The world we live in is quite removed from The Time Before Writing. For the modern world learning and understanding appropriate dominance and submission are key life skills for both sexes. Whether you are male or female I suggest you submit to your work supervisors male or female, and be dominant towards your work subordinates male or female. With your work peers you will likely have an ebb and flow of dominance and submission.
However in the context of marriage I believe for most of us a pattern of male dominance and female submission has a basis in Body Agenda. Women respond sexually to dominant men and they can become quite aggressive towards men that seek sexual access that do not evoke feelings of submission in them. The Body Agenda literally thinks “if he can’t handle me, he can’t actually protect me from anything”. Often a woman will tear her husband apart over quite minor things seeking a reaction to correct her. If she doesn’t get that correction she can become increasingly agitated with her man and progressively more extreme in efforts to force that reaction. The majority of drama queens are just seeking the king to finally show up and tell her to knock it off.
Again – I’m talking about one man and one woman with each other. I’m not talking about all men over all women. Nor am I saying all marriages have to work this way. Just that I believe most would run better for trying it. Many women actively seek domination in their sexual relationships. Have a look at the #1 result auto-fill below…
As I’ve posted many times before, I’m not a particularly aggressive alpha male type guy by nature. Much of that stuff I’ve learned along the way over the last decade and in the last few years in particular. One of the things I was very careful to do when Jennifer and I married was to strive for equality between us, and I was quite careful not be domineering over her.
The result of those good intentions was that often we’d grind to a halt in a deadlock of mutual submission. “What do you want to do?” “I don’t know, anything is fine. What do you want to do?” Just repeat that conversational cycle for about ten years and you get the picture. I’ve often wondered in the last year how someone didn’t just poach her from me early on by simply being assertive towards her and doing something dramatic like… I dunno, simply asking her out on a well planned date or something clever like that. I guess I am lucky.
Well lucky and good… I don’t mean to distract from the main thrust of this post, but Jennifer and I are each others sexual first and we had been long distance in separate countries up until two weeks before our marriage. When we married I was basically unleashing a lifetime of pent up sexuality and generally quite assertive of getting sex and making sure she liked it. That first flurry of sex basically set the tone of the sex in our marriage and it’s continued on that way. In retrospect I was doing the one very alpha thing with her from the start of our marriage. That solves a multitude of non-alpha displays in other areas.
About five years ago I started getting grumpier with some of our mutual submission deadlocks and just started saying what I wanted. Jennifer lapped it up. This was initially very confusing, I thought and felt acting like this was in fact offensive and waited for the response of anger and annoyance of being bossy. It never came. I shit you not.
Since then I’ve reprogrammed myself a great deal away from the idea that everything has to be perfectly equal and fair. I’ve come to realize that being submissive is something she actually gains an active enjoyment from. Some of that is social submission, some of that is sexual submission. It’s only in the last year or two that I’ve found myself actively enjoying being dominant. I’ve given orders on and off for much longer, but felt quite weird about it at first, then felt neutral, but now can sometimes get physically turned on simply by requesting sexual submission.
Some of this is exceptionally simple everyday stuff. If we have four things that have to get done, Jennifer is great at defining the tasks, but if I step in and say “well lets both go and do A and B together because they are close together, then you go do C and I’ll double back to here and do D” she positively beams simply because I made the decision and set direction. Likewise if she wants to go out to dinner, me deciding the place makes her happy.
We did grocery shopping together today. After we came out of the store I said I wanted coffee, I got a “oh that sounds good” and off we went. We went through McDonalds and got coffee and had a Filet-of-Fish each. (OMFG I HATE THAT JINGLE) I get a “this was a fabulous idea” from her. She’s made happy by this. We did not cover this reaction in my Sociology of the Family course in college. Yeah… I have a degree in being non-dominant towards women. Waste of time and money. True story.
Anyway…
Jennifer is certainly not mindless. She’s not sitting at my feet as I write with a leash and a collar. She doesn’t just sit around and wait for direction. She’s actually one of the most competent people I know. I’m not going to spell out what she does for work, but I can assure you she is extremely talented and a vital resource for her company.
Over the last six months I’ve come to understand how our relationship works best and integrate the sense of wanting to be fair, but also define the element of dominance and submission. I’m come to understand it as being a Captain and First Officer relationship. And yes I first thought of this as a Star Trek metaphor (I don’t dress up for conventions understand, I just like the shows) though it’s basically standard for commerical airliners and miltary chain of command. As Wikipedia describes a First Officer…
“In commercial aviation, the first officer is the second pilot (sometimes referred to as the “co-pilot”) of an aircraft. The first officer is second-in-command of the aircraft, to the captain who is the legal commander. In the event of incapacitation of the captain, the first officer will assume command of the aircraft.
Control of the aircraft is normally shared equally between the first officer and the captain, with one pilot normally designated the “Pilot Flying” (PF) and the other the “Pilot Not Flying” (PNF), or “Pilot Monitoring” (PM), for each flight. Even when the first officer is the flying pilot, however, the captain remains ultimately responsible for the aircraft, its passengers, and the crew. In typical day-to-day operations, the essential job tasks remain fairly equal.”
I’ve always liked the dynamic on the Star Trek series between Captains and First Officers. It’s always been quite apparent that the First Officer is always competent and skilled, and if anything happens to the Captain, they step into the role of being in command immediately. The Captains always listen, sometimes the First Officer has a better idea than their own. Sometimes the First Officer actually overrules the Captain in a crisis and gives the crew an order, the Captain usually just trusts the First Officer isn’t doing this to make trouble and runs with it. But at the end of the day… the Captain is the Captain and leadership comes from them, and final responsibility for the ship lies with them. If it all goes to hell the Captain is last off the ship.
My realization is that most wives want the First Officer job. Not Crewman Third Class, but not Captain either. They want to have a say and be heard, they want to be trusted, they don’t want to be micro managed on decisions they are capable of making themselves, they can happily step it up into “having the bridge” when their husbands aren’t available. They just would rather be the second in command and follow someone else’s leadership and general direction.
The challenge for the husband is not to go into marriage as a Redshirt waiting for the deathblow. If that’s what you expect, that’s what you’ll get. Also not to go into marriage and attempt to simply be a member of the crew. The wife will likely try and assume a First Officer role and that makes her the de facto Captain if the husband doesn’t take that position. That may well piss her off. He can even do everything she says wants and asks him to do, and by submitting to her perfectly, that can actually anger and disappoint her more and more. Most men find this extremely confusing.
We have different areas that we specialize in and basically have complete control over, sometimes I “have the bridge” and sometimes she does. But ultimately looking back over our marriage I can see that the majority of our direction and big decisions have been mine with Jennifer supporting me. I’ve not always been right. Sometimes I’ve been quite badly wrong. But even when I’ve been wrong, badly wrong, Jennifer somehow manages to stay supportive. I don’t quite understand how she does that. I’ve come to be awed by that support, but I don’t fully understand it. Must be a chick thing.
There’s no violence. No screaming matches. No threats or retaliations. No infliction of pain. There are roles, and trust and love. Well… occassional light spankings. But we both enjoy that.
So… Captain and First Officer. That’s my theory for male dominance and female submission in marriage. Maybe not yours, but ours it seems to really work for both of us. There are hardly any of those mutual submission battles anymore. I just decide to do what I want more often, and I know what she likes quite well and a good portion of the time I decide we do that. Upon the rare occassion she complains, I might reach for the verbal nuke… “Captains prerogative Number One.”
One thing to watch for is other women picking up on your dominant sexual vibe. It does not hurt at all to think of your wife as your Number One. After all, that is ultimately what she is to you.
Edit: There’s an element of the Google autocomplete being influenced by my own prior searches that I wasn’t aware of at the time. Also Google refreshes the search matrix or flux capacitor, or whatever the voodoo is, periodically as well. If you search on it, you won’t get the same result. I can’t get the same result either, which I said as far back as October 2010. The image isn’t faked, it’s just a snapshot of my computer screen on March 13th 2010. All it shows is some vague evidence of my point that many women are interested in male dominance in their own sexual relationships.
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