t get it back where it belongs due to mud just under the grass. I love our vacation trips, but I really hate problems like this.

Mrs. Lion and I work very well together. We manage to solve problems by exploiting each other’s strengths. Yesterday’s adventure with mud, while frustrating, didn’t create any tension between us. That got me thinking about the enforced chastity and FLM concept of surrender. From my reading on the Internet, and we all know that if it’s on the Internet it has to be true, the general assumption about surrender is that the dominant partner makes all the decisions and the submissive partner just follows orders.

That is totally incorrect. Surrender actually means giving your partner control of you. It doesn’t mean you get to become a lump that gets ordered around. Our relationship requires both of us to manage things. I make a lot of the decisions in the lions’ den. Mrs. Lion makes her share too. When I surrendered to her I didn’t hand her all my responsibilities. That would be insane. What I did was give her veto power to exercise as she wished, and I agreed that I would do anything she wanted.

I lost my vote, but not my responsibilities. In practice, that means that Mrs. Lion chooses changes she wants me to make and creates a rule to support the change. Interrupt her and I get punished. Spill things and I will feel it on punishment day. I suspect that the “spill” rule is there to give her a reason to spank me. No amount of effort on my part will make me less clumsy.

Sometimes I say, “What should we do about dinner?”

She answers, “You decide.”

I reply, “You’re the boss. That’s your job.”

Many times I object that she is in charge and she should decide. That’s wrong. She’s in charge and she gets to decide who is going to make the decision. I do this way too much. Maybe I need a rule to make me more aware of this issue. Insisting that the dominant partner make a decision is a form of topping from the bottom. I’m sure I’m not the only guy who does this. OK, the fantasy most of us share has us just following orders. We don’t get to pick anything. That is a very destructive fantasy. It’s the one that causes our partners to say that being in charge is too much work.

Surrender is not abdication. If anything, surrender will add to my workload. It will add more decisions for me to make. Mrs. Lion has the right to offload any work, including decision making, on me. Every time she asks me to decide something I get a feeling that she doesn’t want to be in charge and her request is her way of letting me know that. Of course that’s wrong. She didn’t sign up to manage every detail of our marriage.

It’s taken me until now to recognize this subtle form of topping from the bottom. I now see that I am trying to get Mrs. Lion to conform to my fantasy instead of being herself. I think it would help me if when I try to get her to decide something she wants me to handle, that she let me know. It’s up to her if she wants to spank me as a memory aid, but it would help me if at the very least she calls me on it when I do this.

1 Comment

  1. Author

    I had to laugh. We’ve had that same discussion about decisions. My response? It is my decision and I’ve decided that you are deciding. He grumbles a bit, but makes the decision. 🙂

Comments are closed.