Hypnotic Conversation

Supposedly, hypnosis is a state of human consciousness involving focused attention and reduced awareness and an enhanced inclination to respond to suggestions. But as the subject of legend and show, it carries with it a great deal of baggage. Even among those who accept hypnosis as a real phenomenon there is controversy as to whether it is primarily a matter of willing susceptibility or an altogether altered state of mind.

I have been told many times by those who claim to know that what I describe in my book as erotic conversational is, essentially, hypnosis. Now, needless to say, conventional hypnosis does not involve sexual stimulation or deliberate manipulation of sexual desires but perhaps this is merely a difference of method.

When I have an erotic conversation with my husband there is behavioral conditioning associating my words with his sexual feelings and rewarding his compliance. But my impression, based on our erotic conversations in the bedroom and subsequent interaction outside, is that something more is going on. Especially revealing have been my husband's confessions to me. And other wives have confirmed similar phenomenon in their own marriages.

We naturally engage communicated thoughts as they are received, evaluating and judging them for their correctness, relevance, and usefulness. In this process we tend to maintain a distance from most of what we hear, especially the commands of others. We are more likely to resist that which is not immediately confirmed by our own experience and to argue if pressed. Men are especially prone to this distancing approach to conversation. It is one reason why husbands interpret instructions from their wives as nagging.

But the situation is altogether different when the communication occurs in the context of sex and in the passion of sexual stimulation. The husband's mind is focused on the pleasant feelings he is experiencing and the desperation he feels to discharge the sexual energies that are building up inside him. He is wondering, whether consciously or unconsciously, "what must I do to get my orgasm?" And since you are in control of the situation he is hanging on your every word and gesture. If hypnosis is a matter of willing susceptibility then this creates exactly that.

In such a state of mind he is putty in your hands and unable or unwilling to resist the thoughts you communicate to him. Over time, repetition will make these thoughts his and he will not even care where they originated.

I prefer to let our erotic conversations develop naturally based on my intuition about what issues may be obstructing our immediate progress, what our marriage might need at the particular moment. But, almost always, I have taken the opportunity to talk about obedience to my will and submission to my dominance as these are fundamental to everything else. I want my husband to internalize the belief that regardless of the situation he can't go wrong if he simply obeys me and that whenever he is in doubt that he should seek me out for instructions.

For us this was no small feat. Before we embarked on wife led marriage, we were always arguing and fighting. It would never have occurred to me to expect his obedience. And while progress came quickly as I developed my technique, old habits died hard. Even when he intellectually recognized that we were no longer equals in our marriage, still, he would habitually fall back on prior behaviors. But with time and repetition he eventually became addicted to my dominance and I believe that our erotic conversations were essential to that.

I suspect that hypnosis played a role because eventually he began repeating back the very phrases I had earlier communicated to him, not just immediately, in in the heat of passion but later outside the bedroom in our everyday lives. Not only did his behavior improve but he had internalized exactly the thoughts, almost verbatim, that I had been communicating to him. He often confessed to me a confusion about his thoughts about obedience. Intellectually, he knew that I had been demanding obedience from him and he remembered when he had earlier resisted my authority but emotionally he felt as if he had always been obedient to me, as if this was just his nature and my words were redundant.

My advice is that you, too, let these conversations develop naturally but I thought it would be helpful to put together a few scripts from a recollection of our conversations that might serve to illustrate and inspire you in yours.

Relax.
Breath and relax.

Don't make any effort.

Allow my words to guide you deeper into relaxation.
I will tell you to say something.

You will repeat it back to me.
It takes no effort to repeat back to me what I tell you to say.
Even if you don't agree with it.

Even if you don't want to say it.

Just repeat it back to me.

It will be easier if you just say it.

There is no effort in repeating back to me what I say.
Say, "I love you." ["I love you."]
Say, "I want you." ["I want you."]
Say, "I need you." ["I need you."]
Say, "I am lost without you." ["I am lost without you."]
Say, "I am lost without your direction." ["I am lost without your direction."]
Say, "I am lost without your commands." ["I am lost without your commands."]
Say, "I want you to command me." ["I want you to command me."]
Say, "I need you to command me." ["I need you to command me."]
Say, "I want to obey you." ["I want to obey you."]

Say, "I need to obey you." ["I need to obey you."]
Say, "I must obey your every command." ["I must obey your every command."]
Say, "I crave your dominance." ["I crave your dominance."]
Say, "I hunger to surrender to your will." ["I hunger to surrender to your will."]
Say, "I worship you." ["I worship you."]
Say, "You are my Queen." ["You are my Queen."]

Relax.
Breath and relax.
Listen to my voice.
The longer you listen to my voice, the happier you feel.
Just the sound of my voice fills you with desire.
Let yourself be drawn to my words.
Whenever you hear my voice, your mind opens to my words.
You must follow each and every word that I say.
So you will never resist my voice.
And you will never resist my words.
Let my words sink deeper and deeper into your mind.
Let my words become your absolute and complete truth.
Knowing now that you just love my voice.
And the happiness you feel whenever you follow my words.
Feeling the desire for my words building inside you.
My voice just soothing you, softly caressing your mind.
You know you want to give in to my voice.
Surrender to the bliss of obedience to my voice.
It's so easy to give in.
Feeling my words pulling you deeper.
Your resistance vanishing.
You feel yourself sinking under me.
Wanting my words to control your mind.
Feeling aroused, feeling that urge, that craving for my voice.
Whenever you hear my voice.
You must drop whatever you are doing to listen to  my voice.
It just feels so right to follow my voice.

Relax.
Breath and relax.
You feel helplessly captivated by my femininity.
You feel yourself longing for my attention.
I am that woman you cannot touch.
I am that woman you wish you could have.
I am an unfathomable mystery to you.
My dominance arouses and overpowers you.
Just wanting to surrender to my dominance.
Focus on my voice and allow me to reveal the truth to you.
This truth is your new reality.
You cannot resist my erotic power.
Don't deny that you feel turned on by my dominance.
My erotic power is a force stronger than you.
There is nothing you can do to resist my erotic power.
You feel deeply controlled by my strong and powerful words.
Just surrender, you are powerless to me.
You feel incomplete without my command.
I am your wife.
I am the root of your life.
I give your life purpose.
Without me your life has no meaning.
You are merely my husband, a weak creature.
It is my nature to dominate.
It is your nature to surrender.
You feel weak and helpless before me.
Whenever you see me you want to throw yourself at my feet.
Whenever you see me you will remember your submissive feelings.
Your submissive thoughts fill you with joy and contentment.
You will remember that you crave my dominance.
Just surrender to my dominance.
A submissive feeling is growing in your heart.
Your purpose is to serve, respect, and fulfill my needs.
You will drop everything to fulfill my request.
Without my direction you are lost.
But under my direction you are a knight in shining armor.
You would brave any danger, any humiliation, to see my will done.
You swell with pride at your obedience to my command.
When my command is fulfilled you will seek my approval.
When I express my satisfaction you will feel joy and contentment.
When one command is fulfilled you hunger for the next.
Nothing else, nobody else, matters to you.
You are mine to do with as I please.
I am your world, your life, your Queen.

The Habit of Love

A wife will often feel frustrated that she must constantly remind her husband of what he needs to do. The husband, on the other hand, often perceives these reminders as nagging. Neither is happy with the situation.

Wife led marriage offers a solution. But while it can be fun to seduce your husband into submission to your will, it requires a lot of thought and work in the beginning. Essentially, what you are doing is teaching your husband new habits. So it helps to think about this in terms of habit training.

What is a habit? A habit is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously. The more subconscious the behavior, the more likely that it will become natural and consistently repeated. Habit makes virtue easier.

Habit is usually contrasted with willpower. For example, you might require your husband to clean the table and do the dishes after every meal. If you must constantly remind him to do this he may perceive this as nagging. If he must rely on his willpower to do this chore then he will be inconsistent and exhausted by it. But if the cleanup becomes habitual, then you won't need to remind him and he won't even need to think about it. He will just do it.

But habits can be more than routine behaviors, they can become rituals. When a habit becomes ritualized your husband will not only do it routinely, he will enjoy doing it, even anticipate it as an enriching opportunity.

Given the power of habit, it's worth your time to learn how to teach your husband new habits. You can read a lot on the subject but the basics are these: cue, routine, and reward.

First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. In our example, the cue is a finished meal and dirty dishes.

Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. The desired routine in our case is cleaning the table and washing the dishes, pots, and pans.

Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Your husband will not naturally feel rewarded by clearing the table and doing the dishes. You must supply the reward initially.

Introducing the reward is a simple as putting the dirty dishes in front of sex. If, for example, it has been you who routinely does the dishes you simply leave them undone and initiate the routine for sex stopping at the last moment to ask your husband to first do the dishes. Upon completion then the sex resumes and he experiences the reward.

But you can also achieve much the same with more subtle rewards. You can use sexual touching and kissing while he does the dishes to reward his behavior.

Over time, this habit loop--cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward--becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined until a powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges. Eventually you can reduce or even remove the artificial reward of sex and the habitual behavior will continue on its own momentum. In part this is because the habit is now subconscious but also because the chore itself becomes associated with sex. It becomes its own reward.

You may need to refresh the habit from time to time but if this is part of a larger program of housekeeping training then it will eventually fall naturally into place. He will acquire the habit of keeping the home of which doing the dishes is simply one part.

Indeed, ultimately what you want to instill in your husband is the habit of obedience. When your husband subconsciously seeks to obey then your will find him anticipating your needs even before you have articulated them.

For a little effort, and fun, upfront, you can achieve a lasting solution through the power of habit.

The Language of Love

Over twenty years ago author and relationship counselor John Gray wrote the classic marriage text, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. In the book, which became hugely popular with many subsequent works, Gray claimed that most common marriage problems between husbands and wives are a result of fundamental psychological differences between the sexes and that each sex is acclimated to its own planet's society and customs, but not to those of the other.

For example, men often offer solutions to problems that women bring up in conversation but women are not necessarily interested in solving those problems, they mainly want to just talk about them. And while such generalizations are always problematic, the essential idea was almost certainly right: men and women are different and we do often talk past one another oriented as we are on our own way of thinking.

To make matters worse, husbands and wives intuitively "keep score" but each tends to score things very differently from the other. As a result, it is quite possible for the efforts of one to go unrecognized and unappreciated by the other. And when the imbalance goes too far, the marriage is in trouble.

Among the differences between husbands and wives is how each views sex. For various biological reasons, women tend to have higher requirements for sex than men. Whereas a woman needs to feel loved to feel sexy, men tend to feel loved through sex. She wants romance but he just wants sex.

Often a wife will want nothing more than to cuddle up with her husband, a moment of nonsexual physical closeness. The husband, on the other hand, tends to see this as a signal of sexual interest or to react to it sexually.

One reason that erotic power is so powerful is that through it the wife speaks the husband's language of love. This is also the reason that it seems so strange for wives who are new to it. Essentially, erotic power entails sexualizing the marriage through and through. In this sense, the wife is agreeing to speak the language of the husband.

But wait!

At the same time the sexualization is, for the most part, without actual sex. In other words, while there is a sexual connotation to every interaction, the frequency of complete sex, especially if measured by the male orgasm, is much reduced. In this sense, every sexual encounter becomes desexualized, the equivalent of courtship and cuddling. The husband is learning to speak the language of the wife. Remembering actually, because he knew to do this before marriage but in the routine of sex in marriage this was all forgotten.

Finally!

The wife can be intimate with her husband without his expectation of sex. Instead, the husband is showering his wife with attention, affection, even worship, at almost every moment of their time together. And the wife freely raises the bar, as high as she dares, for actual sex. The wife is, once again, demanding courtship from her husband.

Like most counselors, Gray believes that the solution to marital difficulties is communication and advises the couple how to better understand each other. But the beauty of wife led marriage is that it doesn't rely on verbal communication. The wife doesn't need her husband to understand what she is doing or to obtain his agreement to change the style of their interaction in the marriage. Instead, she takes the lead in the marriage through her own actions, by her own initiative. And her husband simply learns to follow her lead.

Intimacy Plus Denial Equals Happy Frustration

Men crave sex. That is one of the most reliable truisms of wife led marriage. The more you wield erotic power in your marriage, the more obsessed your husband becomes with sex, the more devoted he becomes to you.

A wife wants her husband to be sexually frustrated, yes. The more frustrated he is, the more romantic and obedient he becomes. That requires managing his sexual release.

When you are first establishing your authority in the marriage simply finding excuses to not have sex is a powerful way to create the crisis that opens the doors to your ascendancy in the marriage.

But once he has surrendered to you, once he has accepted you as Queen of the household, what then? You don't want to live your marriage in a perpetual state of crisis. You simply want maintain a constant state of sexual tension.

The answer is quite simple: deny release, not sex. We call this intimate denial and it has several benefits.

First, you want to be sexual towards your husband, to tease him, to keep him on the edge as much of the time as possible. This is especially the case when he is doing the household chores. You want to eroticize your marriage in general and his homemaking experience in particular.

And just because he is going without sexual release doesn't mean you should be giving up sex. As I wrote in Asymmetric Sex, you can indulge in many more orgasms than you allow your husband.

But most importantly, sexual intimacy is emotionally reassuring for your husband. Withdrawing sex leads him to feel abandoned. Even if you are reassuring him verbally he will subconsciously feel neglected. But if you engage in regular sex with him that happens not to end with his release his emotional experience is altogether different. He is sexually frustrated, yes, but emotionally satisfied

He experiences intimate denial as a happy frustration. He learns to enjoy his frustration, his deep desire for you, his willingness to move heaven and earth for you. You answer his desire for sex with incomplete sex that is playful and teasing but also a demonstration of both your affection and your firm authority in the marriage. He is reminded, again, that you are in command and that he is in submission to your will.

Ideally you will have some long-term schedule of release planned, say once or twice a month, but you will keep him always guessing as to when any particular sexual encounter will end with his release. In this way he is always guessing and hoping but never expecting or demanding.

What it boils down to is that you are saying "yes" to sex and "no" only to his final release. Rather than halting at the start of intimacy you are allowing it to proceed all the way up to, but not including, his final release. You both enjoy the full experience of sexual intimacy. And to the extent that he desires more sex, as he surely will, you can allow, even encourage it.

The more you deny sexual release, the more sexual intimacy you need to provide.

The Power of Attachment

Human attachment is a powerful psychological force. The attachments we form with others  direct our attention and affections and shape how we relate to one another.

Marriage is traditionally idealized as a relationship of mutual attachment. At the wedding, formally, the husband and wife declare their primary attachment to each other. But in practice wives typically attach themselves to their husbands while their husbands only partially reciprocate that attachment. Husbands, instead, attach themselves to their careers and their professional peers sometimes to the exclusion of their wives.

This is a problem.

As do all people naturally, your husband is intuitively attuned to the social hierarchies of authority around him and he will attach himself to what he perceive to be the authority especially if he feels himself dependent upon that authority.  By contrast, within the marriage, to the extent that he feels himself to be in a dominant role, he will not make that attachment but will, instead, be aggressive and self-centered.

If the wife is dependent on the support of her husband and the husband is dependent on his job then that his how the primary attachments will tend to form. If the wife works outside the home then she may form outside attachments that compete with her husbands leading to a weaker attachment in both directions. Only if the wife is the sole bread winner, and the husband a stay at home Dad, is the husband likely to form a stronger attachment to the wife than is the norm. And even then, if the wife relies on her financial power alone her husband is likely to feel resentment, not affection.

Erotic power changes everything.

As you begin to exercise erotic power in your marriage, you make very explicit your husband's sexual dependency on your good will. Sex is a a potent bonding agent evoking powerful emotions of attachment, especially when it is deliberately rationed and used to reinforce compliant behavior. Erotic power alone is extraordinarily subversive of his sense of independence but it is only the start of the transformation.

The human brain naturally establishes a working hierarchy in any attachment relationship. Your task is simply to establish yourself as the dominant party in that attachment and to encourage your husband to accept a submissive role in that relationship. The submissive party looks up to the dominant party for guidance and direction and allows the dominant party to take responsibility for setting the direction of the relationship and the decisions to be taken within it. And it all begins to happen as soon as you assert your sexual dominance in bed.

The capstone of the transformation is financial dependency. Even if your husband is the sole breadwinner, you can leverage your erotic power to obtain financial control in the marriage by having your husband set up direct deposit of his paychecks into a bank account that only you control. Once you accomplish that then his dependency on you is complete: He is not only sexually dependent on you but also financially. He will need your permission for every expenditure beyond the allowance that you grant him. This dependency makes you his primary attachment; his loyalty to his career is reoriented into a desire to work on behalf of you.

It will likely be gradual but you will notice many changes in his attitude towards you.

His attention will follow this attachment. As your husband begins to make you his primary attachment he will turn his attention primarily to you. He will listen carefully what you say and watch what you do. He will notice your moods and think about how to respond to them.

Once you become his primary attachment he will seek out your company. He will want to be with you all the time. He will long for your physical presence whenever he is apart from you.

The more he attaches to you, the less aggressive and self-centered he will become. He will no longer expect you to follow his lead, or become frustrated when you don't, but will, instead, increasingly follow your lead not only consciously but subconsciously. Eventually it will not even occur to him to make decisions without at least taking your wishes into account and he will seek out your approval before he makes any nontrivial decision.

Attachment reinforces authority by serving as a lubricant to ease submission. Without attachment, your assertions of power and authority in the marriage will tend to work against his ego. The more he recognizes your power as a threat to his ego the more he will be tempted to resist. But his attachment to you will lead him to a more natural and intuitive submission to your authority. What begins awkwardly by your power assertions becomes, through attachment, second nature to him.

By using your erotic and financial power to make yourself his primary attachment you will discover that he becomes attuned to you and naturally submissive to your will. He will gladly do whatever you wish of him.

Why is an equal marriage not healthy?

In our modern culture, the institution of marriage is under siege. So many are unable to keep a marriage going beyond a few years. Why is this happening?

I believe the main reason is that couples approach marriage as a partnership of equals.

Until recently husbands held the advantage and wives had little or no say in important matters. Women were not allowed to vote in most countries until the 1950s. But things have changed. Women are more independent and capable and confident of making decisions on our own; we are much less worried about our financial independence. Women are now the majority on college campuses. In short we have become the equals of, if not superior to, men in most matters.

This has skewed the marriage dynamic so that any decision big or small becomes a major fight between husband and wife where neither side is willing to budge for the other.

This is why I believe that inequality in a marriage is so important. In every relationship, one partner must dominate the other if those fights are to be avoided and this is the natural resolution. It is part of the Yin and Yang of marriage. In some marriages, one partner takes a dominant position for life while in others the marriage partners changes positions from time to time or from situation to situation. Sometimes when there are two dominant personalities in a relationship, one has to deliberately surrender to the other. Marriage is about making compromises but the dominant spouse gets the final say

I think dominance in marriage is an important but under-appreciated phenomenon. The most stable marriages seem to be those in which dominance is clear throughout. The dominant partner makes all the final decisions, from what to watch on TV in the evening to which car to buy, and the submissive partner acquiesces and assumes a supporting role. If what people expect from marriage is not necessarily everlasting passionate love but a stable partnership that will allow joint ventures such as buying a home and raising children together, or an opportunity to concentrate on one’s career without worrying about house chores, then an asymmetrical relationship with uncontested dominance probably guarantees the best outcome. The secret to a stable marriage is that one of the two spouses must be willing to give up a disproportionate share of control as the price for stability.

I believe it is time that wives embraced a more dominant role and that husbands accepted a more submissive and supporting role in the marriage. All that is required for this to happen is for things to continue on their present trajectory. Instead of wives deciding that we now have equality in marriage and halting their progress we should just keep pushing forward.

I also want to stress that dominance does not mean disrespecting your spouse. On the outside, of course, it may seem very disrespectful, but if you want to make it work and be healthy, you, as the wife, must express love and respect for your submissive husband. We sometimes worry that a submitting husband is going against his nature and is being emasculated. But this is simply not true.

Also remember that just because your husband is allowing you to take the lead in your marriage doesn't mean that he’s less than you. Submission is not synonymous with slavery or abuse. We have to know how to find the right balance.

In a nutshell a healthy marriage is possible, it is however just that it will not be an equal marriage!!

Learning To Lead

A wife who aims to become a Queen in her marriage expects to change her husband and the dynamics of their marriage. Seldom does she realize how she will be changed by it. But time and again I hear from wives who are ecstatic at how they have become new women not just at home with their families but also with their friends and colleagues.

My own experience is typical. Before I transformed our marriage I was a competent practitioner in my field. My colleagues valued my contributions but I was never called on to lead projects. That changed almost overnight.

We were meeting to discuss a project that had fallen so far behind schedule that the client was threatening to cancel it. Everyone was engaged in the political game of CYA. It wasn't their fault, they insisted, they were unable to deliver because they didn't get what they were expecting from others on the team. And so the finger pointing proceeded in ever more heated rounds. Even the so-called team leader was playing along, no doubt because the senior partner responsible for the client was in attendance.

It had been less than a year since I had taken over as Queen of our household and only a few months since my husband had given up his career to become a full-time homemaker. We were still exploring options, experimenting with styles, and working out various practical issues. But already I was feeling a sense of authority in the home and learning to express it freely and openly. Often I was amazed at what I heard from my own lips:

Before: "Can you please go to the DMV to take care of this?"
After: "Tomorrow you are going to the DMV to take care of this."

Before: "Would you please change the sheets today?"
After: "I expect to see clean sheets tonight."

Before: "I think your blue shirt goes well with the black slacks."
After: "I've set out the blue shirt with the black slacks for you to wear."

Before: "It seems like it's been a while since you've been to the gym."
After: "Go to the gym this morning, your workout card is on the table".

I remember feeling increasingly frustrated by what I was hearing at that meeting. I would never put up with that from my husband, why was the senior partner accepting it from the team? So when I got the chance I called them all out on their excuses, particularly the team leader, and proceeded to put the project back on track and save the account.

Not only did I earn the attention and respect of the senior partner, from then on I was regarded by my peers as one of the strongest leaders in the firm. As my responsibilities grew so did my confidence and authority. Everyone, even those who knew me before that meeting, just assumed that I was a born leader. Often women would approach me asking how they too could advance in their careers up the corporate ladder. I helped them as best I could without revealing the source of my strength.

The truth is that I was not a born leader. I might well have gone through life as a mere practitioner, content to take orders from others. But once I got a taste of it at home I could not be held back at the firm.

And, of course, my confidence flowed the opposite way as well. The more successful I was at the firm the more confident I was at home with my family. Although my husband had long since given up on his own career, it is fair to say that he grew increasingly reverential toward me as the breadwinner of the family. His gushing admiration was, at times, embarrassing. He truly draws his own identity and dignity from his support for my success in my career. He keeps the home so that I am free to be successful at the firm and thereby to provide for the family.

I remember being surprised by this turn of events but, upon reflection, I should not have been. How could any woman, ruling as Queen of her household, with a husband virtually under her thumb night and day, seeking her permission on his every decision, and reporting to her on his every move, not be transformed by it?

My only regret is that I could not be more open with other women about all this. Often I heard other women tell me how much they admired my leadership skills; they wanted to know how they could achieve the same thing in their own careers without ever imagining how it could begin at home. I often wished I could just hand them a copy of my book. But because I had made a conscious decision not to mix my professional career and my secret life as Queen of the household, I never did.

Even those who knew about my domestic situation, that my husband stayed home to keep the house, just assumed that it had always been that way. They could not fathom how much my life had changed.

But I can tell you: Wife led marriage will transform you in ways you cannot even imagine. The longer you practice it, the greater your leadership at home, work, and in your community.

Reminding Him

This is intended to be a short piece as I am interested in the thoughts of others and hope some will comment back.  I have mentioned before that my own marriage dynamic, even before I knew the terms involved, was always somewhat bent toward my leadership.  I tend to be outspoken, authoritative and clear.  My husband is gentler, more agreeable - somewhat submissive in nature.  It works.  

As my own wife led marriage has become even more so - I find that he "mis behaves" with less frequency.  Generally he is super focused on my happiness.  I don't know that the eroticism is all of what works but it is a huge part of it.  His "opportunities" for release are far and few between - maybe more so than in many marriages.  I would say our dynamic is quite successful.  We are connected. He gets a lot of direction(s).  I get exactly the home and lifestyle I want.  In truth I (almost) feel guilty about the extremes of what I have.  I have a (very) dedicated husband/worker bee.  

This brings me to my query.  Even though he is what I would generally (no not always) call "very good" I find it is important to give him occasional "reminders" of his position in the marriage.  His "place" if you will.  At first this seemed counter intuitive.  I had associated discipline or a consequence with mis behavior only - and that continues to be the primary association.  However I have found it important to periodically (even in what might seem to him as an out of the blue way) give him "reminders" of how things are. 

I expect (I really do not know) that I may exhibit a strictness or an authoritarian sort of approach that may go beyond what some other wives do.  We are all different of course.  However I find that the more directive I am, the firmer I am, the more accepting and almost relaxed he is. It is an interesting thing to me and I wonder how other women experience this or does it resonate?