Contract Negotiation Time - End of Discipline Desires

This is being posted on both my blogs.  I am ending my Discipline Desires blog.  It was set up when we thought that we might have a DD aspect to our relationship, but I think I can clearly say that is not going to happen.  Maintaining two blogs has actually been both fun and easy for me, but it is taking way too much of my time from other activities, so this one will be dormant for now.  (It will stay up, and I reserve the right to change my mind at some future point.)

I am moving Follow Friday over to Submissive Wife because, well, I like Follow Friday and so does H.  :)

Hi there!  This is just a quick note to summarize the thoughts from my conversations with H and the excellent discussion on Saturday's post - Everything is (Not) Rosy.  Additionally, Kitty at Sweet Surrender asked me a question about the contract we have, and I assume if one person is wondering, more people are wondering:

When you say you have a contract, what do you mean? A literal, signed contract?

H and I have a literal signed contract, ominously titled, "Contract of Consensual Ownership".  Over the last two months, I have shared several provisions in it on my Submissive Wife blog, where you can hit Contract in the word cloud.

I see a lot of people in various relationship dynamics have literal signed contracts and I think that it is important when you have been together for a long time to have a real starting place when embarking on a new adventure.  And also an ending place in case it doesn't work out for one reason or the other.  Our original term is just under three months from January 25 to April 15.

There is nothing of a financial or domestic nature in our particular contract.  It is actually quite good (for our relationship) and H put it together with what I can only imagine was months of research.  The exit plan is as follows:

11.0.0 Termination/Renewal of Contract

Renewal
On the above named date this contract will be reviewed, renegotiated and rewritten to include all addendums.  After the signing of the new contract, this contract and all addendums for said contract will be destroyed.

Termination
This contract may be terminated at any time by the Master, but never by Slave except during renewal of said contract or in the event of breach of said contract.

Upon termination, all actions between Master and Slave will be forgiven by both parties and they shall return to their previous relationship without blame or disappointment.

We have just under three weeks left and I think I can honestly say that both H and I want to renew.  But, this is my only chance for negotiation under the terms - as you see, I signed away those rights.  (Without too much thought, because H has always been very considerate of me and I had no reason to think that he would be otherwise in this case.)

Here is where we are at so far:

H does not want to punish me and, I don't think I have made this clear previously, I don't really want to be punished.  So, we agree on that.

I do want less control and possibly more pain in our sexual interactions.  We are working on this.

Maintenance is really important to us, but only as a calendar tool for making sure we are connecting very regularly and for advancing the pain interaction goal.

Other than that, the real issue is how submission takes place and whether or not it is enforced.  I have started to think of submission in one of two ways:

Sexual Submission - Rules of attire; service rules; safe words; others, etc. and
Soft Submission - Non-sexual submitting - letting H be the leader, domestic type items, things that could be summarized under the idea of "making a quiet home for us", etc.

For the most part, I think that punishment would fall under soft submission and I know that we don't have much about that in the current contract.  So as long as H doesn't have a rule related to behavior that is domestic, financial, parenting or what not, we don't really have a problem there.

The sexual submission area has one rule that I can not follow and that causes us the most trouble.  I am just going to throw it out there:



She looks as uncomfortable as I often feel when following this rule

Slave shall never in public or private close nor cross her legs in Master's presence, unless specific permission to do so is granted.  Slaves legs shall be spread so that no part of the legs touch each other but may be commanded to increase or decrease this as desired by Master.

I like the thought behind this rule - that H can access me whenever he wishes.  But, he never really has and it is not actually practical around the house in day to day life.

I break it often without noticing and then when I do notice, I notice that H doesn't notice.  This is really where the whole punishment thing breaks down.  It is a good rule, but completely impossible to enforce, so it must be changed.

Other than that, I would formalize maintenance or some type of scheduled interaction (that is practical) and there is one other provision that I think has conflicting direction, but I think we can more than continue into Phase 2 of this contract.  I am sure H will have much more input, and I look forward to it, because so far, he has been pretty amazing through all of this!

In other words, Everything IS Rosy.  :)

Wow, by "quick note", I guess I meant, strap in for a really long post.  Ha.