Thank you to everyone who has contributed their astute observations. I appreciate your thoughtful posts. It is my hope that they will continue as I attempt to sort through myself.

I would like to apologize for my omission in my original post. Yes thir, I am in fact in a vanilla marriage. Thank you Oz for bringing that fact to light. I did not intend to be misleading, although I did intentionally leave that out. To all: Please accept my apology for my exclusion of this pertinent detail.

My husband is a dominant-type vanilla person. He is very dominant in all areas of his life. This is part of what attracted me to him in the first place. He does know about my kink, in fact I disclosed my D/s desires to him early on in our dating. In my naivety, I really thought that he would become a Dom, once introduced to the concept. He even gave me a spanking before we shared our first kiss. It would be fair to say that he pursued a continuation of our relationship, cumulating in marriage, in spite of these (my) desires.

He did not tell me about his intense distaste for my D/s thoughts until (recently) after we had been married for almost 7 years. He dislikes any references to BDSM and gets extremely upset when I state any verbal labels. Words like “Dominance”, “submissiveness”, talking about my “submissive side”, and any reference to a “scene” tend to set him off, and so I try to avoid mention of them. With all that said, he does do things that (I think – as a newbie I don’t pretend to know) most folks would consider a scene. We also tend towards stereotypical gender roles. I do things like sit on the floor at his feet. I serve him his favorite drink, and generally wait on him. I ask him for permission for most activities.