Chapter Five

Why This Man?

I tried submitting to my first husband. I was doing so based on the Christian view that the man is head of the household and what he says goes. I am even seminary-trained, and studied the New Testament in the original Koine Greek. I attended a conservative seminary which did not allow women to run the show. Any show. I was even told by my seminary mentor that when I was in a study group with men, I should pretend I had no ideas of my own and let them make the decisions. I tried to follow. I tried to understand. I tried to agree. I tried to submit to my first husband. All he did was take advantage of me. Who wants to submit to a person who only thinks of their own well-being? So I got pissed, really pissed. The simple truth is that I didn’t respect him. How are you going to follow someone you don’t respect? Why would you want to?

At the start of my first marriage, I submitted out of a fear-based insecurity, and because he had me emotionally beaten down so quickly, I thought there was little else I could do. He had me convinced that I wasn’t intelligent enough for a business degree, and that I couldn’t support myself anyway if I were on my own, degree or not. No one would ever love me the way he did, he assured me. I took jobs I hated, jobs that were so unsuited for my personality; I couldn’t have designed them to be more inappropriate for my skills. But he wanted me in highly secure, eight- to-five positions. Insecurity of any kind in life scared the hell out of him, so all decisions were fear-based. The more risk he saw that I might leave him; the more he tightened his grip on me. He even tried to put me on a one hundred dollar a month budget, saying I earned so little that it was only fair that I got to spend very little on myself. He preferred that I believe I wasn’t attractive, and I recall only one compliment in that regard toward the end of our marriage. He said, “You know, even after all these years, you’re still a handsome woman.” Handsome. Men told me I was hot as hell, but my husband could concede nothing more than “handsome”.

I could have had a lot of “power” in my earlier, adult life. I had a tremendous amount going for me. Instead, I believed what an insecure, scared man wanted me to believe about myself and the world, and I handed over my power to him.

But I looked on one hand at my mother, who was in her fifth marriage at that time of my life, and looked on the other hand at my husband, a man who at least didn’t beat me, run around on me or call me names. I guessed I really didn’t have it that bad. But why did it feel so damned bad? And the sad thing is, the longer a person stays in a relationship like that, the more things start to feel acceptable. I gave up fighting for myself, and learned to just shut up and tolerate his behavior. And then I became passive-aggressive, and it felt damned good. We had so little connection between us, I see now that others treated him with far more respect than I did.

He said he wanted everyone to believe we had the perfect marriage. He said he wanted his home to be a haven, and he didn’t want us having discord or talking about problems. In short, he didn’t want me to acknowledge that we had problems. The message was clear: Shove it all under the rug, put one foot in front of the other every day, come home and collapse in front of the television, and then start the daily charade all over again.

But things simmered. A wife has to be able to talk to her husband, an employee should be able to talk to a boss; children should be able to talk to their parents, and a subbie/slave has to be able to talk to his or her Dom/Master. But it didn’t work that way in our house. If I said I needed to talk, his eyes never left the TV screen. He might turn down the sound, sure, but he wasn’t going to show me the courtesy of turning to face me and looking me in the eye while I spoke to him. You may think I’m exaggerating, but I’m truly surprised my first husband knew what color my eyes were. He never even looked me in the eye during the rare occasions when we had sex. And please don’t think I’m blaming all the dysfunction on him. I married him. I stayed with him. I enabled him. I taught him how to treat me.

I was a doormat. I was so desperate for the approval of my own husband; I would do anything to keep the peace between us, anything to keep him from getting mad at me. I even did things that endangered my life. Although he never once hit me, his anger frightened me enough to control me, and I don’t think it took long for him to learn that this was a powerful weapon in his arsenal. After fifteen or so years of this, however, he had cried wolf so often, all bluster and bluff, I no longer cared if he was mad or not. He once went ten days without speaking to me (because I didn’t share the same opinion on a controversial news event), and I actually enjoyed it.

Toward the end of our marriage, I renewed my faith in “god”, and I enrolled in seminary. We women were taught to submit to our husbands, but there was never any discussion about communication or negotiation. It was sort of an admonishment like, “Just submit, then just shut (the fuck) up,” but it was of course more subtle than that, because people in seminary don’t say fuck, right? I got the feeling that a lot of people in my seminary didn’t fuck, period, but who was I to talk? My marriage was so dead, my husband and I were just roommates. When you submit to a man you don’t truly respect, a man whom you know doesn’t truly value you, a man for whom connection and intimacy are downright frightening, a man for whom sex seems to be a strange, unnecessary, inconvenient part of marriage, well…

Yep. Things more than simmered. And so I started pouring alcohol on the fire. Red wine in the winter and ice-cold white wine in the summer. Was he being inconsiderate? Light a smoke and pour a glass. Was he away on a business trip for a week? Celebrate! Smoke a few packs and drink an entire bottle every day he was away. What a wonderful week lay ahead when he was out of town. I drank for years, and it allowed me to stay in a dead marriage. A great trade-off, I know. I’d been told by Christians that there would be great rewards for me in heaven if I stayed married to him. I was also told, “God didn’t give up on you, so how can you justify giving up on your husband?” So I drank even more so I could silence the ever-nagging voice that there had to be so much more to life and there had to be so much more joy attainable in a relationship with a spouse.

I read scores of books on Christian marriage, written by authors who claimed to know the mind of god and exactly what he required of me as a Christian wife. I recall one book in particular that addressed the author’s 100% submission to her husband. She told him she was giving up responsibility for the marriage and was turning it over to her Lord. The husband got a little freaked out and asked if it meant she was giving up on the marriage. She explained that the health of the marriage was being turned over to more capable hands in heaven, and she was no longer responsible. Well, let me cut to the chase and tell you that in my opinion, this poor woman became an absolute doormat. And instead of behaving as an intuitive man who might finally catch a hint or two about the failing health of his marriage—should he take his head out of his ass for a second—he continued to treat her poorly and take her for granted. The sad thing was her children had to suffer too. There was a rule in the home that they would always eat dinner as a family, with the father present, no matter what time he got home. So, here the woman has four young children, but they might not get to eat dinner until Dad drags his self-absorbed ass home, and that could have been at 7:00, or it could have been at 9:30. My whole point is the woman seemed to just give up. She surrendered in a way that not only did a disservice to herself, but to her children and their well-being too. Like her, I remained in a marriage that did nothing but confuse and frustrate me, while I waited for a sky-spook force outside of me to fix things.

I’m also embarrassed to admit that I sent the book to my mother. I was so sure that if she submitted to her husband, she would find some sort of resolution to her ongoing problems with him. What the hell was I thinking? She never mentioned the book to me, and I can certainly understand why. I was essentially sending her instructions to submit to a weak, alcoholic, stupid man. She was intelligent enough to divorce him before he brought her down with him, and before he ended up losing even more than the hundreds of thousands of their money he’d already lost in frivolous investing.

Submission can be a tricky thing. Submit to the wrong man, and you’re fucked.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but somewhere during this time, I discovered erotica. As a young girl, I found a book about domination and submission in my stepfather’s glove compartment, and I know I read “Valley of the Dolls” and “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask) well before my teen years. My stepfather at the time told me to write down anything I didn’t understand from the “Everything…” book, and he went over my questions with me. It was pretty damned cool of him, almost as cool as when he pretended year after year to be the Easter Bunny. He said sex was a wonderful, natural thing that happened between a man and woman. (Cut me some slack here, okay? Those were his words, not mine. You people, I swear!) He was cool enough to provide definitions of all the words I’d written down that I didn’t understand. Ejaculation. Huh? What’s a prophylactic?

Anyway, I would love to recall the first erotic novel I picked up during my marriage, but whatever it was lit a fire in me. And I didn’t stumble upon Harlequin Romances, but books that involved bondage, anal sex, non-con sex, punishment, etc. Woohoo! Unfortunately, much of what I read had plots that included devastatingly handsome billionaires who resided in castles, and who had very exclusive play parties almost every weekend. These story lines always involved breathtakingly beautiful women, who were “taught” to be submissives in only about sixty pages, and they were passed around among the guests and forced to please everyone or else they’d get a light whipping. (Big deal, by the way, on the light whipping.) And so I pretty much came to believe that while I might enjoy reading of really dominant, hunky men who liked to tie up chicks and fuck their brains out, there was no way my fantasies would or could ever be realized with my first husband. Also, I was pretty damned sure there were no castles, and there were no gorgeous, hapless, kidnapped females ending up at lavish parties to be ravished by wealthy, educated, frequently-showered, well-heeled, considerate gentlemen with nice breath.

But I continued to fantasize about being bound by a dominant, muscular man who forced me to sexually service him in whatever way he pleased. More than anything, I wanted a man so dominant that he would use every hole whether I wanted him to or not, mold me into what he wanted me to be, train me, and then spank the ever-lovin’ crap out of me every time I disobeyed. And I was Christian at the time, so I felt a tremendous amount of guilt for even fantasizing about such things, especially since not a single fantasy involved my husband. So I tried not to think about “nasty” sex, and I tried to keep my focus on a straight and narrow religious path.

But the marriage and sexual situation only got worse and worse. I recall a time in bed with my husband that became so tedious and boring that I sat up and said, “Let’s just blow this off, okay?” I got up and left the room. I can only imagine what hearing those words from me must have done to his feelings of worth, but I simply had no more energy or desire to pretend that he could excite me sexually in the least. Tension rose to the level where I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. But I still hung on. I’d invested twenty-three years at that point, and those years hung over my head day after day after day. They hung over my head as a heavy, wet shroud.

I was told by well-meaning church-goers to keep praying that God would heal my marriage. My mother wisely asked, “Well just how long do you have to pray?!!” I wouldn’t have believed in a million years that within a decade, I would become an atheist, and a man I loved and served would become the most precious “God” I could ask for. My profound happiness was not the result of some sky creature manipulating the strings for me. I took action, and went after what I wanted for my life.

Well, I went looking for a new and happy life; however, had I gone looking for a Dom or Master specifically, I wouldn’t have found the one I have, and He wasn’t even busy looking for a woman, much less a sub or slave. He was concentrating all his efforts on getting a new, personal-training business off the ground, and had only enough energy at the end of the day to grab something to eat and fall into bed at 9:00. So you’ll recall that I had quit smoking, and gained weight rapidly. Well, then I walked into His training studio and things simply clicked. There was no forcing it, and no need to analyze it. Never before had I met a person so devoid of the need to play games. The ability to be transparent was there. The sexual chemistry followed naturally. Then came the mind-blowing sex. (After the initial failure to launch I told you about. Good things come to those who wait?)

And we lived happily ever after. It was as easy as that.

NOT!