ME, SUBMISSIVE? WHO KNEW?

I should probably make something clear at the start. You will frequently read that submissive men know they are submissive, often as early as childhood. Out of shame, guilt and fear of rejection, they typically conceal and often suppress their need to be dominated well into adulthood and sometimes throughout their entire lifetimes. If this is true, and many submissive men indicate that it is, then I am an exception to the rule. I spent over 20 years in a reasonably happy marriage with an assertive, but not particularly dominant woman, and never once consciously entertained a desire to kneel at her feet or bare my bottom for a spanking. Incidentally, that reference to my conscious level is for all the psych majors out there who will be quick to point out that perhaps I was suppressing a subconscious desire to submit. All things are possible I suppose, so if this true, I didn’t know it, and thus was spared years of discontent.

As the bumper sticker says, "Shit Happens". Indeed. My first marriage went down the toilet. It had little to do with FemDom and everything to do with two mules wearing blinders, in the same harness, but pulling in different directions. Then I met a woman with a bumper sticker that said something entirely different. Prominently displayed in purple on the rear window of her car read the words, "Worship Me as the Goddess I Am". Mind you, she did not act like a prima donna. Far from it. She was warm, personable, caring, respectful, loving and generous. While she carried herself with an air of confidence that demanded respect and consideration as a human being, she did this without the slightest hint of arrogance or conceit. Nonetheless, I took offense to those purple words and remember thinking more than once, “Who in the hell does she think she is?” Despite my umbrage over a bumper sticker, this woman very quickly became my confidant and best friend, later my lover, and eventually my wife. When the sticker become worn and faded by the weather, I scraped it away and felt so much better with that Goddess business gone. As I write these words, I have to smile at my naiveté at the time. Uhuh, the bumper sticker was gone, but the Goddess business? Not a chance.

YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW
Think about that. I do. What I didn’t know nearly cost me the opportunity to be happier than I have ever been, in ways I never imagined. You might say that my inability to understand the intrinsic wisdom in worshipping a woman, any woman as my Goddess represented the pinnacle of macho stupidity. I loved her and felt as if I treated her better in most ways than any man treated a woman. After all, she was the best thing that had happened to me in many years and I knew it. But she would often remark that I was not attentive enough. I found this positively maddening because I felt as if I was doing what it took to make her see how much I loved her. I brought her flowers weekly, I wrote her poems and love notes. I spent hundreds of dollars on greeting cards. I painted her pictures (I’m the creative type by the way). I did crazy, romantic things like sticking dozens of paper pink hearts all over her car on Valentine's Day, hand-making 45 individual birthday cards for her 45th birthday, waiting for her in the bathtub wearing only a pair of black socks (what can I say: she has a thing for men’s feet in black socks), ordering vanity license plates with her name on them, and on and on. But there was one thing I wasn't doing. Though I loved her more than I could tell her, in my mind, I did not have her on a pedestal. She was my wife, my lover, my partner and my most trusted friend, but I was not truly worshipping her as my Goddess. And that made all the difference.