Chapter 1. A New Life
My name is Richard and I am a submissive. Sylvia, my wife at that time, had experimented with sexual dominance before I met her at university, and was an experienced Domme by then. We had dated, played together, lived together and then finally gotten married. We had been been together for fourteen years, actually married for six, and now we were coming apart. Though nothing had been said yet, she knew it and I knew it. For different reasons, neither of us was happy about the coming breakup but, like an elephant in the room, it was becoming more obvious every day.
Sylvie loved having an obedient, submissive husband, and knew I would be hard to replace. She had put a lot of effort into training me to know her moods and her wishes, and to satisfy her desires, almost before she was aware of them herself.
I was unhappy now, not because I no longer loved her, or no longer loved being submissive to her, but because I found myself disliking what this marriage was doing to me. I did not want to be as much of a slave as she was making me, and as I had become.
At first, our marriage had been the fulfillment of a deep desire (very different desires) in each of us. I loved to please her. Though it was painful at the time, I loved that she often took a tawse or cane to my bottom, either because I had displeased her in some way, or because she felt like doing it. In most things, I didn't mind -- even enjoyed -- obeying her, and putting her wishes first. I am, after all, by temperament, a deeply submissive male, and for years, Sylvie and I worked well as a D/s couple. But then I began to realize -- dimly at first -- that I was not what Sylvie wanted.
More than a good submissive, she wanted a slave. It was not enough for her now that I obeyed her, and put her needs and wishes first. She wanted me to erase myself entirely -- to have no thoughts or wishes, or even needs, of my own. To save our marriage, I had tried to comply but now was finding that I couldn't satisfy her, and didn't want to. I did and do have a mind and needs of my own. I could not erase myself as completely as she demanded. I needed to have a voice -- even a respected and significant voice -- in our affairs, even if she had the final say. Submission was not a game for me. It was much more than a sexual 'kink,' though I enjoyed that aspect fully. Submission was and is a personality trait -- one that I hope to understand some day, but that I must satisfy, somehow, whether I understand it or not. But it is not the whole of me. There is another part that also needs a place in the sun. Sylvie came to be aware of this, but she wanted the whole of me; and that just wasn't going to happen, no matter how savagely she flogged me with her cane or crop. She could and did hurt me a lot. She even had me bleeding once, which was against our rules. It got to a point where I was afraid of her; but she had reached a point of complete frustration with me -- where she was getting resentful obedience rather than joyful service and submission. I would do everything to avoid her harsh discipline, but she was not really breaking me and she knew it.
For my part, I knew by then that I wanted out of the marriage. I think she knew this too, though she said nothing. It was now only a matter of time, and a sufficient trigger.
I don't want to give the impression that Sylvie was a bad or cruel person. By her own lights and the basic terms of our relationship, she was not. When we started dating, as students at McGill University (in Montreal, where we both still live), it soon became clear that we shared a taste for spanking and bondage games: she as a modern, assertive young woman, and I as a horny, virgin youth whose taste in pornography ran that way. Sylvie took to dominance in our relationship like a duck to its pond, and spanking soon became a staple of our premarital sex life, with her dishing it out (with her hand or a wooden hairbrush), and me turned over her knee getting my bottom toasted. After the spanking, she loved to have me kneel between her thighs, naked, hands clasped or tied behind my back, to eat her pussy for an hour or more. She always preferred this to fucking, which she would not let me do until shortly before I proposed to her.
She accepted, but we agreed to wait. We still had another year of college to finish; and then she planned to go to Law School while I was thinking of taking an MBA and becoming a business journalist. Even in these career choices, I now see, our D/s personalities were reflected. She liked to play real games for real stakes and win. I liked to watch life happen and write about it.
With support from our families, student loans, summer jobs and even a bit of scholarship money, we got through our studies -- living together, but working hard. By the time Sylvie was admitted to the Bar, I had obtained my MBA, held a training job at a multinational corporation, and published several magazine articles on business affairs.
We had lived together for almost eight years already before we actually 'tied the knot' -- before a judge, with a family dinner afterwards and a more elaborate collaring ceremony a few days later among our closest friends. The basic patterns of our marriage were already set, but there was one big change still to come: A few years later, when Sylvie was a busy, prosperous lawyer striving for a partnership, she had me quit my corporate job and become a househusband.
In some ways the change was good for me, as it was fairly clear that the corporate job might keep me employed for life, but had no exciting promotions in store. I was not expected to do all the household chores myself, but could use a cleaning service and order food delivered during the day from a nearby catering service. I had only to hire and pay and generally manage our home. I could still write my free-lance articles. I began to write some erotic stories on the side -- and began to think about a D/s novel. But my relationship with Sylvie changed, and not for the better.
Before, with a corporate 9 to 5 job, I had been a career-person like herself, a voluntary submissive in our marriage, earning less than she was, true, but essentially an equal. Now she began to see me as her slave -- something less than a friend and partner, wholly dependent on her to keep up our standard of living.
Which was basically the truth. Writing paid me enough to live on after I left her, but in nothing like the luxury I had enjoyed before. From seeing me as a slave -- and perhaps too, in response to my own insecurity and defensiveness in this new arrangement, she became much harsher and more demanding than she had been in the past. My bond to her was fraying, but she never noticed. Preoccupied also with her legal career and her ambition she came to take me for granted, forgetting that obedience and submission were my gifts to her, treating them as something to which she was entitled as a matter of innate superiority.
I was aware -- we both were -- that in Femdom erotica, the women are always superior mortals (if not goddesses) whose favours and torments the lustful male, enslaved by his own desires, can only aspire to or humbly and gratefully accept as they are given. But a real-life female-led relationship is more complex than that. The connection has to work much as any marriage does: as a life partnership, not just a sexual game. The submissive partner may defer to the Dominant but still wants a say that is heard and weighed even if finally over-ridden. The Dominant may make all the final decisions, but must make them in the interest of the ongoing relationship, getting the sub to trust that this is the case.
Sylvie never understood this, nor did I so clearly at the time. To her, my attempts to have a voice were just 'topping from below' -- something that good submissives are not supposed to do. For my part, I felt unjustly disrespected and increasingly resentful -- as if my obedience and service were not a gift of love, but something owed to her by Divine Right. The break came one evening when she showed me a cock cage that she'd just bought for me, and ordered me to strip so she could put it on. I just looked at her for almost a full minute. "No," I finally said. "That's not going to happen."
She stared back. "You don't say 'no' to me!"
"I do now," I answered. "I have my limits, and you're crossing them. As things stand between us, I am not going to wear a chastity cage for you without a long discussion of what's gone wrong between us: a discussion I don't think you're prepared to have."
"Richard," she said. "I don't 'discuss' with you. You do what I tell you, or we're through."
"Then we're though," I answered. "This is only what I expected from you." I turned away from her and started up the stairs to my room.
"You don't live here any more," she screamed at me.
"No, I don't," I agreed. "Don't worry, I'm just going to pack a few clothes, and take my lap top. I'll be out of your hair within the hour. I'll come back at some point for my books and personal possessions."
She opened her mouth to object, but I continued, "The house is half in my name, as you well know. I'm not going to fight you for it unless you give me trouble moving out."
Those were the last words we exchanged that evening. Sylvie just went to her room, looking stunned. It was obvious that my rebellion had taken her by surprise. I did just what I said: got dressed, packed a small valise with clothes and my laptop and used my cell phone to call a cab. Once in the street, I called an old, close friend of mine and asked if I could crash at his apartment that night. "Of course," he said. "What happened? Did Sylvie catch you looking at another woman?"
"Nothing so simple, Joe" I answered him. "I'll tell you all about it when I get there." The cab came and we hung up. Half an hour later I rang his doorbell and he let me in.
