It’s the dark secret of modern marriage - no matter how deep your love, the middle-aged master bedroom is a dead one.
Sure, it sees moments of passion by chance, or on vacation, or at those moments when life changes and you feel sexually alive to each other. Mostly though, you consider yourself fortunate if you have lack-luster sex once a month.
They didn’t tell us this when we got married (unless those remarks about the importance of working at relationships were code for “the sex runs out, try to take up an absorbing hobby”). Even so, it’s a secret hidden in plain sight. It’s there in popular humor, in those awful seaside postcards of yesteryear, in the jokes people make at work, and in TV comedy. It’s also there in the sex therapy industry - all those self help books, couple’s retreats, and marriage therapists driving around in expensive cars. And then there are the sex studies.
It all boils down to a three uncomfortable facts of life:
(1)Romantic love lasts a year if you are lucky.
(2)Sexual interest wanes after about seven years.
(3)The more equal and stable the couple, the less sex they have.
Most of us accept the fading of romantic love as long as it sparks from time to time. We just can’t cope with that level of intensity day-in-day out, and we’re happy to trade it for the deeper more solid love that comes from a long term relationship.
However, we’re horrified by the waning of sexual interest.
Why the waning?
Some couple therapists think the “higher desire partner” chases the “lower desire partner” into a corner. In other words, the partner who wants sex the most pesters the less horny partner for sex so much that it turns them off rather than on.
Perhaps this is true in the short term.
However, if that was the whole truth, you’d expect the “lower desire partner” to be in a rush to set limits and get the sex working again, which is not — frankly — what you see in real life. Instead, the “lower desire partner” simply disinvests in sex, leaving the higher desire partner high and dry, bouncing between anger and self-doubt: “Let’s go to sex therapy so we can have more sex” - “But I’m not interested in having more sex.”
This is not “men are horny but women want cuddles thing”. Either partner can be the “higher desire one”. However, if you are reading this book, then you are a husband trying to restore your sex life with your wife.
(For brevity, I’ll use “husband and wife” to mean “man and woman in permanent monogamous relationship whether or not you are formally married”. I’m not trying to exclude gay couples; it’s just that I can’t write confidently about them. If you’re gay and any of this works for you, please let me know…)
Why has your wife disinvested in sex? (Remember, husbands do this too, but that’s not what this book is about.)
It’s possible that you have become a sexist slob and so now turn her off. However I bet you’ve already gone to a lot of effort to lose the beer gut, curb your bad temper and support her in her career, so let’s assume not.
It’s possible she’s exhausted by the demands of middle-aged life, typically work and children. However, studies show that horny couples find time and energy anyway. After all, in theory she could give up yoga or step aerobics to practice the Kama Sutra with you instead.
If it’s not you or your lifestyle, what is it?
Could it be that the dead bedroom is “natural”.
For all that we remain strongly bonded by love, perhaps we’re not “supposed” to keep having sex after seven or eight years. Back in the pre-birth control primal past, seven years would be about time to stop making babies and make a good job of raising the ones we have. In the grand scheme of things, securing the future of the next generation far outweighs a little middle-aged sexual frustration.
Perhaps our sense of adventure acts as a built in timer. When we’re young, sex is an adventure but it’s hard to feel like Indiana Jones when the territory is mapped and all the pitfalls known. Similarly, the things that make for good companionship further erode the sense of mystery, and hence the sexual tension.
Finally, there’s mounting evidence that the old fashioned gender roles, though the suck, work well in the bedroom. This disheartening information is also not very useful, since we would not want to turn the clock back to the repulsive world of the Mad Men.
This takes us to the third uncomfortable fact I mentioned: The more equal and stable the couple, the less sex they have.
WTF? How unfair is that?
Embrace equality - Feminism, if you like - regard your wife as your equal, your best friend, your life companion, and you’ll have less sex than the knuckle dragging Neanderthal next door. Worse - if the studies are to be believed - it’ll be less mutually satisfactory sex. Yes, Mrs Neanderthal likes it that way (which is presumably why she married him). The same goes for stability - stormy couples with deep seated issues get plenty of makeup sex (which is perhaps why they do it), just like in that Fleetwood Mac song.
Again this is probably nature at work. However, that’s not very helpful. You’re not a sexist pig and your wife wouldn’t want you to be that way. Nor are you in some crazy chaotic marriage that crowds out your other hopes and dreams, hence perhaps your dead bedroom.
So the dead bedroom could be hardwired (by God or Evolution, or both, take your pick), a natural phenomenon like droughts and forest fires, and hurricanes… I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be happy than natural.
So now you’re at a crossroads with four paths:
1. Divorce - but you love your wife, and there’s a shared life—kids, perhaps—in which you are deeply invested. Also, who’s to say this won’t happen all over again.
2. Affairs - some couples make this work with “open relationships” and polyamory. That could be your path (if so; good luck, play safe, go buy a different self help book) but it sounds rather time consuming and risky, not to mention that if you are like me, you would prefer to be monogamous.
3. Therapy - whether in-office or self help, but that requires time and money and buy-in from your wife, and is also perhaps unrealistic; we saw that the dead bedroom is probably natural.
4. Kink - “Spicing things up” is almost a cliche, but that’s what a lot of middle aged couples do. If your wife just read 50 Shades of Grey and wants you to dominate her, put this book down and go learn to “top”. Otherwise, given the title, I guess you are hoping spicing things up means, experimenting with Femdom. That’s what this book is about, which leads me to to the title; Become her Roman Slave.
Take a look at my favorite picture on earth:
It’s from an Ancient Roman wall painting in Pompeii, Italy. Some Roman ladies, you see, used their male slaves for pleasure. (We know he’s her slave because he is dressed and she is not, and because Romans thought cunnilingus was demeaning and unmanly.)
What you’re seeing here isn’t a sex act. She’s merely enjoying slave-assisted masturbation. Prior to going down on her, he probably gave her a nice massage. He’ll still be horny later when he serves her wine while she reads a book or chats to friends. He may even be locked into a male chastity device - the Romans called these “seed pods”. And of course, if he falls short of expectations then he can look forward to a whipping.
Imagine being her Roman slave for just one day. You’d be getting as much kink as you could handle; chastity, denial, objectification, humiliation, domestic service, oral service, teasing (though not intentional), and finally corporal punishment… all those things and yet without her needing to feel kinky or even notice your existence.
That’s Phase One of the Roman Slave approach; establishing yourself as her “real” slave so that you can make an end run around her lack of interest in sex and land squarely in her relaxation and masturbation space. It’s much much easier to get somebody to be selfish than to be cruel, not least because being selfish is easy whereas cruelty requires effort.
With luck, the cruelty — the delicious sadism - happens naturally in Phase Two, though I will show you how to help it along. Power really does corrupt, especially if backed by a sense of permission and entitlement, which is of course what the first phase creates…
You’ll notice, though, that the Roman slave has little or no control and that the “dynamic” doesn’t have much to do with modern BDSM culture. He doesn’t negotiate scenes with his mistress, nor try to direct the action through a battery of safewords. No matter how much he may enjoy the action, everything that happens is for her benefit or else is part of the logic of slavery.
So, that’s what this book is about; how to approach your wife in the right way and establish yourself as her Roman-style slave so convincingly that the power feels real to both of you, leading her to move from using and abusing you to playing out sadistic games at your expense.
Around about now, you’re probably wandering whether this is all a little manipulative!
I hope not.
There’s nothing wrong with thinking about your relationship, nor with reading books to help you do this. Nor is it wrong to be tactical in your approaches to your wife. If you wanted a blow job, or an expensive set of golf clubs, you would chose your moment and pick your words with care. Why does Femdom have to be different?
Or perhaps you feel uncomfortable with the idea of pursuing a secret program, of approaching the bedroom with an agenda?
Don’t worry. I’m not asking you to lie to your wife. You can tell her the truth about this book; that it will help you explore Femdom with her and that not everything in it will be her or your cup of tea, which is fine because she’s very much in charge.
After a while, that mistress-slave relationship will start to feel natural, so natural that you may start to wonder whether perhaps Femdom is as natural a arrangement as the knuckle dragging alternative.
Read on if you dare…
This book will be a while coming! In the mean time, why not try one of my other Female Centered Femdom self help books?
