Your relationship sounds so much like my grandparents' relationship, Bramble! I love the gentleness, the mutual respect, the kindness, the way you cherish each other. I really think this is how relationships should be. Thanks so much for the beautiful and inspiring article, and please write more!

I agree that this sounds exactly how a marriage should be.

I identify with certain areas in particular, my husband is the stricter parent, for instance, though these days we have fewer clashes over the children than we used to, he is more willing to make compromise decisions about them because I am more willing to listen to him.

Other things are quite different from my own experience, I've never personally known any couple, of any generation, where the wife was expected to obey the husband, certainly not in my own parents' case, my father would have been horrifed at the very idea. And my husband has always been tidier than I am, much tidier.

In our case, the 'punishment' thing is something he does because he knows I want him to, it's not a serious belief that I can somehow be reformed by being spanked, it's just more exciting for me if I feel there is a 'real' reason why he is doing it. Neither of us is perfect, and neither expects the other to be perfect, it just makes our relationship more fun.

What a terrific thing to have four daughters after your husband thought he might he infertile! I wish we still had a girl in the house, sharing a house with four males I sometimes feel swamped by masculinity!

The way it work for me is that after knowing my husband for 23 years, I know pretty well the things that seriously bother him. Things like letting the house get into a mess, letting the children run wild etc. These are the things that I try seriously hard not to let happen nowadays. My husband has never spanked me for letting the house get messy because I try seriously hard not to let that happen since I know it annoys him very much. I try very hard not to do things that I know really annoy him, because I appreciate very much that he tries very hard not to lose his temper with me like he used to do fairly frequently in the past. Both of us try much harder now not to upset the other. We must be getting something right, because we haven't had a row for eight months now, ever since we started the Taken In Hand thing in fact.

The things he spanks me for are mostly things that are going to occur because of my nature, as I have remarked elsewhere on here, I am a bad-tempered bitch, and quite frequently have fits of sulkiness, bad temper etc. Those are going to occur no matter what, sometimes they're hormonal, sometimes they are just the result of sheer bloody-mindedness. I also get spanked for shopping without permission, my husband imposed the shopping ban as a result of my own worries about my spending too much, but I know this is something he doesn't really care about, it's not something that is going to seriously annoy him the way the messy house would.

I have only once ever been spanked for something my husband was seriously annoyed about, and although it was exciting in a way, it was also very disturbing, because I knew he was really angry, and therefore it did not have the relaxing and sensual effect on me that it usually does, it was very strange. "Is this it?" I said to myself "the Holy Grail of the DD experience, the non-erotic punishment spanking?" No, I still felt turned on afterwards, but it was all rather more dramatic than usual and therefore, for me at any rate, something to be avoided. Being Taken In Hand is, as far as I am concerned, about avoiding dramatic emotional experiences, of which I have had a basinful.

I honestly don't think it would be a good thing if my husband felt he had to beat me in order to get me to pay attention to the things he really cares about. For me, being Taken In Hand is about paying attention to him because I genuinely care about him and want to make him happy, and also I do feel more respect for him now that he controls his temper, and can also, to my surprise and pleasure, control mine.

That one experience of coming near the edge of a non-erotic spanking convinced me that it is something I really don't want. I don't want to feel I'm being beaten into submitting to him, I like it best when I feel that he is restoring the submissive feeling simply by his strength of will, not by thrashing me.

He has never actually continued to spank me when I really didn't want him to. There have been times when I have slithered off his knee (he never tries to keep me there by force) and he says "get back there" and I find myself responding to the authority in his voice to make me do this. But I said to him once "If I said to you 'No, I can't do it, I can't take any more' would you try to force me?" "No," he said decisively "Because that would be crossing the line from mutual consent into abuse" It was something of a relief to me that he seemed to feel exactly the way I did about it, without us ever having discussed it.

I have come to the conclusion that the spanking is largely irrelevent to our Taken In Hand relationship, it hasn't got anything to do with why I feel more respect for him, why I pay more attention to his wishes, why we communicate better, why I feel ready for sex whenever he does, and why we haven't had a row for eight months. It is something I enjoy, it is something I need, but it has nothing to do with the change in our relationship.

Well, the worst decision my hubby ever made, I wasn't even involved in( I was at home cleaning house, actually,)--it concerned an extreme motorcycle jump( that he had done before) that nearly killed him, when we were young. And it was a doozy. He nearly died 3 times on the operating table, broke his back, was in the hospital for a month...out of work for 3 months--and he was the major wage earner. 60k in medical bills(inadequate insurance, too.)

Having been through that, few other decisions have seemed that crucial to me. Alot of the hardest decisions, neither one of us could know the future, so he did the best he could, after lots of talk.

I've been willing to go along with decisions that I didn't think were best, to not be a hinderance or negative voice. Mostly I figured that if he thought it was a good idea, then it probably was a good idea, maybe I wasn't seeing something he saw. He's never been much of a gambler, prefers to be able to study something before getting into it, and has never put big things at risk,(not since that accident, anyway,)like the mortgage, or made decisions that would add more to my workload and not to his(selfish decisions). In fact, he is pretty protective of the amount of work etc that I do, and tends to watch out for my energy level etc(I have a health condition that causes energy levels to fluctuate.)'Wrong' decisions haven't really been that bad, or were correctable.

We have figured out, over the years, that my instincts involving the kids, their friends, friends's parents etc, are usually better than his and so many decisions involving the kids are pretty much mine, but again, we talk about those things.