My Femdom Wife Started Making the Rules, Part 1: The Card on the Fridge

I have gone back and forth on posting this for about four months now. I kept opening the box and closing it again. But I read a bunch of stuff on here and nobody seems to actually talk about the boring parts, the parts where it is just your kitchen and your wife and a pen, so here it is. I guess this is a femdom wife true story, which is not a phrase I would ever have used about my own marriage two years ago. I am thirty four, I do estimating for a building supply company outside Allentown, and I have been married to my wife Rachel for six years. She is thirty six and she cleans teeth for a living. That is the whole context. Nothing about us would make you look twice in a grocery store.

I should back up. I am not going to pretend I never thought about any of this before she brought it up. I had thought about it since I was about nineteen, in that specific way where you think about something constantly and also never say the words out loud, not once, not to anybody, because the second you say it out loud it becomes a thing about you. I had a folder of browser tabs in my head. That is the best way I can put it. And I had been married six years to a woman who I was pretty sure would have found the whole thing ridiculous.

She did not find it ridiculous. That is sort of the headline here. It turns out I was the only one being a coward about it.

How my femdom wife brought it up the first time

It was a Tuesday in February, which I remember because the Flyers were on and losing and I had it on mute. Rachel came home late from a shift, still in her scrubs, the mint colored ones, and she did the thing she does where she stands in the kitchen eating crackers out of the sleeve over the sink instead of sitting down. Our apartment is small enough that the kitchen and the living room are basically one room with a counter pretending to divide them, so we were talking across it.

And she said, out of nowhere, with her mouth full, "You know you say sorry to me about eleven times a day."

I said something like what, no I do not.

"You do. You said sorry this morning because the milk was almost out. You did not drink the milk. I drank the milk." She put the crackers down. "I have been paying attention to it for like two weeks. You apologize to me constantly and you also, and this is the part I want to talk about, you never once in six years have told me what you actually want in bed. Not once. You ask me what I want and then you do that."

I remember my ears getting hot. I remember thinking very clearly, she knows, and also, she cannot possibly know. I said I did not know what she meant.

She looked at me for a long second. Rachel has this flat way of looking at you when she has already decided something and is just waiting for you to catch up. She said, "I am going to say a thing and you are going to not make a face. I think you want me to tell you what to do. Not like, pass the remote. I mean generally. I think you have wanted that the entire time and you have been waiting for me to guess."

And I did the worst possible thing, which was laugh. Not a real laugh. One of those single syllable fake laughs that sounds like a cough. She did not react to it at all, which somehow was worse than if she had gotten mad.

"Okay," she said. "Then I am wrong and this is a weird night and we will never discuss it." She picked the crackers back up.

I stood there in my work clothes with the hockey game on mute and I thought, you are thirty four years old. And I said, out loud, to the counter more than to her, "You are not wrong."

She did not whoop or jump on me or any of that. She chewed. Then she said, "Okay. Good. I am going to think about it. I am not going to wing this." And she went and took a shower and we watched the end of the game and she fell asleep on me on the couch like always. That was the whole first conversation. It took maybe nine minutes. I lay awake until two in the morning afterward with my heart going like I had run somewhere.

The rules she wrote on the index card

Four days later there was an index card on the fridge under the magnet from the pizza place.

I want to be honest about how unromantic this looked, because I think people expect leather and candles and some woman in heels descending a staircase. It was a lined white index card from the junk drawer. Her handwriting is small and slanted and she writes in blue pen always. The card said, and I am copying this exactly because I still have it in my sock drawer:

1. You ask me before you touch yourself. Every time. No exceptions and no deciding you know what I would say.

2. You tell me one true thing you want every day. Out loud. Even if it is small and even if it is embarrassing. Especially then.

3. Thursday nights are mine. Be home and showered by eight.

4. If any of this stops being fun you say the word peaches and everything stops immediately and I will not be hurt or weird about it. I mean this one more than the other three.

I stood in front of the fridge in my socks reading an index card four times. The thing that got me was not rule one or rule three. It was rule four. Because it meant she had actually gone and read about this. She had done homework. My wife, who thinks a podcast is a thing you put in a Keurig, had gone and looked up how to do this correctly for me, and the first thing she made sure of was that I could get out.

She came up behind me while I was reading it and put her chin on my shoulder and said, "Well?"

I said the word peaches is insane.

"It is supposed to be insane. That is the point. You are not going to say peaches by accident." She tapped the card. "Number two is the one you are going to hate."

She was right. Rule two was the one that nearly killed me.

The first week of asking permission

Here is what nobody tells you about asking permission. It is not hot at first. At first it is just mortifying.

The first time was that Sunday. She was in the bedroom folding laundry on the bed and I came in and stood in the doorway for probably forty five seconds doing nothing, like a kid about to ask for money. She did not look up. She knew exactly what I was standing there for and she just kept matching socks. Finally I said, "Can I ask you the thing."

"You can ask me the thing."

And then I could not say it. I actually could not get the sentence out. I have given presentations to contractors with forty people in a room. I stood in my own bedroom and could not produce a nine word sentence to my wife of six years. She let the silence sit there. That was the first time I understood that she was going to be good at this, because a nicer person would have rescued me and she did not.

I got it out eventually. Badly. She said, "No, not today," and went back to the laundry, and then she said, almost as an afterthought, without looking up, "Ask me again tomorrow."

That was it. That was the entire scene. And I went and sat in the living room completely wrecked over it. I could not tell you why a woman folding socks saying ask me again tomorrow did more to me than anything in six years of a normal good sex life, but it did, and I have stopped trying to explain it to myself.

She said no for nine days. I counted. Not cruelly, she was not mean about it, she would just say not today, or she would say tell me why you should get to and then say no after I told her. On day four she started saying it in front of her phone while she was scrolling, which somehow made it a hundred times worse.

And rule two, the one true thing a day. That one rewired something in me. The first few were pathetic. I want you to keep wearing the mint scrubs home instead of changing at work. I want you to tell me when I have done a good job at something. Small stuff. But I had to say them out loud, every single day, and by about day six I noticed I had stopped apologizing for the milk. You say what you want out loud three hundred times and you stop being a person who narrates your own existence as an inconvenience. She knew that. I did not know that going in. She did.

The other thing that happened that week, and this is the part I think about most, is that she called me at work on a Wednesday afternoon. I was at my desk in a cubicle with a space heater under it. She said, "I am going to be in a meeting at four and then I have a cleaning at four thirty. You are going to text me at exactly four fifteen and ask, and I am going to see it when I come out and I will answer whenever I answer."

I said that is a weird amount of planning.

"Four fifteen," she said, and hung up.

I sat in a cubicle and watched a clock go from two fifty to four fifteen. I did almost no work. I have never been more aware of a stapler in my life. I sent the text at four fifteen exactly and she answered at six forty, after she had gotten home, after she had taken her shoes off, after she had asked me about the thermostat. She answered by looking up from her phone at me across the room and saying, "Yes. But not until I say."

Thursday nights became a thing

Rule three was the one that turned into the actual structure of our whole marriage, and it started so small that I did not see it coming.

The first Thursday I came home and showered and sat on the couch in a t shirt and basketball shorts waiting like an idiot, because she had not said what to wear or what to do, she had just said be home and showered by eight. She got home at eight twenty and made me wait while she ate half a sandwich. Then she said, "Come here and sit on the floor."

So I sat on the floor of my own living room in front of my own couch with my back to the TV, and she sat on the couch with her feet next to my leg, and she said, "Okay. Three things. One, do not talk unless I ask you something. Two, hands on your knees. Three, when I tell you to look at me, look at me."

And then she turned the TV back on.

I am not kidding. She watched most of an episode of a show about people flipping houses in Texas with me sitting on the floor in front of her not being allowed to talk. Forty minutes. Every so often she would reach down and run her hand through the back of my hair, not even looking away from the screen, and then take her hand back. By about twenty minutes in I was shaking a little. Not cold. Just the body doing whatever the body does when it does not have anything to do and all the normal exits are closed. I remember the sound of the radiator going. I remember the car commercial. I remember that at one point I had an itch on my face and I chose not to scratch it and that choosing felt enormous.

During a commercial she said, "Look at me."

I looked up. She was in her glasses and a Temple sweatshirt and she looked like she always looks, which is to say like a woman who is going to make a dentist appointment for you if you do not do it yourself.

She said, "You are doing well. You are allowed to know that." And then she went back to the show.

I have not been able to explain to anybody why I almost cried on the floor of my living room over the phrase you are allowed to know that. I think it is because for six years I had been trying very hard to be low maintenance and it turns out being low maintenance is just a way of not being looked at.

At the end she told me to get up and she took me to the bedroom and she was in charge there too, completely, in a way she had never once been before, and she told me what to do and when, and she made me ask for the thing out loud again right at the end even though I had been waiting eleven days by then, and she made me wait another ten minutes after I asked. She fell asleep first. I lay there in the dark thinking that we were going to do this for the rest of our lives.

Thursdays got more involved after that. She started writing things down in the notes app on her phone during the week and I was not allowed to read it. Sometimes she would say a thing like "put the wine glasses away before eight" so that the first thing Thursday was already something she had told me to do before she even walked in. One Thursday she had me kneel at the foot of the bed and just talk, for an hour, about the things I had been too embarrassed to say for fifteen years, and every time I stopped she said keep going, and when I finally ran out she said "see, nothing happened," which is the single most effective thing anyone has ever said to me.

What my femdom wife did at the dinner party

This is the part I actually came here to tell, and it is the part where I understood that this had gotten out of the Thursday box and into the whole house.

In April we went to her coworker Danielle's place for a thing. Housewarming, sort of, Danielle had bought a townhouse in Bethlehem and there were about fourteen people there and a cheese board the size of a car hood. Normal party. I knew maybe four people. I was doing my usual thing of standing near whoever was talking about the Eagles.

In the car on the way over Rachel had said, "If I tap my glass twice, you go get me another drink, and you hand it to me with both hands, and you do not say anything."

I said that is going to look strange.

"It is going to look like a husband getting his wife a drink. You are the only one who will know." And then she said, and this is the line that stuck in me for the whole night, "That is sort of the whole point of it."

She tapped the glass at maybe nine thirty. I was across the room in the middle of a conversation about a deck somebody was building. I heard it. I actually heard it over the room, two little clicks of her nail on the glass, and I said excuse me to a man mid sentence and walked to the kitchen and poured her a glass of the white she had been drinking and carried it back through fourteen people and handed it to her with both hands and did not say anything.

She took it with one hand, said "thank you honey" in a completely flat normal voice, and went right back to telling Danielle about a patient who lied about flossing.

I went back to the deck conversation and could not have told you one thing about that deck. My whole body was humming. I was standing in a townhouse in Bethlehem holding a beer I did not want, having the most intense twenty minutes of my adult life, while a woman described plaque.

She tapped the glass twice more that night. The third time she let her fingers stay on mine for about a second longer than she needed to when she took it, and she looked up at me, and that was all it was, and I had to go stand in the half bathroom for a minute.

In the car home she waited until we were on the highway and then she said, "You liked that."

I said yes.

"Say the whole thing."

And I said the whole thing, all of it, in the car, with the heat on and the wipers going because it had started to rain, and she drove and listened and at the end she said, "Good. Because I liked it more than you did, and I was starting to think I was the strange one here."

That stopped me cold. I had spent two months assuming I was the one being indulged. I said are you serious.

She said, "Do you know what it is like to be married to someone who treats you like a very polite roommate and then find out he has wanted you to run the whole thing the entire time? I am not doing you a favor. I am having the best four months of my marriage."

We pulled into the lot and she did not get out. She sat there with the engine off and said, "Thursdays are not enough anymore. I want to write something real. Not an index card. I want rules for the whole week, and I want you to read them and sign them, and I want some of them to be things you will not like." And then she went inside to pee because she had been holding it since Bethlehem, which I think is the most accurate detail in this entire post.

Where things stand now

That was five months ago. The index card is in my sock drawer and there is a different document now, a real one, three pages, and I did sign it, and she was right that some of it I do not like. I have not said peaches. I have come close exactly once and I will probably write that part up separately because it is the only part of this that is genuinely hard to talk about and I do not want to bury it at the bottom of a long post.

I do not have a neat ending for you. We still argue about the dishwasher. She still eats crackers over the sink. Last week she made me ask twice in front of a mirror and then said no and I was annoyed about it in a completely ordinary way, the way you get annoyed at your wife, and then I was not. If you are the guy I was two years ago, sitting there with your folder of tabs and six years of saying nothing, I am not going to tell you it will go the way mine went, because I got extremely lucky in who I married. But she guessed. She guessed because I made it guessable and then made her do all the work of saying it. That is the part I would do differently.

If you want the version of this with less of my marriage in it, there are other pieces on here worth reading. The one about the thirty day lock covers some of the same ground from a completely different angle, and if you are somewhere near where Rachel was in February and trying to figure out how to actually start, the guide on how to start a female led relationship is close to what she apparently read. There is more in True Stories if you want other people's, and a lot of it in User Submitted Stories.

Part two is the written agreement and the night she read it to me out loud, which was worse and better than this.

If you have your own, post it at submit a story. I promise somebody needs to read it.