Sex Life When The Captain Is Deployed On An Away Mission

Reader:  Dear Athol, Thanks for taking the time to respond to my email. I needed to take care of the bigger questions before committing fully to the plan.

I’ve got another concern if you don’t mind.  I work away from home about 40% of the time, for periods of 3-6 weeks at a time.  This has contributed to the imbalance in the relationship. 

I’ve definitely been raised to prioritize beta traits and I’m doing much too well with that! My default behaviour has previously been to bend over backwards for her when I come home.

When I come home to my wife and two young kids (2 and 4) she naturally has complete control of the household and I think it’s been tricky taking back control of the ‘bridge’. Of course the first thing I want to do is rip her clothes off the minute I’m through the door, but because she’s had to be ‘captain’ for a month, I find myself having to resort to pleading in order to get through about what I need (I know better now…).  Naturally her rationale is that she’s tired from looking after the kids on her own – and that’s entirely understandable.  The problem is that I feel she’s completely turned off and unreceptive.  It’s like she doesn’t think about me while I’m away.

What I’d like to happen is for her to be excited (sexually) that I’m home. That she’s missed me, has thought about me, and is even perhaps unsettled that I might have strayed while away.  If she’s tired I can understand, we don’t have to have sex right away.  But I think she can be tired and want me at the same time – they don’t have to be mutually exclusive feelings, do they?   As you say so well in your book, it’s at times like these that I feel most cheated out of our contract.

Once my MAP has been put into action for a while, I imagine it’s only a matter of time before she gets used to me being back and starts enjoying and looking forward to relinquishing control.  Do you have any previous blog posts or just a few pointers about making this transition successful?  Is the best approach to set a precedent before I go away so that she misses her ‘captain’?  Is there anything I can do while.

Many thanks again, your help is priceless.

Athol:  I’m going to do a post on this tomorrow. The short answer being you have to maintain a connection while you are away. You don’t stop being the Captain when you go on your business trips.

Do you call a lot?  Skype and talk to the kids?  Phone sex with her? Flirt? Sext?  Video chat and sex with her?

Also do you make a point of relieving her from duty and taking the kids off her hands completely when you come back for a day or two?

Reader:  I’m glad you’ve decided to do a post on this.  I’m sure many of your readers have similar situations.  See my answers below:

It’s a valid point, but she gets help at home from a relative and we also pay for a nanny that comes in part-time. So when I’m home I do take the kids away for a few hours for the first couple of days to do things with them (and because I’ve missed them so much), but what happens most of the time is that she decides to tag along because she wants us to be all together.

We maintain a good connection, but not sexually.  I brought up the issue of her sex drive while we’re away and why she never touches herself, which I thought was quite revealing.  So I bought her a quality vibrator and she has used a few times, but not regularly.

Something interesting happened a few nights ago – I was chatting with her and she’d had a glass of wine and I after a few sexy texts, I REQUESTED she show me some skin on the webcam.  Her first (and standard) reaction was ‘I’m shy, it’s been so long darling’…  What I would normally do is back down!  But this time, because I’ve finished reading your book and wanted to things to go differently, I said:  “I’m going to call you on the webcam in 3 minutes, and when you answer, you’re going to give me a nice surprise”.  To which she answered, after a pause, “ok, but only if I get a surprise from you as well”.  I couldn’t believe it!  It was like I had just called her bluff and she was glad…

Following that success and according to my new knowledge(!), the next time I go away we’re going to have ‘date nights’ through the webcam.  This will be a requirement.  There’s absolutely no reason we can’t find the time to do this once or twice a week.

Thanks again Athol, you’re the man.

Athol:  Adding on to this,  I think you’re just staying focused on what you can do rather than what you can’t. You can’t kiss and cuddle each other, but you can have a good conversation with each other. You can’t have sex with each other, but you can watch each other be sexual. You can’t playfight the kids, but you can read them a bedtime story. You can’t open the mail, but you can talk about the bills and make decisions with her.

In short, you’re on an away mission, but you still have to be the Captain and stay in contact with the ship.

If you’re frequently away, there’s nothing much better than getting a laptop with a built in camera and loading Skype. It’s free and you can video chat “hands free”.

It’s well worth buying a good quality vibrator for her too. You want her to stay sexually active while you’re away, just not with some other guy. So she should be encouraged to masturbate to stay in sexual shape. Use it or lose it.

I mean women have phone sex and webcam sex with their lovers all the time. Be her lover.

And yeah…. do try and get to the ripping her clothes off thing as soon as possible after coming through the door!