She Leads, I Follow

I started this account because I am keenly interested in some intersecting topics — gender non-conformity, role reversal, and female-led relationships. As noted in my earlier post, I lean heavily — albeit privately — into the world of GNC.

But my gender nonconformity doesn’t stop with my crossdressing-adjacent clothing choices. That’s more a symptom of a deeper personality conflict with traditional masculinity. At my heart, I am a soft person. I flee from confrontation, I have failed at every attempt at physical competition, and I have half a century of career disasters that boil down to “No ambition.” I can’t lead. I can’t teach. I can’t take command. I even had an opportunity, many years ago, to teach others on a topic that is my area of expertise… and I failed miserably. Not because I don’t know the subject, but because I lack what they call “command presence.” The others in the class, who don’t know the first thing about the topic in which I am an expert, wasted our time by making jokes, going on irrelevant tangents, socializing — and I was powerless to stop them. After half a century, my job title was no more elevated than it was when I started — a junior engineer, while my peers had long since gone into upper management and the “C-suite” of elite super-managers just a heartbeat away from CEO.

All of which is to say, my love life was off to a rocky start. I could never make the first move in my early relationships. Should I kiss her? Does she expect me to do more than kiss? What’s the limit when we’re just getting to know each other? I desperately needed someone to take control. Someone who was capable of taking control.

Needless to say, those early attempts at forming a bond failed just as spectacularly as my professional career failed. They wanted a leader that I couldn’t be for them.

When I finally met someone who was a strong, independent woman — we were both burnt out on love. She had resigned herself to the fact that she would never find a man content to let her be herself, and I had resigned to the fact that I would never find a woman who could take control and tell me what she wanted me to do next.

The funny thing is, even today if you said “female-led relationship” to her, she would deny we have such a thing. Over forty years of marriage with her making all the big decisions for both of us, taking the lead in all things related to intimacy, finance, health, etc., and she thinks that I only “allow” her to make decisions out of the goodness of my heart, like it’s in my power to grant or revoke her agency. And for my part, I had never even heard the phrase “female-led relationship” until I had already been married for more than three decades.

I said at the start that I opened this account to write on the topics that interest me. I’d be more than content to just sit back and absorb what others have to say on the topic, but… much of what’s out there is focused on kink or fantasy, which is great for those who enjoy it — but it doesn’t reflect what FLR looks like in our home, or in the lives of people I know.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy that stuff too. What man doesn’t enjoy the fantasy of a leather-catsuit-wearing, whip-wielding dominatrix who makes him lick her boots? But when you’ve lived through half a century or more of just surviving the daily grind of paying bills and finding a trustworthy plumber to fix that leaking sink, thigh-high stilettos and maid uniforms are the least of your worries.

So I write about FLR just like last-century domestic sitcoms wrote about traditional gender role marriages. You never saw Ozzie Nelson make Harriett kneel and kiss his boots. You never saw Ward Cleaver wearing a leather catsuit and forcing June to fill out daily chore charts, wear a chastity device, and spank her when she failed to obey. Granted, that sounds fantastic and I’d pay a lot of money to see a version like that! But in my FLR world, it’s more egalitarian. Yes, she makes the decisions. Yes, there are consequences if he (I) doesn’t obey. When I push back, she might stop talking to me until I cave. Back when we shared a bed (health problems prohibit that now) I might have found myself sleeping on the sofa. But no rituals, no foot worship, no humiliation.

She leads, I follow. It’s as simple as that.

Let me stress, I don’t mean to kink-shame here. People who are younger and have more of a knack for roleplay and consensual BDSM do exist, and do enjoy the more elaborate forms of FLR. I just want to let you mild-mannered FLR practitioners know: you’re not alone, and there’s nothing wrong with your “FLR-lite”. I’m right there with you, and I support you.

If she says I can.