I first found Taken In Hand last Autumn, and after a longer search realised that at last I had found a site that dealt with the complexities of male/female love in an adult way – and not in an ‘adult’, in-your-face, “See some porn pictures? Only $2.95 for three days!” way.

How was it that I was searching anyway? We need to go back to 1968. I was already a rapidly rising senior physician and needed a new secretary. Like many of us in the 1960s and certainly if one worked closely with armies of beautiful girls (young female doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, secretaries and so on) lots of sex and also a great deal of tender love were there for the asking.

I own up, I had been there, had multiple affairs, loved many women and, maybe, broken lots of hearts.

Then, when I was 28, this young, totally unaffected, gorgeous eighteen-year-old, fresh out of secretarial college came for an interview and took the job on offer. After a while I dropped my existing girlfriend and started to show an interest in, I will call her, M.

M, as she told me years later, was so pleased that her boss had begun to notice her. At first I occasionally took her to lunch to get to know her better, and eventually started dating her. She introduced me to serious hiking and mountain walking (something that over the years has grown and grown – eventually our children were walking long distances with their own walking boots at about three or four – M and I have trekked in the Himalayas, in the Catalan Pyrenees, in the Bavarian Alps and pretty well anywhere a good set of legs can carry a human). How I loved this girl ten years younger than I. She remained a virgin until we married in church just after her 20th birthday – and a lump still comes to my throat over 33 years after our wedding with the memory of this glorious girl/woman, with her golden hair crafted on to the top of her head, walking down the aisle towards me.

This was really a marriage made in heaven. I had suggested to her perhaps six months after she became my secretary that she was wasted doing that job, and how about college and a degree? So when we married I had not only gorgeous young wife I also had an undergraduate at that. Fortunately she was able to live at home while working for her degree.

Eventually, we wanted children. The first two pregnancies ended in miscarriages. Though as a doctor I had seen many miscarriages, I had never seen and felt the unbelievable loss that we both went through each time. Time passed and we healed and our first son, who bears one of my pen names, was born. He bears the same genes as my great aunt who died of cholera in WW1 while my grandfather, an ordinary London East-end Cockney, was fighting at the front – driving ammunition wagons. My grandfather, as a common soldier, was not allowed home for the death of his beloved ‘Rosie’ and as an old man in the 1960s I remember him still treasuring a lock of hair taken from her dead head... gorgeously auburn-red hair just like that of our first son, now 28 and a rising star in the production of historical television programmes.

Son number two, now 26 and down from university, is engaged to the most loving girl he could ever have found, a Spanish lawyer, who came to England to learn our brand of the mother tongue.

When M was bringing up the children she wanted to stay at home and did until the younger was about 11. During this time she set up and ran a highly successful and novel food business. This she sold when she wanted to take up her profession again.

M has always been successful, whatever she has done – whether bringing up children, loving her garden, walking, cycling, camping, her profession. This young beauty is now 53 and, as I said in an earlier posting, passes easily for a 35 year old (no surgery, no fancy make-up, just my M).

Fast forwarding over the years... As I said in my previous article, after erotic ‘sex slave’ games, and after she had read The Surrendered Wife, by Laura Doyle, M asked to become my slave. We had always had a totally equal relationship and we had loved our sex-life and had a huge range in our glorious fantasy sex-life, so the sex-slave game was nothing new. Asking to be my slave was.

Of course I accepted but said we should explore it slowly, first as a game. It very soon became obvious that this was not a game but something very real. something for every hour of every day. Something, I suspect, that I had never noticed before... that this highly intelligent, beautiful woman, whom I adored and worshipped and in many ways had always been in awe of, actually had been wanting to submit totally to her man.

I searched the web... the submissive sites, the BDSM sites, the D/s sites and on and on, but I could not find what M was. Of course she was and wanted to be and is my total slave. Except in public, she is not now known by her Christian name; she has her own name that she herself chose, and which I will not repeat here because it is her private name with me. Similarly my own Christian name, which is not actually Ben or Nathan, is not used between us; she calls me her master.

Since M became my slave, our learning curve has been like an F16 going skywards, climbing exceedingly fast. Clotos, as she appears on this site (and Clotos is another of her names with a special meaning to us) and I made a contract about our new relationship and it has grown and grown; it deepens daily. Neither of us could have ever have believed that a 53 year old woman and a 63 year old man could love like we do.

A love and an ownership of each other that just goes on deepening. Though legally still my wife, Clotos (who is perfectly sane and as normal as a human could ever be) is no longer my wife, except for ceremonial reasons, and I am not her husband: at her wish I am her master.

Not only is she my total slave and I her total master, I am her total slave and she my total mistress. I care for everything about her... her health, the shopping, cooking, washing, ironing, and all the bills. In her own right she is financially quite wealthy but she now owns nothing. I give her a generous allowance which she may do what she wants with but I am trusted with absolutely everything else to look after.

It is about total trust and total love.

It is about understanding the paradox of the totally owned, yet totally free, slave who loves her owner and master and in turn owns and has enslaved him and is his mistress (something we have discovered together progressively since the early part of 2002).

Why have multiple lovers and lots of different sex games when you are with the person who knows all those different lovers within herself and within her partner and also all the games (and yet more), after years of being together? Anyone who needs help might try the books by Nancy Friday.

Perhaps the closest model of our love is still that which we repeated in our marriage vows in 1970. Although we did not use the word ‘obey’, Clotos knows now that she will only gain the deeper and deeper insights of our gorgeous better love if she follows three simple rules in regard to her enslavement to me: care, love, and obedience, rules which I follow in my enslavement to her.

If you want to call this TPE, fine, D/s, fine, BDSM, fine... but it just doesn't seem to be any of that. What we have is ours and I can only hope that anyone reading this will not just laugh and think, ‘What a couple of nutters’ but instead, will try risking such an exploration in their own life. Why not try, as Clotos very bravely did, giving yourself, totally, with no holding back – and it takes time and many setbacks – to your lover. If you too offer yourself to be owned and enslaved, you might find, as Clotos has, that your shackles do not become tighter. You might find that, surprisingly, they disappear altogether.

Ben Nathan

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