0 DIVA'S LOVING LEADERSHIP: ONLY FAIRY TALES HAVE HAPPY ENDINGS

“The world turned upside down” (gender-role reversal) 

(Note from Mark Remond: The following is a "cross post" from a fairly new FLR blog, Diva's Loving Leadership. It is reprinted here, in slightly abridged form, with the permission of the author, "Diva," or "Dree." Readers interested in her other posts, some of them quite provocative, need only click on the link just above. Thank you, Dree, for letting me share your thoughts and ideas with my readers.)

In our gendered world, women, in particular, are raised up with the idea of a “Prince Charming” coming to sweep us off of our feet into a life-long “Happily Ever After”, with the “perfect” courtship, the “perfect” wedding, the “perfect” marriage. But, life isn’t “perfect” and often, we awaken to a world full of stress and anxiety and fear about whether we can really keep up with the Joneses and live up to the world’s expectations that we will beat the odds and keep our long-term relationships happy and intact.

Recently, my husband and I fell into a rut, in our marriage. We were kind of quietly falling apart, but we didn’t know how to stop it. Even though our marriage already started out kind of, unorthodox, I was still expecting certain specific and somewhat gendered behaviors from him and likewise, he from me.

Almost from the moment we moved in together, he took over the cooking and the cleaning. He waited on me hand and foot. If I needed him and called, he’d drop everything and come running. But when it came to intimacy, we were sorely lacking.

He was waiting for me to tell him what to do and how to do it and I was growing weary of always having to do so. Our lives had become so routine that we kind of grew accustomed to the fact that neither of us was going to get what we wanted and we were just going through the motions, hoping for a miracle. In my gendered thinking, the man almost always knows how and when to touch a woman in certain ways and in his gendered thinking, I was always ready, because he was.

I finally broke the ice and we had a heart-breaking, gut-wrenching discussion about what was wrong. I thought that it was because he needed to “Man Up” and take the initiative in learning how to please me and tease me in our romantic and sex life. I thought that I needed him to be more “manly” in how he solved other problems in our life. But the one thing that he continued to bring up, over and over, was that he needed my help; my direction, in figuring out what to do and how to do it. He wanted to keep doing things for the household and for me, he didn’t want to give up his less traditional role.

It wasn’t enough that I screamed, “Yes, Yes!” when things were good. He needed me to tell him, “No, no, no… that’s not working for me!” more often and more vocally. Instead, I would give a few directions a few times and when he would get lax, I’d just give up.

So I did some research on his personality type. I’d never encountered it in my life. A man who wanted to do the housekeeping; who wanted to please me, for his sake, not really for mine? What a concept!

I realized that it was I who needed to embrace a different kind of gender role; a role where I was in the lead and my husband was the submissive spouse. I came across the idea of FLR or female-led relationship. I had researched such a thing in the past, but my first husband was not interested, even from a role-playing point of view, so I put that away as a “not in this lifetime” sort of idea. So when I presented the idea to my current husband I was very surprised that he embraced it immediately. And, together, we have been studying the central ideas around it and learning how to navigate a new relationship dynamic.

Right now, we are still kind of newbies at it. We are still making up the rules. Or rather, I am (and he’s agreeing to most of them). But, the change in our relationship and how we are connecting has been incredible. The level of true intimacy between us has gone up significantly (because I am training him when and how to be affectionate or to give me the attention that I need and I am also teaching him to ask me for affection when he feels that he needs it). I have taken sex off of the table for the time being, as we get to know each other in this new relationship. I want to make sure these lessons stick, before we take it to the next level.

Like anything else, this lifestyle is not for everyone. It may not even be for us, in the long-term. But, for now, we are trying this and hope to journal our story for posterity and maybe in the hopes that somebody else can learn from us or that we can try new things on the advice of others.

(Note: For additional posts, go to Diva's Loving Leadership.)